Congratulations! You’ve published a blog post. After brainstorming a topic, doing a whole lot of research, writing a few drafts, adding a couple sweet images, picking a call-to-action, having a buddy edit it, and tightening up your title … the hard work is all done, right? Right?
Not so fast, my friend. While we all wish we could just sit back, put on a pot of tea, and watch the traffic to our posts come pouring in, it doesn’t quite work that way.
To get more eyeballs on your new blog post, you need to do more than just hit “publish.” You need to optimize that content, promote it, share it, and get it in front of the right people. How you do that all depends on the post, but if you’re struggling for some ideas, here are 10 things you can do once you’ve written a new blog post to get the most out of your efforts.
1) Add a teaser to your email signature.
Adding your most recent blog post to your email signature is one clever way it can support your marketing. You can create a dynamic email signature using a freemium tool called WiseStamp, which can show the title of your most recent blog post and updates automatically as you publish new posts.
2) Shorten your post’s URL and use it to link to your post on social networks.
Short URLs are way easier to share and remember than their longer counterpart. You can use bit.ly to shorten your URLs, or if you’re a HubSpot customer, every blog post’s URL is automatically shortened and tracks clicks. (HubSpot customers: Learn more about your automatically shortened URLs here.)
Include your new shortened URL in social media posts promoting your new blog post. When posting, keep these two best practices in mind, too:
- Use images to promote your post, as this has been proven to significantly increase engagement on both Twitter and Facebook.
- Switch up the language you use in your posts, as well, instead of just tweeting the title with a link — analysis on tweet copy from the @HubSpot account revealed that the difference in number of clicks on a “title tweet” (a tweet that includes the title of a blog post + a link to that post) versus a “copy tweet” (a tweet that presents the blog post as a sentence or question) was not statistically significant. Be sure to include both types of copy in to humanize your updates and give your social media posts a little variety.
3) See if your post can help others on Twitter.
Search for related hashtags or keywords on Twitter and see if your blog post can answer anyone’s questions or contribute to a discussion — and remember to use the shortened URL when responding.
4) Share your blog post with prospects.
Did you just publish a blog post that would be really useful to a particular lead or customer? Send the post their way via a tweet or a quick email. (HubSpot customers: In Social Inbox, notice each tweet is color coded to help you identify customers and leads in your Twitter stream.)
If you’re offering them helpful and relevant information, they’ll appreciate that you thought of them and might think of you more as a trusted source of information. Click here to learn more about matching content to folks in every lifecycle stage.
5) Share your blog post with colleagues.
Think about the social reach of all of your colleagues combined — don’t let the opportunity to reach those audiences go to waste. The key is making sharing as easy as possible for your colleagues. When your blog post goes live, send an internal email that includes the title of your post, a brief explanation, and a shortened link to the post. Make it even easier by created a few ready-made tweets that include the link and are under 140 characters.
6) Syndicate your post on LinkedIn and other websites.
LinkedIn can be a great place to syndicate your content because anything you publish there is automatically pushed out to everyone in your network and could be featured in one of the many topical LinkedIn channels. Publishing there has been rolling out to all users since February 2014, and if you’re linking back to your original post, you shouldn’t be too worried about duplicate content.
Other places to try syndicating your blog post include Quora and Medium, where you can take advantage of their additional promotion of popular posts.
7) Give it a boost using paid marketing.
Take advantage of paid content distribution opportunities to amplify your message and supplement your reach on organic search. These opportunities include Twitter Ad campaigns, Facebook campaigns, and LinkedIn’s Sponsored Updates feature. Content discovery platforms like Outbrain and Taboola also can well.
Just be sure you spend a lot of time defining your target audience on each platform so you get the most bang for your buck. (You can learn more about paid content distribution here.)
8) Pitch your post to the press.
Authoring a well-written blog post helps position you as a topic expert — something journalists are always looking for. It’s not easy to pitch to the press, but if they do pick up your post, it could mean a big bump in traffic for your website. The potential ROI of writing a simple email is worth it, but you’ve got to make sure you’re writing the right email.
Journalists can receive hundreds of pitches in a day, so be sure to include concise bullet points describing the main point(s) of your post in your email pitch so they don’t have to click through to anything. Finally, don’t make any careless grammatical errors or misspell the reporter’s name — it usually means they trash your pitch. (Learn about more silly mistakes to stop making in your pitches here.)
9) Post teasers to discussion boards or other websites.
You want new eyeballs on your blog post, and a great way to entice new readers to come to your website is by posting a compelling thought or question on an external site, such as inbound.org or a LinkedIn Group, along with a shortened link to your new blog post. As long as your content is relevant and adds to the discussion (and you’re not the only one posting self-promotional content on the site), it’s not spammy.
10) Include the post in a “kit” offer.
In the long term, if you find yourself writing several blog posts that are related to each other under an umbrella category, consider bringing them together into a “kit” offer. Gate this offer behind a landing page form and collect contacts when people download. (Like this idea? Learn more about how to repurpose blog posts into ebooks here.)
What do you do after publishing a blog post to generate more traffic?
