How to promote your blog? It’s a good question most marketers struggle with. And yet, folks like Joseph Jaffe recommend spending 90% of your time promoting the blog you wrote during the other 10% of your day. Let that sink in: Joseph recommends that you spend 54 minutes promoting your blog for every hour you spend writing. If you’re anything like us at CoSchedule, you’re already:
- Trying really hard to write better content that your audience will find extremely useful.
- Working on growing your email list to introduce thousands of new folks to your products and services.
- Focusing on projects that will deliver 10x growth for your business.
So Joseph’s advice makes a ton of sense: Promote your blog to get the most out of the work you put into creating your really good content.
I’m actually writing this post because this is a huge area we need to improve at CoSchedule. We write great blog posts, but we could do so much more to promote them. But when I started researching the topic of “how to promote your blog”, I just wasn’t finding a whole lot of ideas coupled with the real how-to, actionable advice that would really help us find the best blog promotion tactics for us. So I decided to share this research with you to help you promote your blog better than ever. Consider this post a “choose your own adventure” novel, just like I did when writing it. This is meant to inspire new ideas, try new blog promotion tactics, and grow traffic to your blog. You don’t need to try every one, but here is the world’s most in-depth list of how to promote your blog.
How To Promote Your Blog With Email Marketing
1. Build your email list.
When Noah Kagan from OkDork wrote a post about getting more traffic for every single post you publish, his very first tip was to start building and prioritizing your email list. It’s the best way to turn organic traffic into engaged readers who constantly see the cool stuff you’re publishing and keep coming back to your blog. As we know at CoSchedule, we focus on converting our traffic into email subscribers because they’re more likely than any other audience type to become regular users of our editorial calendar software. Noah has a couple awesome tools he uses to build his email list, including the SumoMe plugin, List Builder, and Scroll Box. At CoSchedule, we’ve used tools like OptinMonster and LeadPages. Any of these should work well for building your initial email list to give you an audience that will read your posts and share them with their networks. As Noah puts it:
2. Send your emails at the absolute best times for opens and clickthroughs.
MailChimp did some awesome research when they included a send time optimization feature into their email marketing software. Essentially, they wanted to know the absolute best days and times to send email when there is heavy receiver inbox activity. They studied billions (yeah, really) of people’s inbox activity to do this, so it’s pretty interesting stuff:
John from MailChimp notes that no single day really wins hands down, but there is definitely a trend: Weekdays work best for promoting your blog posts via email. And to me, it looks like there are slight peaks on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
The best time to send an email is about 10 a.m. in your own time zone. John notes that the peak here is less than 7% of total inboxes, so there is a lot of variety in the times that people actually check their email. And it gets even more diverse depending on your industry, with some peak times being earlier than 10 a.m., so check out the graph above and send your emails at the absolute best times for your niche.
3. Send emails to launch your new posts.
This one’s pretty basic, but it’s also super important—send an email to your list to let your subscribers know you published something new.
Email your new posts to your subscribers. We sent this email to promote a new content development process post on the CoSchedule blog. This type of email gives us a nice launching point at CoSchedule to amplify social sharing from our most loyal audience, which helps us increase pageviews from the very beginning.
Email your subscribers when you publish new posts to increase your traffic. Some quick tips to maximize your new post email:
- Sell the benefits of why your subscribers should read your posts so they know WIIFM (what’s in it for me?).
- Use action verbs like read to help your subscribers understand exactly what you want them to do.
- Keep ’em short and to the point. You want to get them to your blog to read the rest.
4. To send plain text emails or visual emails?
It looks like there are a lot of people who are trending toward plain text emails recently. HubSpot found that HTML-enhanced emails decreased their open and clickthrough rates, suggesting that some email clients may filter enhanced email from even getting into primary inboxes and that folks tend to see email as a 1-to-1 interaction. DIYthemes also changed their email newsletter to a simple plain text option, and their subscribers seemed to love it. So of course, I had to dig into our own data to understand what you gals and guys like from us here at CoSchedule. It turns out that adding a visual into our new post emails decreases open rates by as much as 3.5% while clickthroughs increase by about 2.12%. Given the massive amount of people who open our emails, I’ll take my 3.5% more opens with slightly fewer clickthroughs.
