There’s nothing quite like the feeling of wrapping up a blog post. After many hours of outlining, researching, and creative writing, it feels amazing to review your completed work and imagine how much your audience will love it …
… hopefully enough to trust your brand, share your content, and purchase your products, right?
Unfortunately, not even the best blog post can meet any of those goals without being seen first — the post-and-pray method just doesn’t cut it anymore.
Today, you need to put a bit more oomph behind those blogs.
What kind of oomph are we talkin’ about? We created this blog post to help you with "how" and "where" to promote and distribute your blog. This will help you build trust between your customers and business to create loyal brand advocates.
Here are five tactics to follow to promote your blog and grow your readership.
1. Create high-quality blog content.
Before you consider how you’ll promote your blog, make sure you’re creating high-quality blog content. Creating content for the sake of creating content won’t help your business in the long run. Your blog should contain helpful, unique content that relates to your product and brand.
Aside from how-to content and ultimate guides, feature guest writers on your blog, too. Not only will this mix up the type of content you’re publishing, but it will highlight different voices from your network, employee base, and even current customers, which provides valuable insight for readers.
Don’t shy away from trends. While every blog needs evergreen content, content based on trends, seasonality, and recent news can keep your brand relevant and blog interesting.
Remember, even the best promotion plan won’t matter if you’re promoting low-quality blog content.
2. Understand your target audience.
You can’t create helpful content until you know exactly how to help your readers. Conduct extensive target audience research to better understand their challenges, desires, and pain points — and tailor your content to respond to, solve, and meet these needs. Centering your blog around your readers will allow you to provide truly valuable content.
If you haven’t already, develop buyer personas to streamline your audience data across your organization. Then, start writing content that you envision your personas would read and enjoy.
3. Incorporate visual media.
Media like images and videos make your blog posts more visually appealing and memorable. Consumers remember 65% of visual content versus only 10% of written content, meaning that adding visual media to your blogs can help readers retain information and remember your brand.
Another way to help your blog content resonate with readers is to develop original images for your blog. This applies to blog headers as well as original infographics, graphs, and other types of visual media.
Save countless hours by using these pre-made templates to design your infographics.
Visual content can also help drive traffic to your blog. Image alt text alone can help boost your blog SEO — an experiment we ran at HubSpot that saw a 25% increase in blog traffic. (Image alt text also contributes to your blog’s accessibility, an equally important feature to optimize.)
4. Make your blog searchable.
In addition to creating interesting, helpful content, don’t forget to optimize your blog content for search. Employ on-page and off-page search engine optimization (SEO) tactics to help your content show up on search engine results pages (SERPs).
To write blog posts for SEO, do keyword research to identify high-ranking terms and naturally integrate those terms throughout your content. Link to relevant internal pages as well as influential external sites.
Optimizing your blog for search allows readers to organically discover, read, and share your high-quality blog content. Better yet, it’s more cost-effective than paid promotion.
5. Build real relationships.
Not all blog promotion needs to happen online and on your blog; building real relationships with readers can be just as beneficial. First, establish and build a loyal base of readers. (One way to cultivate this base is via email, which we’ll talk about in the next section.) You can count on these readers to provide feedback for and share your blog content, effectively distributing it for you.
Another way to leverage real relationships for blog promotion is to build off-site relationships with other bloggers and businesses. Share other people’s content on social media, in your emails, and through links in your blog content — you never know who will share yours in exchange.
Where to Promote Your Blog
Where you promote your blog posts is just as important as how you promote them. In this section, we’ll talk about where you can distribute your content and grow your audience.
Email is a uniquely powerful blog promotion tool. You can use it to cultivate your reader audience as well as connect with industry experts and guest writers.
First, consider starting a blog newsletter to build your list of readers. Include a simple call-to-action (CTA) on your blog for those interested in reading new posts. This is a great way to convert readers into subscribers and, eventually, into paying customers.
Once you build a substantial list, start to segment your subscribers by topic interest. You can decipher these interests based on what blog links each subscriber clicks on, what content offers they download, or what products they buy.
Another way to leverage email for blog promotion is to reach out to people you mentioned or quoted in your content. Not only does this alert them to their name or brand being mentioned, but it gives them an incentive to share your content with their networks. Email, in this case, is also more personal than Twitter, which we’ll discuss next.
Social Media
Social media is a great way to share blog content in a friendly way as well as engage with readers and customers. Twitter is beneficial for content promotion as many professionals are active on the network and can jump into conversations or mention your blog with a short tweet. As you promote your content on Twitter, tag relevant people (including those you mentioned in your blog or may be interested in your post).
When posting on social media — Twitter included — take note of the timing of your posts. Research when your audience is online and post within those windows. Promote your blog on as many channels as possible, sometimes posting multiple times with the same link. Also, be sure to add context with each link you share, otherwise, your followers may not open and read it.
Website
Your website can be a helpful tool for promoting your blog content. First, make sure your blog is a prominent link on your site menu. Throughout your website, encourage readers to check out your blog. Also, include a subscription CTA on your website so that visitors can sign up to receive new posts.
The very best blog content can’t engage readers and convert customers without a solid promotion plan. Put these blog promotion tactics to work to grow your reader base and convert more customers.
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