Embedding blog posts with social sharing buttons empowers your readers to increase your traffic. Pitching your posts to the local media can also widen your audience immensely, as it did for Wendy Rockcastle, of Rockcastle Florist in Rochester, New York.
Anyone who’s ever tried blogging knows it’s a challenging art. Between coming up with compelling content, finding your voice, tracking down high-quality images, and combing through your words for any grammatical errors, you invest a lot of time and brainpower crafting your masterpiece. (Click here for tips to get your creative juices flowing.) Naturally, after all that work, you want to get our blog post in front of as many eyeballs as possible.
Many bloggers hit “publish” … then wait to see what happens. The result, quite consistently, is nothing, says Carol Bryant, who blogs at least twice a week for “Fidose of Reality,” a website about canine health, and always gets several reader comments — sometimes as many as 50. “Being proactive is the most effective way to garner traffic,” Bryant said. In a recent post for Blog Paws, a community of pet bloggers, she shared a few easy ways she gets more mileage out of her posts.
- Include social sharing buttons on every post. Your readers can exponentially increase your reach if you include the capability for them to share your post on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram in one click.
- Post on LinkedIn. Don’t pass over the business networking site. “It has come into its own,” Bryant said. Heather Waits, owner of Bloomtastic in Columbus, Ohio, echoes this advice. She’s a member of 21 LinkedIn groups, most relating to the wedding industry, and every week she posts her blog to their discussion boards. “Members read the post, like it, comment on it or start a conversation, go to my website, and sign up for my free weekly emails,” she said. Overwhelmed by an influx of weddings last month, she didn’t post to LinkedIn for all of September and “noticed a huge drop in new sign ups.”
- Tune in to message boards. Bryant instigated a ton of traffic for a series of blog posts she did on doggy leg issues because she reached out to a woman who posted concerns on a cocker spaniel message board about her pup’s torn ACL. The forum made it easy to “engage in conversation and share my content in a meaningful and helpful way,” she said. You could have a similar experience by scanning wedding message boards.
- Pitch your post to the press. Keep an eye out for online media queries that are related to a blog post. Subscribe to Help a Reporter Out to see what stories journalists are currently working on and lacking sources. Even more proactive: if you have a post with a timely hook, email it to your local news organizations. This tactic worked wonders for Wendy Rockcastle, owner of Rockcastle Florist in Rochester, New York. Her local paper, The Democrat and Chronicle, liked her writing so much, it now features her blog posts on its home site and reprints them in its weekend edition. For tips on connecting with the press, check out SAF’s PR Bootcamp.
For more ideas on promoting your blog, click here.
