How to promote your blog post for maximum reach

Content Marketing

Knowing how to market your blog post is just as crucial as crafting high-quality content. You could have written a piece that would make James Joyce proud, but unless you can create a buzz around it amongst the crowded digital marketing scene, your hard work will be in vain. It is important to establish yourself in the industry, build a strong connection with your readers, so that when you publish your content, they are already engaged. Putting an emphasis on your blog post will not only drive readers and potential readers to your posts, but will also drive traffic to your website, improve your SEO with a URL shortener, and make your brand a leader in your area.

No one teaches you how to promote your blog post in university so I have been learning by doing – and by reaching out to industry experts. I asked:

Quora: ‘How do you promote your content online?’
Digital marketing groups on Facebook: ‘What techniques do you use to promote your blog posts?’
and ‘What is the most important part of promoting your blog posts?’

I got a great response and used all of the tips and techniques to promote three of our blog posts:

Our analytics showed that these articles gained more interest than many of the posts before them.

How to Promote Your Blog Post!

Dear…x, y, z?

Who exactly are you writing to? Mostly men? Mostly women? Generation X or Generation Y? Do they have children? Where do they live? What is their educational background?

Before you put pen to paper you have to create a buyer persona. These important questions verify exactly who your demographic is. This will affect the platform you choose for sharing, what you write and how you write your message in order to appeal directly to your audience. The strongest buyer personas are created through market research. Never assume anything about your audience, run surveys, ask questions on social media or email users for feedback. Who is better to tell you about your customers and why they have chosen your product or service than your actual customers.

Hubspot offers a pretty good template to graph your buyer persona. If you are completely new to this area, they also offer a free inbound marketing course.

Once you have determined your demographic, you can then reach out to them on the platforms they use and at the times they are usually online.

Tracking

The next step still isn’t writing or promoting. It is tracking and it is super important. You have to track and analyze the results! Without tracking you don’t know how well a campaign is doing compared to another, or what content is reaching your target demographic. You’re just creating and sharing without optimizing your process.

Our sister company, ClickMeter has a WordPress plugin and this is what we use to track our effectiveness. We determine the popularity of a blog post by how many unique views we get and if those views are coming from our target audience or not.

Next, we look at the conversion rate. What counts as a conversion is totally up to you, but usually, it will be something like when a visitor makes a purchase, signs up for a newsletter or requests a demo. The success of an article should be calculated by dividing conversions and views to get the conversion rate and then you can compare the success of your blog posts.

ClickMeter wrote an article on how to analyze the data you receive from WordPress called ‘How to track your WordPress Blog’, which is worth checking out. The important thing is we know what actions have been taken, by who they were taken and analyzing the data can help us improve the process.

Intriguing Writing

Entice the reader, make an impact, give context and add value! Stick to those rules and you’re on to a winner

Each article or blog post should have a benefit to both you and your reader. If Rebrandly wrote about fabulous festival hair, it would be beneficial to some readers but would add no real benefit for us. Bonding with readers around something completely unrelated to our product won’t get us far and won’t result in conversions. It would also bear no relevance to what our data has suggested our customers are interested in and listening to your readers’ wants is important.

Finally, be clear and concise!! A public relations lecturer I had in college would always say:

Language was made so that we could communicate – not to confuse each other. Don’t try to impress me with words you don’t really understand, just tell me like I’m the man down the road.

It makes sense, if you want people to listen to your message don’t make it difficult to consume. Use images, create infographics, make sure busy people can scroll and learn.

Searchability

Promote your blog post naturally by making it easy to discover when people search for similar content. If you are using WordPress, the Yoast SEO tool will give you tips on how to improve your blog post for SEO.

I try to use one main keyword in the title, first paragraph, metadata and then at least 3 times throughout the article. In this article, I choose the keyword ‘promote your blog post’. Usually, I also pick a secondary keyword. For this article, I picked ‘promoting your blog post’, which is similar to the main keyword, and used it where possible. Repeat your keywords 3 to 4 times depending on the length of the article. The Yoast plug-in will let you know if you’ve used it too much, or not enough. In addition to this, you can add keywords to tags, images, and your URL slug.

Assuming that you are writing in a similar sphere all the time, you should add a recommended reading section of similar articles to your post. That might be throughout the article or at the end with a ‘You Might Also Like’ or ‘Further Reading’.

Friends! Make Friends, Nurture Friends!

Before you start to promote your blog post, try to make friends and create a community. Hubspot’s blog is a good example of a well-established, nurtured community. Once you have made connections, they will be more likely to care about what you have to say. Hard sales rarely work online where everyone is competing for airtime.

Start by sharing other people’s content and tag them so they know you are supporting what they have to say. This will not only get you noticed by potential ‘friends’ but will also add value to your followers.

If you are looking to get noticed by a certain demographic, including industry leaders and influencers in your article by mentioning or quoting them. For this article, we will reach out to everyone mentioned and go back to the people we asked for advice. You can then contact them asking them to tweet about your blog. Or alternatively, you can tag them in your post while promoting your content. If this approach is successful, ask them about guest blogging or even co-marketing, which will benefit all parties.

Once you’ve made friends, we then get to the nurture part. This is a rule for life, not just marketing – don’t forget about those who already care! Nurture your readers, send them in-app or email messages, set up a newsletter, offer special deals. Show them you care and your following, your community and your group of influencers will only grow.

Reach out to Extended Communities

Reach out and share your content on other community pages check Facebook and LinkedIn for groups engaged in your industry who might be interested in hearing your message.

I post on Medium.com, Inbound, Growth Hacker, Hacker News and a number of LinkedIn Marketing, PR and Social Media Marketing groups. There are many sites and communities where you can share content and there’s sure to be one that’s relevant to your industry and audience. These are just sites relevant to Rebrandly’s blog content.

Social Media – Share Don’t Spam

Social Media is about connecting people, having a conversation and listening to what others have to say. It’s not a loudspeaker you can shout into and everyone has to take notice.

As Pawan Deshpande, the CEO of Curata, said:

Content Marketing is like a first date, if all you do is talk about yourself there won’t be a second date.

Hashtag – but use the right hashtag. Don’t just use popular hashtags that bear no relevance to your product. That would be like getting a loudspeaker and announcing great offers on car insurance at Disney on Ice. Sure thousands of people will have heard your message, but how many of them care? Write a list of your possible keywords then do some research on a tool like RiteTag to see if they are keywords that will get you seen. From there, it’s happy hashtagging!

Make even more friends with the mentioned function. If you mention someone in your article, tag them to tell them. If you used a brand as an example or include one in a list, tell them. They might even share or retweet it.

When you have followed our recommendations on how to promote your blog post and you’re happy with how you have positioned it, then use it again and again. If you take the time to create quality content to share on social media, then use it more than once. Don’t post it every day, but do add it to a library of evergreen content to share periodically. Social media tools like SocialBee and MeetEdgar will let you do this with ease.

Conclusion

There are many things you can do to promote your blog post online. These are just some basic ideas taken from my own experience and from the advice of industry experts. I am still learning and would love to hear more about how all of you promote your content:

[Tweet “I promote my content by…”]

It is very important to remember when you are sharing to use your brand name by sharing a Rebrandly branded link. You can check to see if your brand name is available here.

[Tweet “I promote my blog by using Branded Links”]

Further Reading:

This Article is about:

Blog Post Promotion
How to Promote your Blog Post
Promoting Content Online
Promote your Blog Post

Originally Posted: May 9th, 2017.
Post Updated: June 1st, 2023.

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Author: Enrico Lucia

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How to promote your blog post for maximum reach

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