Blog > The Blog Promotion Checklist: Marketing Techniques for Success
You’ve put time and energy into writing useful and exciting content that you know your audience will love.
It’s time to make sure it gets the attention it deserves.
Good content needs the support of good marketing in order to truly spread its wings and reach its potential.
There are several avenues you can use to give it the nudge it needs, and it’s best to try them all to see which produces the best results for you.
Thankfully, it doesn’t take a lot to put together a pre-flight checklist for every time you publish a piece of content; which you can then use to methodically take care of your marketing.
I’ll go through some of these marketing avenues with you now, talking you through how they’re best utilised so that you can put together a checklist that works for you.
Optimising Your Post
Making sure your post is optimised for sharing and search engines is a process done over time, but it’s good to have the groundworks in place for when you launch.
When it comes to SEO, you’ll want to make sure you’ve set up some compelling metadata. It’s also worthwhile reviewing your post against our SEO checklist to make sure you’ve covered as many bases as possible with your writing.
You’ll also want to set up the Open Graph Information on your blog. This is what is displayed in the link preview when someone shares the link to one of your blog posts on social media. Make sure to write something attention grabbing that draws people into wanting to find out more.
Over time, you’ll be able to see what’s working and what can be improved mainly by checking your clickthrough rates. This can be done through Google Search Console and through your social media platform analytics.
Be sure to benchmark and test to see what metadata and Open Graph information offers the best clickthrough rates for your content.
Utilising Internal Linking
If you’ve read my previous post on getting started with blogging, you should have already thought about and structured some powerful calls-to-action within your post to keep people engaged on your site.
However, the linking shouldn’t stop there. When you start to build a blog and more resources across your website, covering your niche / industry in detail, there will be some crossover between what you write.
You should make use of this crossover by linking to your other content where appropriate. Say for example you’re discussing a process for creating a piece of jewellery, and you mention a specific technique you’ve written about elsewhere, you should absolutely link this section of text.
This is good for you because you’re helping to educate your audience and keep them engaged with your content for longer. It’s also fantastic for your audience as you’re making information more accessible to them without them having to search harder for what they want to know.
This comes with SEO benefits, engagement benefits and audience approval benefits. It’s a win-win all round so make sure to put some time aside to make sure relevant content is linked. It’s also a good idea to review your older content for new linking opportunities as you write newer content.
Publishing On Social Media
Social media is a great outlet to start to drum up some initial traffic to your new blog. Having written some content will also help you to maintain a regular content calendar.
Many blog writers will post their blog on social media once and then never speak about it again. For all the time you put into it, you don’t want to leave an opportunity on the table like this.
Once you’ve announced your blog post, think about how you can break down the key points into separate social media posts. If you’ve covered several angles on one particular topic in your writing, these can form several different social posts that you can put out across your content calendar.
It can be helpful to schedule these in advance. Once your content calendar has played out, you can then review which talking points about your blog garnered the most interest. You can schedule these posts to go out again in the future or carry the learnings forward to other posts you write.
Updating Your Email List
If you’ve just started your blog, you may not have much of an email list yet; if at all. Now is a good time to start building one up though. You’ll find an email list a valuable asset in getting word out to your most avid readers.
There are several ways that you can set up email sign up forms across your website in Create to start building your list. For example, you can add a signup form to your footer, or anywhere on your content pages.
If you have already set up an account with an email platform, you can also embed a signup form that imports contacts directly into your account with them.
Try to build a regular pattern for sending out an email every time you write a new blog; to begin with at least. No matter the number of people you have on the list, they are likely to be those who are most engaged, most likely to share and most likely to take action.
Over time, you’ll build a bigger list, have a better idea of what title and format works well and you’ll be able to depend on email as a vital part of your content delivery.
Stay Active In Forums
Social Media goes two ways. It’s great to have your content calendar and post regularly, but it also pays to engage with the communities focused around your product and service.
There are loads of forums you can find where people will be discussing topics that you write about. Reddit and Facebook Groups are a great place to start when trying to find your tribe. You may also find dedicated hashtags that help you reach the people you want to connect with.
It’s important to engage with the conversations that are happening and make sure you seem a familiar face in these communities.
What you’ll find is that when you want to post in the Group (following their community guidelines of course) that people are much more receptive.
You’ll also find people asking questions about topics you’re well versed in. This may give you ideas for valuable topics to write about in future or a chance to share something you’ve already written.
Repurpose Your Content
As time goes on and your content calendar runs out, that doesn’t have to be the end for your blog post. There are other ways you can revive your content and release it; especially if it has done well for you.
Repurposing content means finding a new way to package up your content and distribute it to your audience. For example, if you have a really popular blog post, you may find it’s worth your while creating a video or a podcast to cover the content as well.
If you’ve shared useful data with your audience, you could spend some time on canva creating a striking infographic that visually describes the information you’ve shared.
You can also create spin-off content that covers particular parts of your original blog post in more detail (you can use the information you’ve learnt from sharing different points on social media to decide which points are the most worthwhile to talk about).
You’ve already done most of the hard work by writing the content. Repurposing what you already have takes less time to continue the great results.
Wrapping Up
Marketing your blog will take a consistent and dedicated effort each time you release content. Over time, you’ll get a feeling for what’s working and what isn’t worth the time. This is when you’ll focus your efforts and start seeing amazing results.
In the meantime, follow this checklist to start giving your content its best shot at being found:
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