Plain text emails tend to have higher open rates than HTML-enhanced emails.
5. Send an email newsletter.
Most bloggers publish 2–3 times a week. Why not compile those posts with a few others from rock stars in your niche to build an email newsletter your subscribers will love? That’s a great way to share your new content again, maybe a few of your older but super awesome posts, and make the time you put into social media content curation totally worth it by sharing those posts again.
Share your latest posts—along with your best-ofs and curated content—in an email newsletter to increase your traffic. This is a great way to remind your subscribers to check out your content, while also providing a ton of additional value by sharing other folks’ great stuff.
6. Send ’em again to the peeps who missed your initial email.
Noah Kagan gets pretty blunt when he talks about email open rates:
So he went about finding a solution to increase his open rates by 30%. The process is simple:
- Look at the email you just sent to your entire email list. Look at the A/B test results to see which words really resonated for opens.
- Change the subject line to a new A/B test based on your previous opens.
- Send another email with the new subject lines a week later to only the people who didn’t open your original email.
…and after that, this is what happened:
As Noah puts it:
Not a shabby way to promote your blog while also using your time super efficiently.
7. Nurture your email subscribers with marketing automation.
I had the opportunity to chat with Adam Tuttle at ActiveCampaign during a recent webinar:
One of the things Adam talks about is the idea of understanding what pages and posts your subscribers are reading most so you can automatically send them relevant content suited for their own preferences. That’s brilliant! Basically, look into a marketing automation tool like ActiveCampaign, and start monitoring your most popular pages. When you start to find flows for your content, you can create email campaigns to send your blog posts that complement the information your subscribers are already looking for. Watch that webinar quick for a lot more detail on how to keep your email subscribers. Adam is a fantastic teacher.
8. Enable social shares directly from email.
It’s super easy to create a click to share link to inspire social shares right from your emails. Including click to tweet links in our plain text emails helps us get an average of 12 shares for each blog post within the first couple hours after our emails go out. And it’s super easy to do. Just use Share Link Generator, write your social message, and drop in the link to your blog post. Create the link, and include it in your email like this:
Use click to share links right in your emails to inspire social engagement. This is an example from our write better content post. It’s that easy to get a few social shares to establish your post’s credibility right off the bat.
9. Include links to your blog and your posts in your email signature.
The first time I started chatting with Barry Feldman from Feldman Creative, his email signature caught my eye.
Barry Feldman uses WiseStamp to include links to blog posts in his email signature. Barry rocks WiseStamp to make this signature, and it seems like a super easy process to get started: Enter in all of your contact information, your picture or a logo, and your blog’s RSS feed. Grab the code from WiseStamp and add it into your email signature right in your email client. Done.
How To Use Community To Promote Your Blog
10. Participate in aggregate sites and up-vote communities.
If you’ve never heard of aggregate sites before, think of them as a place to go for information from many different sources related to a specific topic. These sites are where you can share your own content and other people’s awesome stuff in your niche to help your community with similar interests. The up-vote aspect of these communities takes on a social role, giving the site’s users the chance to say it’s good or bad. It’s an awesome way to keep the community strong (and keep the junk content out). Here are a few sites you could look into to promote your blog:
- reddit: The legendary front page of the Internet has pages for nearly any topic, and your niche is sure to be present.
- BizSugar: Small business marketing, finance, management, technology, and startups.
- Product Hunt: New product content.
- Hacker News: Startup and computer science.
- DataTau: Data science stuff.
- Lobsters: Technology content.
- Triberr: Blogging.
- Inbound.org: Inbound and content marketing.
- Growth Hackers: Startup stuff and disruptive marketing.
