It seems like every B2B company these days has a blog, and there’s a reason why. They are a great way for you to establish yourself as a thought leader and create useful and easily accessible content for your prospects and leads at every stage of the sales funnel.
Now while we’ve written several posts about creating engaging content and the power of blogs, this is not one of them. This post is about how to get your prospects and leads to pay attention to it. Because despite the potential of your blog to help you reach more leads, this tool is only useful if you get people to actually read what you write. And even if your SEO game is strong and your seeing tons of organic traffic, investing time in promoting your blog can help you see even better results.
Although blogs have been around for a while, the digital marketing landscape has definitely changed, and with that so has the way we perform outreach to promote our content. If you haven’t been keeping up with trends on how to promote content or looking for new ideas to expand your reach, today we’re rounding up a few ways you can promote your content in 2018.
Social Sharing
1. Add social sharing buttons
This one is a no-brainer. But you’d be surprised how many sites and blogs don’t have any social sharing buttons. These are important because they provide a CTA within the post asking your readers to share it, and if they find your post inspiring they probably will.
2. Share on Instagram Stories
If you have a verified business account and access to that swipe up feature, this is a great way to entice someone to visit your blog. Try creating a fun series of videos or photos with fun captions to inspire your followers to engage and swipe up to visit your site. If you’re crunched for time, you can work in Canva to create a graphic featuring an image, stat or interesting quote from your post.
3. Link to your blog on your Instagram profile
Promoting your blog on Instagram doesn’t have to take too much effort, you can also just link to your blog in your profile bio and see results. How does this work? If you’re great at curating visual content, people will likely visit your profile and many of them will be inclined to click on your featured website to learn more about who you are. Or you can be proactive and post a photo with a catchy preview caption and encourage your followers to learn more by clicking the link in your bio.
4. Post it on Pinterest
Pinterest is all about visuals, so make sure you have an eye-catching image to attract the attention of your followers. Use Canva to create a fun cover image to share, or infographic to highlight some of the key points or stats in your blog post. You should also look into setting up rich pins to ensure all the relevant information and meta description shows up.
5. Post to LinkedIn Groups
If you’re a working professional chances are you have a LinkedIn profile, and if you haven’t already, you should probably also consider joining groups based on your industry. The great thing about LinkedIn groups is they provide a community of people that are interested in the same topics as you, so it’s a great place to share your blog content for both views and shares.
6. Record a video and share on LinkedIn
Take advantage of LinkedIn’s emphasis on videos uploaded directly to the platform and record a short promo video about your blog and 2-3 key takeaways. This is also a great way for you and your sales team to build their thought leadership, too.
7. Add a Twitter card to your post
This is a type of markup that will basically make your post look way better on Twitter. Because it will look so much better, your tweet will get retweeted and liked more.
Twitter cards are free to use, and don’t take more than a few minutes to set up. Get the free plugin WordPress SEO by Yoast to make setup faster (and to give yourself an awesome SEO optimization tool).
8. Remember to tag people when you share
Did you quote an influencer or discuss a trending brand or company in your blog post? Make sure to tag them when you share on social media so it will show up on their followers’ feeds, and also give that company or influencer an opportunity to see it so they might be inclined to give you a shoutout as well.
9. Make some sentences of your post tweetable…
… and set them up with a plugin that makes them tweetable with one click. There’s a free “Click to Tweet” plugin available from CoSchedule that’s a snap to setup.
10. Invest in paid promotion.
Is this cheating? Maybe, but big blogs do it all the time. You may not have $10,000 to spend to promote a post, but why not $20? Paid posts on Facebook can be particularly effective, especially when shown to custom audiences. When setting up your post, make sure you narrow down your audience to reflect your customer persona, so that you see the right type of leads engaging with your post.
11. Use relevant hashtags
Whether you’re posting to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram, using relevant hashtags can help make it easier for people to find you if they’re searching for a specific interest or keyword. Or you might just pop on their news feed as a suggested item based on their previous browsing history.
12. Partner with others to promote your content
Chances are you’ve made a friend or two within your field that also has a blog they’d like to promote. Why not try to support each other in your efforts by partnering up and agreeing to share your individual posts and content.
And if you don’t feel comfortable branching out, you can always practice this with members of your team. At Act-On, we often notify our colleagues when a specific piece of content has been posted asking them to take a look, like and share. This boosts engagement on our posts and helps us expand our reach.
13. Social media automation is key.
Finally, take some of the thought out of promoting your post by using a social sharing automation tool. At Act-On, we use Oktopost to schedule and share our social posts. This allows us to keep up with our busy content publishing calendar, schedule things ahead of time, and ensure our audiences see the right message at the right time.
Networking and outreach works online too
14. Partner with influencers
Love them or hate them, influencers have a huge reach and an ability to, of course, influence what people perceive as valuable. That is why partnering with them is to the best of your advantage. Try asking an influencer in your field to provide a quote on a specific topic you’re writing about. You’ll benefit from people stumbling on your site when they search for that influencer, and you’ll see even more traffic if they decide to share it with their audience.
15. Trade guest posts
Guest posting has been a trend that’s been around for a while and the reason why is it works. Start by researching a few businesses and blogs within your industry that could help you reach new leads. Ask to write an original guest post linking back to your blog and website, and watch your traffic increase. Pay back the favor and invite your partner to do the same on your blog.
16. Comment on other blogs
Again – be real careful about this. You want to contribute, not to spam, OK? But where it makes sense, mentioning your related post in a comment can work very nicely.
17. Email other bloggers and ask them to link back to your blog
If you have a recent blog post that you think would support another blogger’s argument or topic, share it with them through email and suggest that they link back to your blog.
18. Bookmark your post on the top bookmarking sites
Sharing your blog posts on bookmarking sites is a great way to help your target audience discover your blog. Bookmarking sites include Mix, Reddit and Bloglovin.
19. Make your post into a SlideShare
This is easier than it sounds, and SlideShare can deliver a surprising amount of traffic. You don’t need to create a 30-slide PowerPoint deck – even 10-15 slides summarizing your post is enough.
20. Set up feedburner
Thousands of people read RSS feeds every day. Make sure your posts are available in this format.
21. Blog roundup newsletter
Act-On has one and it helps us keep our readers who don’t visit the blog on a regular basis up to speed. Figure out a cadence that works for your audience, and highlight some post and upcoming events.
22. Email people who would be interested in your post
This is most effective when you’re contacting “influencers” or editors, and can help you reach a wider audience. Just be 100% sure the people you reach out to will be interested in your post.
23. Promote on other sites
Websites like Outbrain allow you to pay to have your blog content suggested as a read on top websites such as Time and Huffington Post.These ads are paid, but with the amount of potential traffic from popular sites, it’s well worth looking into.
Use Your Own Blog and Website
24. Add links from other pages on your site to your new post
Everybody misses this one, but it’s a brilliant way to get more traffic to a new post. It will also help your internal link profile, which is good for SEO. Another twist on this is setting up a related posts plugin on your blog. That way if a reader is intrigued to keep learning more on a specific topic, they’ll click through.
25. Curate a list of posts on a specific topic
Your own blog is a great place to continue promoting your content. If you’re like us at Act-On, it’s possible that you’ve written many posts offering various insights on the same topic. Why not compile that information into a curated list to make each of them easier to find for your reader?
26. Feature the post on the main page of your website
There’s no rule that your blog content only has to live on your blog page. Try adding a slideshow header to your business website featuring popular or new posts. That way, if you have customers that go directly there, they’ll have an incentive to keep learning more through your blog.