One of the most frequent mistakes bloggers make is failing to promote their articles after publishing. You’ve likely spent hours meticulously researching, writing, and editing your blog...why would you not take a few more minutes to ensure that your content is seen by as many people as possible?
With the abundance of social media scheduling tools available at your fingertips, there’s no excuse not to be promoting your articles. What once had to be painstakingly done manually can now be completed in a matter of minutes. Read on for some helpful ways to maximize the reach of your articles.
Get creative with what you share.
The most effective way to get people to click on your link to read the full article is by teasing what the article covers. Don’t give away everything in your social media posts, but just enough to captivate their attention and leave them wanting to know more.
Instead of just copying and pasting the blog title and a link to the article in your social posts, consider additional strategies to make your content stand out from the crowd. Some potential ideas for maximizing clicks to your site include:
- Including interesting and relevant quotes
- Sharing a single idea/tip from the blog
- Creating corresponding infographics or visuals that complement material covered in the blog
- Focus on answering common pain points your audience may be facing
It’s important to note that you should stray away from clickbait titles. You know the ones; those outrageous titles you just can’t help but click on, but when you get to the article you’re left confused and disappointed. These may garner a few extra clicks, but overtime this promotional style will begin to erode trust within your audience. Not good.
Post frequently, but don’t spam.
As mentioned earlier, you likely spent a lot of time and energy creating your blog. Promoting your article on social media once or twice simply won’t suffice. Given the large quantity of content posted on social media each day, it’s easy for your post to get lost in the abyss of crowded feeds.
As a general rule of thumb, you should be promoting your blog as soon as it goes live, followed by a trickle campaign that gradually decreases over time. By incorporating a tool such as Missinglettr, this creation and scheduling can be done effortlessly in no time at all.
Just like clickbait titles, it’s important to note that you shouldn’t be spamming your social platforms with your content. Not only is this a surefire way to annoy your audience and potentially lead to unfollows, but it’s also likely that you will be dinged by the algorithms leading to your content being seen by fewer people.
Encourage reader engagement.
If there’s one thing people love more than anything, it’s expressing their own thoughts and opinions on a certain subject matter. A great way to encourage reader engagement is by asking your audience questions.
For example, if you’re promoting an article about ways to increase the number of volunteers at a local non-profit, ask your audience what their ir favorite non-profit organization is or when the last time they volunteered was.
By getting people to actively participate and engage with your social content, you’re likely to be awarded “points” by the algorithm that will lead to your content being shown to more users organically. Plus, it's a great way to get some ideas for future blog posts from your audience. That way, you can continue churning out content that would interest them and continue growing your blog.
Experiment with different posting times.
This relates back to frequently promoting your content across platforms. While there are seemingly endless infographics and articles outlining which times are best to post, there is no definite answer. Every company has a different target audience that uses social media at different times throughout the day.
The best way to determine the ideal posting times is good old-fashioned trial and error. Consider implementing A/B testing to see which times perform the best. It’s important to keep track of which times you post and how they perform. Consider taking an hour at the end of each month to review previous posts and record the number of views and engagement they each had.
Over time, you’ll begin to see a trend of which times garner the most views. Once you’ve gathered enough data to identify which times perform best, double down on scheduling posts during that time frame.
Customize your messaging for different platforms.
Just as you’d do when writing various blogs, it’s important to pay attention to the platform you’re promoting on. Each platform has its own strengths and weaknesses. Here are some general tips for some of the most popular platforms:
- Incorporate as many of the following into your posts: Location tagging, images, video, and relevant tags if applicable. Each post is awarded “points” based on how many of these are included; the more “points” your post receives, the more likely it is to be shared with a larger audience.
- Use short, attention-grabbing headlines. Lengthy blocks of text typically don’t perform well. Use a URL shortener to save precious characters.
- Include 3-5 relevant hashtags and be sure to mention any related accounts.
- This is the preferred platform for most business individuals. If your product or service is targeted towards this audience, LinkedIn can be a great place to reach these types of people.
- Due to the nature of LinkedIn, serious posts with more formal stylization tend to perform best, however, that’s not always the case.
- Include 5+ relevant hashtags to get your post in front of industry professionals.
Don’t stop your promotional efforts.
It’s easy to become disheartened if you don’t see the number of clicks and engagement on your posts that you expected to see. However, don’t give up so easily. It takes consistent time and practice to build a following. Rather than giving up and tossing in the towel, focus your efforts on posting quality content at a consistent rate. It will only be more difficult to get your momentum back if you stop posting for a period of time.
Take charge of your social media marketing this year with Missinglettr. After connecting your RSS feed, Missinglettr will begin automatically pulling each new blog you publish and developing a 12-month social media campaign. From there, it just takes a few clicks to approve and you’re on your way to getting your blog in front of your target audience. Get started for free now!