11. Answer questions with your blog posts in forums.
Marketers talk about solving people’s problems all the time. There are forums out there dedicated purely to helping people ask questions where they can get expert advice as answers. What an awesome way to connect directly with your audience, provide a bit of your expertise, and link back to your blog for further, in-depth answers! A common forum marketers love is Quora, but there are bound to be some even more specific to your industry. For example, I used to work in wholesale electrical distribution, and one of our audiences was electrical contractors—your electrician. There’s a forum for that. Really. And it’s super electric-nerdy—which makes it a perfect place for wholesalers to reach out with product advice for their super niche target audience. You can do it, too, with a little research and your good ol’ buddy, Google. Simply search for the forums in your niche with this algorithm:
Here’s what it looks like when I try to find forums for bloggers:
Use Google to find forums in your niche with this algorithm: “intitle:forum” + niche keyword. No more excuses. I bet there is a forum that already exists for your niche. or else you can do one better and start your niche’s forum yourself. bbPress is a forum software from the makers of WordPress that you can use to get started now.
12. Get your blog on social bookmarking sites.
Some folks prefer to find content through popular social bookmarking sites. You can apply to have your blog content present on these sites to help people who are interested in a certain topic discover your posts:
- AllTop: There are tons of categories with one bound to fit your niche. Simply submit your blog to get your content out there for a new audience to check out.
- StumbleUpon: Add your blog to the right category to help people discover your content. Like AllTop, once you’re signed up, you can submit a blog for StumbleUpon to look in to.
- Digg: It’s all about the most talked about information on the Internet. Submit your blog.
13. Build your inner circle.
I’m in a couple different Slack groups that serve different purposes. But one of them, started by Mention, is meant for blog editors, content marketers, and entrepreneurs to connect, share ideas, and review work.
It’s a terrific way for us to publish blog posts and share them with an inside network of people we appreciate and trust. It’s an awesome way to build connections with a you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours culture. It’s a smart idea, and one you can use in your industry for a lot more than just promoting your blog posts. Like Mention, you could rock a long-term group using a tool like Slack, or even smaller, one-at-a-time, face-to-face meetings with a tool like Google Hangouts.
How To Promote Your Blog With Social Media
14. Share your content in many places.
Desmond Chua wrote a roundup post on ReferralCandy’s blog, getting the best advice from industry influencers. I loved James Clear’s simple idea:
When you apply that thought to social media, the opportunities are nearly endless, but there are definitely the big ones you don’t want to miss out on:
- Google+
- Tumblr
Sharing your content on the networks you know your audience uses is smart. I like James’ approach because everyone is different, and while a majority of your audience may use a certain social network, sharing messages on all of these is really easy and has potential to draw additional interest to your blog. Heck, just schedule your social shares to these networks via CoSchedule to keep it super simple.
15. Include your blog link in your social media profiles.
I just read a post from Olsy Sorokina that mentioned a simple tip that works well for any social network: Look at your social profile and make sure you have a link back to your blog in it.
16. Rock the power of 100 rule.
There’s an old rule from sales that is all about forming new relationships. The power of 100 rule is a simple concept: Make 100 new contacts every day. What better place than to try this than your own social networks? It’s as easy as responding to comments or following new folks. If 100 is a scary number for you, consider this social media engagement and make a point to not just blast your content, but share it in context and participate in the ensuing conversation. I haven’t tried this yet, but I would bet that focusing on growing your social networks will help you reach a much larger audience with every social share, making this a super worth while daily habit.
17. Clean up your open graph data.
Basically, this is all about optimizing your blog posts so when your readers share your content on social networks, they look really good.
18. Share your blog posts on social media right when you publish them.
This is a no-brainer way to boost your social media schedule. Right when you publish your blog posts, share them to every one of your business’ social accounts, and also the personal ones you use for business. The more immediate retweets, likes, and general shares you get, the more credibility the post receives, so kickstarting your shares right when you publish is a great way to encourage even more shares. Some of your audience may follow you on your various social profiles, so instead of just sending every message with the headline of your post, switch it up to optimize each message for your different social networks. More details on that to come!
19. Share your brand new posts more than once.
You could just share your blog post on all of your networks right when you publish it and call it good. But when we researched the idea of sharing your content more than once on social media, we found it can increase your traffic by 3,150%!
- At publish: Schedule different messages to all of your social accounts to generate immediate interest.
- Same day: It’s perfectly acceptable to share to some social networks more than once a day. I like to use this opportunity to A/B test a variety of headlines to see which gets the most engagement, then literally change my post headlines appropriately.
- Next day: Share your post a few more times.
