How to Effectively Promote Your Blog Content

If you don’t have any experience in marketing or sales, promoting your blog content can be challenging. There is a super fine line between actually bringing value to your readers and annoying them. You obviously want to aim for the former, however more often than not bloggers end up with the latter.

A key ingredient to successful blogging is successful promotion. In fact, as most successful bloggers will tell you, only 20% of their efforts go to producing content, and 80% is spent promoting it. Yes, promotion is that important. How else do you think you’ll get eyes on your blog? So here’s how to effectively promote your blog content:

Speak the Language of Each Social Media Platform

Every social media platform has a different language. Users on each platform are there for different reasons which means they consume content in a very specific way depending on the platform they’re on. Make sense?

And it’s your job to figure out how to speak the platform’s native language. Just because you’re promoting your content on Instagram doesn’t mean it’s going to drive traffic to your blog… unless you’re speaking Instagram’s language.

For example, Instagram users are very visual, so you want to create stunning visuals to catch their attention with a to-the-point caption that will direct them to your blog. You also want to take into consideration the fact people rarely click out of Instagram so your promotional tactics really have to be targeted.

Ideally you want to play around with all the platforms to see what social media language you’re naturally fluent in because what works for one blogger may not work for you and vice versa. It’s a matter of trial and error.

Show Teasers at High Engagement Times

You want to give your followers a taste of what you have in store for the day/week/month on social media. You don’t want to reveal too much, otherwise there is no incentive to go to your blog, but you do want to reveal just enough, at just the right time, in order to get as much as attention as possible.

You can do this by posting teasers of your latest content at your highest engagement hours on social media. For example, Facebook and Instagram offer insights to when your followers are online and active on your profile. For other platforms that don’t have tracking or analytics tools, you can just take a mental note of what days/times have gotten the best results. You can also put yourself in the shoes of your followers and think ‘When would they be online?’. Lunchtime, late afternoon, and right before bed are good times to start with.

Posting at the optimum time is extremely important now more than ever, since most feeds are based on engagement, meaning whoever your followers engage with the most is going to show up the most frequently in their feeds. So you really want to create conversational and engaging content for whatever it is you’re promoting.

Explain Why

In order to effectively promote your blog content, you need to explain why your followers need it, not want it, but need it. Of course you don’t want to come off too pushy and say something like, “You NEED to read my latest blog post, it’s going to change your life!”. Really? Well how is it going to do that? A caption like that can come off as spammy and annoying.

Before publishing any promotion you want to ask yourself, how can your followers benefit from this content? What is it going to do to improve their lives? What problem is it solving for them? Then after you answer those questions you can make a Snapchat video, an Instagram caption, or a Facebook status using 1-3 sentences explaining all of those things. It may take you a few times to hit your stride, but you’ll get there. Have patience.  

What is your favourite social media platform right now? Tell us in the comments below!

xx Britt

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