Blogging 101: How to Effectively Promote Your Posts

New to the world of blogging? There’s more to it than headline writing and thinking up ideas for fresh posts. These days it seems like everyone has a blog. How will you stand out? Use these tips to effectively promote your posts:

Post Regularly

We’ve all had that one coworker or friend who ambitiously starts a blog, writes up one post, and completely forgets about it for six months. Don’t let your blog just sit there, you’ve got to post regularly. After all, there’s nothing to promote if you don’t have any posts.

Editorial calendars are essential and so are social media scheduling tools. But, there’s so many out there, it can be hard to find just one tool that meets all of your unique needs. CoSchedule, the world’s only content marketing tool and social media editorial calendar for the blogging platform WordPress, can help new bloggers save time and boost their blog traffic. CoSchedule allows bloggers to plan their social media with a calendar, which according to CoSchedule data, increases traffic up to 75 percent. The editorial calendar also helps bloggers plan ahead and blog more efficiently. Plus, bloggers can create new content within CoSchedule, from pinning images to Pinterest to recording a new clip for YouTube, it’s all easy and it’s all in one place. There’s even an option to share older, popular posts from your blog roll, right from CoSchedule.

Ali Luke of the blog Aliventures, writing for ProBlogger, recommends posting one, two or even three blog times a week. That way your posts won’t be rushed and your readers won’t be overwhelmed. She recommends constructing longer posts, 1,000 words and up, and suggests keeping the content evergreen, so that it never expires and is always relevant. Posting regularly doesn’t mean posting daily.

Get Social

Social promotion is the key ingredient to successful blog promotion. Without posting your blog content to your social media sites and having share buttons on your blog, your post doesn’t have the chance to go viral. Essentially, it just sits there and only lives on your blog, meaning that you’re not reaching the audience that’s out there if they haven’t subscribed to your blog .

One business that’s doing it right is LifeLock. The identity theft protection company promotes its company blog on its social media channels, including its Facebook page. The company has more than 296,000 likes on Facebook and engages its audience by posting about topics relevant to identity theft. In addition to posting blog articles, the company uses photos and videos to captivate its online audience. The company welcomes discussion and feedback about its product and encourages its audience to share their thoughts.

Like regularly blogging, social requires some attention, too. Don’t create a Twitter handle associated with your blog if you’re never going to use it. These valuable communities can help boost your blog traffic, and best of all, they’re free. However, you can pay to boost your posts to drive engagement. The features editor of Fstoppers, Jaron Schneider, says post boosting on Facebook has doubled sales and boosted posts bring twice as much traffic to the website.

Network

When it comes to blogging, you can’t do it alone. Networking is huge in the world of blogging. Like landing your first job, it’s all about who you know. One method that can increase your online audience is guest posting. Having an expert within your niche contribute to your blog can bring their followers to your site. Not only does it introduce new readers, guest posting is great for SEO and it helps to build professional relationships, according to Goins, Writer.