- 3 days later: Get a few more shares going with different messages and graphics from in your post.
- Week later: Keep that traffic rolling in with a few more social messages, using your social analytics to help you know which messages have been most successful so far.
- 2 weeks later: Again, keep that traffic coming with a couple more reminder messages.
- ____ later: CoSchedule customers like Buzzfarmers have come up with their own awesome social media schedules. Buzz farmers has a 12 message system where they write 12 messages, schedule them for 12 days, then continue to add them to their social media calendar throughout an entire year.
20. Repromote your older, most successful content.
Neil Patel knows how to generate tons of traffic. I love reading his blog for new techniques and inspiration I wouldn’t have thought of myself. One of Neil’s tips is to repromote your old content, but not just any content. Neil noticed when he shared all of his content again, he actually experienced a traffic drop from his social networks. But when he shared only his best content again, he grew his traffic. So find a tool like CoSchedule where you can see your most popular posts and schedule even more social shares to keep that traffic coming in.
After we took Neil’s advice, we noticed traffic continues to grow for our most popular blog posts, even when they’re more than a year old.
21. Who said you could only share one blog post at a time?
There are other pages on your blog that work great for social sharing—your home page, categories pages, and tags. Imagine grouping a list of blog posts together with a tag dedicated to a very specific topic: You could repurpose the posts to help solve a very specific problem, then share that across your social networks. Buffer started trying out this method recently with some success, making it an interesting way to promote your blog with more than just one post at a time.
22. Connect to emotion.
When the New York Times researched why people were sharing content, the results were clear: It’s an emotional task. People share because they feel something for the content they’re sharing, which makes total sense, right?
- 84% share content to support a cause.
- 78% share content to maintain relationships they may not otherwise have the chance to keep up with.
- 69% share content to feel involved and connected in the world.
- 68% share content to define themselves and what they stand for and care about.
- 49% share content to inform others of what they care about and to sway opinions—a form of entertainment.
Experiment with these five emotions in your social messages to capture interest and inspire shares.
23. Only sharing your headline? There’s a better way.
The idea of sharing your content more than once gets super old if you just share the headline of your blog post over and over again. Get inspiration to change up your messages from in the body of your blog post itself:
- Meta description: You write a meta description for every post to sell your readers on why they should click to read your post in search engine results pages. Reuse that inspiration.
- Subheadings: Just like your headlines, you spend time crafting subheadings to keep your scanner readers engaged in your content. Repurpose those headlines into social messages.
- Click To Tweet boxes: If you’ve installed Click To Tweet on your WordPress blog, you already have tons of tweetable soundbites from your posts that are perfect for a few more social shares.
- Quotes: If you mention influencers and their awesome advice in your blog posts, reuse that inspiration in your social messages (oh! And tag those folks to let them know you loved their input and even possibly encourage a re-share or two).
- Big takeaways: Every post you publish as a point. Use your thesis as inspiration for new social messages.
24. Stand out with visuals.
Kimberlee Morrison makes the point super eloquently:
There’s even evidence to suggest that including images in your tweets could boost your clickthrough rate by 150% while using animated GIFs can get you even more clicks.
So make your blog visually appealing, then reuse the images, graphics, animated GIFs, and videos you create in your social messages.
25. Help employees promote your blog posts.
If you’re like us here at CoSchedule, you love what you do. So why not turn that love into action to share your content with even more of your team’s networks? We do this at CoSchedule, and it’s so fun to have a more personal conversation with our audience rather than just through our business social profiles.
And, it drives clickthroughs back to your content, which is an added bonus.
Help your employees promote your blog to reach more people and get more traffic.
26. Thank readers for sharing.
A trick that I love to do is use social media listening to see who’s sharing our content, and where they’re doing it. It helps us stay in tune with the words our audience is using and where they’re having conversations so I can make it a point to have a presence there. It’s a blast to thank our advocates for sharing our content, then providing a related, totally relevant blog post similar to the one they shared, with a little message like, “Thanks so much for sharing, Nathan! I bet you’ll like this, too! [link]” We personalize that message every time so it doesn’t come across spammy, and it shows.
