You’ve got yourself a blog. You’re in a groove with banging out posts on a regular schedule. You’re feelin’ pretty good about this whole blogging thing.
But… If a tree falls in the woods, does anyone hear it? Better yet, if you write a blog post and don’t promote it via social media…. Who’s going to read it?
It’s a delicate balance between writing and promoting what you write. All of the creative spurts in the world won’t amount to a hill of beans if you don’t have an opportunity to get your posts in front of your audience.
So, how do you do it? For starters, you’ll want to build some time into your blogging process to promote your posts — and find the best avenues to reach your audience.
Carving Out Time For Research
Don’t worry! The research process will not make a considerable dent in your blogging time! For starters, make sure you’ve set your blog up with Google Analytics. (If you haven’t already, it’s super simple to do so. Check out this post to learn how!) Through Google Analytics, you can measure over time your most popular posts, where your traffic is coming from, and the average amount of time your readers linger on a page. This is a great starting point for discovering what captures — and holds — your readers interest!
Don’t worry! The research process will not make a considerable dent in your blogging time! For starters, make sure you’ve set your blog up with Google Analytics. (If you haven’t already, it’s super simple to do so. Check out this post to learn how!) Through Google Analytics, you can measure over time your most popular posts, where your traffic is coming from, and the average amount of time your readers linger on a page. This is a great starting point for discovering what captures — and holds — your readers interest!
Although Google Analytics can seem slightly intimidating when you’re just starting out with it, there are other free tools you can use to help you learn what’s meaningful to your audience and what posts are performing best. One of the easiest tools you can use to find out how many clicks each blog post receives is the link shortner Bit.ly. Not only does Bit.ly truncate your blog post URL (making it easier to promote on sites like Twitter that only allow you a piddling 144 characters), but it also gives you some insight into how many people clicked on your post via social media and what time of day they did so. This can give you valuable information as to when is the best time of day to reach your readers on social media.
Arming yourself with this information sooner rather than later can help you best direct your blog-promoting energies! Within 1 month of posting, you should have enough solid research and information as to what has performed best for your blog and what your next steps should be on the promotion side. Easy peasy!
Stayin’ Social
If you’ve just started your blog, you are probably just promoting it online to friends and family via your personal social media accounts. Although Grandma might be proud as punch that you’ve spawned your very own blog about Norwegian Death Metal Bands That Wear Alpaca Wool Sweaters, chances are that Grandma is probably not your blog’s target audience.
You may have some friends who share your interest on social media, so start spreadin’ the news about your blog on your individual Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and Pinterest accounts.
As time passes, and to attract more valuable blog traffic from folks who may be searching for your blog’s social media presence online, you’ll want to set up designated social media profile accounts online that are specifically devoted to your blog.
Setting up designated accounts for social media should take you no longer than it did to set up a a personal account on social media. Just make sure you have a nice, tight description of your blog and a few well-chosen photos that will “speak” to your readers. You’ll want to have a few crisp profile photos, logos, or header photos at-the-ready when you’re setting up these accounts.
Don’t be shy about getting your existing friends on social media to try to recruit new readers for you! Ask them to kindly share your blog with their own network of friends who may be interested, too.
Promoting Posts… And Automating That Promotion!
Now that you’re all set up on social media, have a feel for what posts perform best, and are trying to reach out to new readers, it’s time to take it to the social media airwaves!
You may think that you have to deliver social media promotion in “real-time,” the second you hit the “publish” button. However, that’s not necessarily the case. You can actually “schedule” your social media posts to go live at more strategic times after your blog post has had a chance to marinate out there on the internet.
There are a few free tools that can help you pre-schedule posts to distribute to select social media platforms.
Buffer is a terrific application that can be used to configure a promotional social media post to go live at a designated time.
For instance, although you published your blog post on Sunday night at midnight, your previous research may have discovered that alerting readers via Twitter on Tuesday at 2pm gives you a greater chance to get the most visits to your blog. However, you may be busy in a meeting or have a late lunch scheduled at that time and may not be able to tweet about your latest blog post at that time.
Don’t worry. You can do it! After your blog post has gone live and you’ve created a Bit.ly link to the post, you can use a tool like Buffer to “pre-schedule” a promotional Tweet or Facebook post to go live on Tuesday…. Even if it’s 12:01 A.M. on a Sunday evening!
Simply plug the time you want the promotional tweet or post to go live and “set it and forget it”!
This takes mere minutes to do and will save you a lot of time and headaches down the line in terms of promoting your blog and growing your readership. Happy blogging!