If you take engagement seriously, why not turn that into a blog promotion technique, too, to keep your advocates coming back for more?
27. Stop sharing already.
Sometimes, your audience may just not like the blog posts you’ve published. That’s OK, really, because you can use that as a learning tool to help you write better content. But, when that’s the case, review your social analytics to understand when to stop sharing certain posts. Just like it’s appropriate to keep sharing the best of the best like Neil Patel recommends, it’s just fine to pull the plug when your social engagement for certain posts drops. As Neil puts it:
Look at your social media analytics to understand when it’s time to stop sharing. You could even halt for just a few months, then try again to see if you had maybe promoted your same piece of content too heavily, giving you the chance to improve your social media scheduling in the future.
How To Use Twitter To Promote Your Blog
28. Tweet at the best times.
When our very own Julie Neidlinger researched 10 different studies about the best times to post on social media, she found a few ways to make every tweet get a little more engagement:
- Wednesdays at 12 p.m. and 5–6 p.m.
- Mondays–Fridays at 12–3 p.m. and 5 p.m.
- Any day of the week from 2–3 a.m., 6–7 a.m., and 9–10 p.m.
29. Tweet 15 times a day.
We’ve been researching quite a few different ways to help you maximize your impact on social media. And our CoSchedule users ask us a lot about how often they should post on social media. We analyzed our data and combined it with the top 10 studies we could find on the topic—with the complete findings soon to be released in a brand new blog post (so enjoy the preview!). The consensus for daily posting frequency on Twitter was 15 tweets per day. So share lots of content multiple times a day on your Twitter accounts to promote your blog posts.
30. Tweet helpful tips to stand out on Twitter.
Use Twitter to help your followers do something better. You can increase your clickthroughs with visuals, and mix up your messages with the key points from your blog post. Tweets containing 70–100 characters and an image that helps your followers define themselves tend to perform best.
31. Use hashtags to reach a larger audience.
You can piggyback off of the trending hashtags you see next to your Twitter feed, or you can easily search for popular ones people are using to share related content in your niche. Trending hashtags simply have lots of tweets using that hashtag, so your tweet lifespan is relatively short and you’ll need to make sure you use only hashtags that make sense in the context of your blog posts. What makes sense more often than not is to find and use a hashtag that complements your content—a hashtag people would use to find your stuff specifically.
Trending hashtags are super popular. But finding your hashtags may be a smarter move to make sure they complement your blog posts you’re sharing. There are a few tools you could use to help you find relevant hashtags for the tweets you’ll use to promote your blog posts:
- What the Trend is good for finding trending hashtags.
- Hashtags.org helps you find hashtags relevant to your industry.
- Twitonomy helps you explore the analytics behind your hashtags, and you can even get search analytics for hashtags which will help you find the ones that have the best opportunity to give you the most traffic.
Use one or two hashtags per tweet to grow your engagement by 21%.
32. A/B test your headlines to improve your clickthroughs.
Did you know Upworthy writes 25 headlines for every single blog post they publish? It sounds a bit crazy at first, but when we started doing it ourselves, we noticed a huge improvement in connecting powerfully emotional headlines and our clickthrough rate on Twitter. Upworthy’s process is simple (and a bit funny):
- You HAVE to write out 25 headlines for every piece of content.
- You WILL write some really stinky headlines.
- Once you start getting desperate you start thinking outside the box.
- So you HAVE TO WRITE 25 HEADLINES.
- #24 will suck. Then #25 will be a gift from the headlines gods and will make you a legend.
- Accept that not every headline will be perfect.
- Then write 25 headlines.
- With practice, you’ll be writing 25 in 15 minutes. Only then do you have permission to lower your limit.
And now that you have 25 blog post headlines, you probably ended up with at least a few really good ones. So A/B test them very simply using Twitter:
- Share your blog post right when you publish it using your best headline.
- Tweet again an hour later with a variation of the headline.
- Review your Twitter Analytics to know which headline got the most clickthroughs.
- Change your headline to the one that gets the most clickthroughs.
We’re taking this to the next level at CoSchedule and started sharing even more variations to help us really keep our traffic rolling in through irresistible headlines, and it’s all based on Twitter A/B testing.
33. Twitter cards “drive traffic to your website.”
This is really similar to cleaning up your open graph data, but relates specifically to optimizing your audience’s tweets for your blog posts. As Twitter puts it nicely:
Here’s an example of a tweet they sent from a website that’s optimized for Twitter cards:
All it takes is implementing some HTML into your blog post meta tags to optimize the tweets your audience sends, which sounds like a perfect fit into your pre-publish blog editing workflow. Get the code to do this right from Twitter right now.
34. Pin tweets to the top of your profile to get more retweets.
After you tweet an awesome blog post, you can pin that tweet to the top of your Twitter profile. Essentially, that makes it the first tweet any followers see when they check out your Twitter account, and it gives your posts a nice amount of visibility longer than the normal lifespan of a tweet.
Aaron Lee wrote a blog post for Post Planner that basically says he was able to boost retweets for a single tweet up to 450 times in just a couple weeks. Seems worth it for how easy it is to do. All you have to do is go into Twitter and find the tweet you scheduled through CoSchedule, and simply hit the three dots and choose to pin that tweet. That’s it.
35. Place links 25% of the way into your tweet.
This is a hack I just learned from Dan Zarrella. The guy analyzed 200,000 link-containing tweets and found that the ones with the most clickthroughs actually contained links about 25% of the way into the message.
36. Host or participate in Twitter chats to share your knowledge and recommend blog posts.
When we started hosting #cochat, our Twitter chat, we thought of basing social media conversations around the blog posts we were publishing. The thought was that the reach would increase for our Twitter presence, while also providing a viable, more long-form solution to a challenge when we would provide a link back to the blog post around which the conversation was born. It worked. But it’s a lot of time to dedicate to promotion—coming up with questions, participating in the chat itself, and being “on” for answering every question. It was a bit much, to be honest. But I’d suggest trying it out and seeing if it’s a fit for your audience. And hey, much like guest blogging, you could be a guest on someone else’s Twitter chat to introduce your blog to an entirely new audience. We’ve done that with a few of our friends in the industry, and it’s been a good way to grow your blog audience.
37. Try promoted tweets to share your most successful tweets with a larger audience.
As Twitter says:
Essentially, you tweet your blog posts and then review your Twitter Analytics data to understand which messages are driving the most clickthroughs. From there, you can select the best tweets and pay to have them reach more people.
You can pay to promote your tweets to reach a larger audience and drive more traffic to your blog posts..
How To Use Google+ To Promote Your Blog
38. Post at the best possible times.
Julie’s research on the best times to post on social media found that you’ll get the best engagement when you post on weekdays.
39. Know how often to post on Google+.
Our soon-to-be released data about how often to post on social media analyzes 10 of the top posts on the topic, and even includes our own custom data. Based on our findings, share two posts to Google+ every weekday to promote your blog.
40. Optimize your messages with technical information.
Google+ users tend to be tech-savvy, so think about including in-depth, fact-driven, how-to content that includes videos and GIFs that guide your audience through their challenges. Use rich text like bolding and italics, combined with long-form posts to stand out.
41. Use hashtags to help people outside of your circles find your content.
At first, I was a bit skeptical about the usefulness of Google+ hashtags. But Ann Smarty lays it out in a way I can definitely understand and want to pursue when I promote my blog posts now:
Google automatically assigns hashtags to your Google+ posts, but you can edit and modify them to suit your content even better. Think of using the keyword from your blog post as a hashtag along with a variant or two. It sounds like using 2–3 hashtags per Google+ post is the best for increasing your reach.
42. Try +Post Ads to promote your blog posts.
Jennifer Beese wrote a fantastic post for Sprout Social covering +Post Ads, which you’d manage through your AdWords account with Google. She mentions there are a few restrictions:
- You need 1,000 followers on your Google+ page.
- You need to opt in to share endorsements for Google+ pages.
- Your post needs to contain family-safe content relevant for your audience.
It looks like +Post Ads differ from other promoted social content because they can receive engagement from more places on the Web than just Google+. As Jennifer says:
I’d say it’s worth a try to promote your blog posts through +Post Ads and measure your success, especially since there appears to be a few more opportunities for engagement other than on the social network itself.
How To Promote Your Blog With Facebook
43. Post on the best days, at the best times.
Julie’s analysis of 10 different studies found that posting on Facebook later into the week and on weekends is generally the best way to increase your engagement on Facebook.
44. Post the optimal amount of times every day.
We’re currently researching how many times to post to Facebook every day to get the most traffic for your hard work. Based on the data available to us right now, I’d suggest sharing one post to Facebook every day, and if you have more than 10,000 friends, share two posts per day.
45. Use Facebook to entertain your audience.
If you’re promoting an entertaining blog post, Facebook is the perfect network to fuel your social referral traffic. Facebook users want to be entertained, so make your messages humorous, inspirational, cause-related, or just super useful. Posts that are less than 100 characters long and include emotional visuals tend to perform well. Include videos to stand out in your fans’ newsfeeds.
46. Use popular hashtags to increase your reach.
When it comes to Facebook, hashtags serve to categorize your content for discovery. So it makes sense to understand what’s popular right now to get in on the trend that’s already getting attention. You can find popular hashtags on Facebook by opening up your feed and checking out the right side. There’s a widget there titled “Trending” where you’ll see the three most popular hashtags. If you click, you’ll see a few categories, and more trending hashtags will show up.
Data from Digital Information World suggests that 1–2 hashtags per Facebook message tend to get the most interactions.
47. Pin to the top of your Facebook wall to increase your reach.
When you promote your blog posts through normal Facebook posts, you can also pin them to the top of your wall. It’s a simple practice that can increase the number of people you reach with a post since it’s the first post new visitors to your Facebook page see.
It’s easy to start pinning: Go to your Facebook page’s timeline, click the upside-down carrot icon on a normal post you just published, then select “Pin to Top” and you’re rocking.
48. Tap into the fans in your Facebook Group.
Don’t have a Facebook Group? It’s a great place to start your community to ask a core audience transparent questions, get feedback on projects you’re planning, and yes, even promote your blog posts from time to time—especially the posts your group inspires. Just go to your Facebook page, and on the left side of your newsfeed find the “Groups” area and select “Create Group”. From there, connect your group into CoSchedule, and you can share messages easily with the folks in your group.
49. Pay to increase your reach with boosted posts and Facebook ads.
Facebook makes it really easy to boost posts after you share them. It’s something we’ve started experimenting with recently ourselves, and a big lesson learned is that targeting the right audience is critical to success—otherwise you’re just paying for eyeballs, but not for clicks.
This is especially true with Facebook ads. Something Amy Porterfield, author of Facebook Marketing All-in-One For Dummies suggests looking into is Facebook’s power editor where you can upload your entire list of email addresses to help Facebook find lookalike audiences with similar interests to people on your list. Amy also suggests retargeting your website visitors using Facebook ads to re-engage with those folks. You could use ads to promote your blog posts as a soft sell to get them back to your blog that’s optimized for conversion.
How To Use LinkedIn To Share Your Blog
50. Post on LinkedIn at the best possible times.
Since LinkedIn is generally a professional’s social network, it makes sense that it’s busiest during weekdays at break times and right before and after work.
51. Share the perfect amount of posts every day.
Research tells us that LinkedIn is most active during the work week. So maintaining your presence throughout the typical Monday–Friday just makes sense, and is exactly what we found when we analyzed the perfect number of times to share to LinkedIn every day. Post to LinkedIn four times a week, nearly one every weekday. You can combine this knowledge with what you just learned about the best times to post on LinkedIn and forget about posting on Fridays.
52. Help your audience build skills with LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is the business professionals’ network, so messages that connect with case studies and success stories, business inspiration, and skill building perform particularly well. Steal the nuggets from your blog posts to share in shorter messages (slightly longer than Twitter) combined with infographics and info-images, memes, and videos.
53. Promote your blog to your LinkedIn Group.
You can create a LinkedIn Group to help you connect with peers, members of your audience, or even your current customers. Just like you’d use a Facebook Group, you can ask them questions and get feedback to turn their input into awesome content. When they inspire awesome blog posts, share them right back with your LinkedIn Group.
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