10 Strategies to Effectively Promote Blog Posts with WordPress
Here are ten strategies given by Gayane Mar (instantshift.com) on how to promote your WordPress blog posts. InstantShift is leading design and inspiration related community for web designers and developers daily resource, inspiration and premium web design and development. Gayane Mar is a passionate web-blogger who started her blogging activity a few years ago. Her posts are all about web design and web development. She writes all these posts for good people who need some guidance or advice with web development. If you are interested you can follow her own blog wpcapitan.com. Feature image courtesy of dizainstock via Bigstockphoto.
Promoting a blog post is not an easy task. It often happens that you write a really good piece, include visuals, do the right SEO adjustments, but it just doesn’t get the expected attention.
Well, that’s a very common thing that most of the bloggers have certainly struggled with at some stages of their blogging career.
The reasons behind sometimes lie in the simplest things we don’t really pay enough attention to, but which do really matter. And usually the problem is not with the content , but with the strategies and techniques we use to promote blog posts.
A well-planned and organized post promotion strategy can help your content reach to many more readers and drive more traffic to your site. Since there are tons of content promotion strategies out there and there is no one-fits-all option to go with, I suggest taking a look at some simple yet effective ones. These strategies are proven to work and drive results. Very often some of them go perfectly together and bring better results when implemented in the right time and in the right order.
Write better content and headlines
I know this is a pretty hackneyed point, but the reality is that the content is still the most important thing when it comes to promoting a blog post. Believe it or not, nobody’s going to read any of your posts if they have no value to offer.
When writing a blog post there are several things to keep in mind: those are the headlines, topic, and visuals. Headlines are absolutely essential. There is a pretty large research on the importance of headlines and how they affect the click through rate. Try to write compelling, catchy, interesting post headlines, and try to keep them short and sweet. It’s the headlines that bring people to your door, but if your content is not relevant to your niche audience or has less or no value to offer, that’s not going to work either. Write with passion, do research, and offer valuable content, something your readers may learn from.
Use Visuals
Images, photos, infographics and videos are proven to drive a lot more attention and traffic to your blog. They compliment your posts and add value to your content. So, why not use images and other visuals in your posts when they are that good at calling in visitors?
People proceed visual information faster and are more likely to have a look at a photo than read a whole text. That’s why a single photo or inforgrtaphic sometimes are worth hundreds of text lines. To get the most of images and visuals, make sure to place them right above your content ,and provide a new image or photo once every 350 words. The good thing about the visual is that there are many types of images you can use in your content, such as screenshots, charts, graphs, stock images, etc. You just have to identify which one is more relevant to your content and which of them drives the best traffic and engagement. Also, to make them more about your blog, you can add your blog logo, if it has one. This is a good tactic to give your blog credit and more exposure when the posts are shared on social media.
Target the right audience
Building readership is challenging as well. It’s very important to target the right people and reach out to the right audience. Picking up readers here and there, is not a good way to building readership. Instead, try to figure out who’s your audience, and where they hang out on internet. Although it may seem challenging at first, there are some simple things you can do to target the right audience.
Create surveys and polls on social platforms, analyze your competitors, and try to narrow down the segment that you’re trying to reach. You’d better invest your time and efforts in the people who are actually interested in the work you do.
Social Media
I will actually break social media strategy into two parts: social media presence and social sharing. These two go together hand in hand and are absolutely crucial. Make sure to create accounts on the platforms your audience is more active and try to identify the weekdays and time of the day when they are more likely to engage. Try to get to know how each platform works and get in meaningful interaction with your audience. Respond to shares, mentions and comments, and show them interest. Also, make it easy for them to connect with you, and try to respond timely.
Social sharing rather depends on your content and your audience. Make it easier for your audience to share your content. Let your visitors promote your content by sharing it on their social profiles and feeds. If you’re looking for an advanced and user-friendly social sharing plugin, you can check out Social Warfare. It’s a fully customizable plugin, allowing you to have your content shared in the exact way you want. It comes with a number of button style options, placement options, supports share counts and more.
Guest Post
Guest posting is another great content promotion strategy, that will also help you grow your audience, build authority, get backlinks to your site and build connections with other blog owners and writers. The trick here is to guest post on the right niche blogs, that are relevant to your blog focus.
Google search is the easiest way to find guest posting opportunities. Also, make sure to check out My Blog Guest , which is a great community of guest bloggers. You can sign up for free and search out for blogs accepting guest posts.
Post frequently
How often should I blog ? This is a very common question I see under blog comments and Q/A platforms. Well, the answers is tricky, but the higher your posting frequency the better. We’re not talking about Huffington Post publishing a new post about every minute though. Posting frequency depends on your blog’s size, type and your goal. For larger blogs, it would be good to publish a post for every category every day. For smaller ones, posting everyday would be perfect, but if you’re not able to keep the pace, 2-3 new posts a week will also bring results.
To organize your content marketing and social scheduling efforts Coschedule is a great tool for WordPress powered blogs. It’s a feature-packed editorial calendar allowing you to plan posts, automate social sharing, markup deadlines, and stay connected with your team. With its help you can promote you blog posts at the best possible traffic time for each social platform, and monitor how often your content has been shared on social media. The plugin perfectly integrates with tools such as Google Analytics, Google Docs, EverNote, Headline Analyzer and more.
Collect email subscribers
List building is another proven to work marketing strategy, and one of the most popular ones at the moment. It’s effectiveness lies in the fact that visitors who subscribe to any of your email lists are the people who are actually interested in what you have to offer, be it content , a product or a service. That’s why popups asking for subscription can be found on almost any kind of blog and website.
Perhaps the most widely used email marketing tool is Mailchimp. And if you’re looking for an easy way to integrate your website with Mailchimp service, check out Mailchimp WD plugin. It seamlessly integrates with Mailchimp and allows you to easily create stunning subscription forms in just minutes. The plugin features an advanced form editor, where you can customize form header, select form action, and add custom fields to the forms. Some of the custom field options include PayPal integration, file upload option, custom select and country select, date and time picker, survey tools, and more. You can use its conditional fields option to hide or display specific form fields based on the selection your visitors make. There are 4 form display options and advanced emailing settings to make the most of your email marketing campaign.
Consider paid promotion
Here we come. Sponsored content. Although most of the content promotion strategies mentioned above can implemented for absolutely free, paid promotion is another story.
It’s not a secret that lots of brands, companies and blogs are fine with paying for promotion to make sure their content reaches the right audience and attracts qualified traffic and leads. This is yet another proven to work tactic, as long as you can afford paying for it. Very often paid promotion requires a lot of money investment, and includes sponsored posts on various high traffic websites. If you decide to go with paid promotion, just make sure to choose the right promotion channel for your blog posts.
Optimize
Search engine optimization is crucial when it comes to promoting blog posts. It involves not only technical optimization, but also a lot of research in terms of keywords. Although it may seem challenging at first, the good news is there are some pretty good optimization tools for WordPress websites, that will take care of your site SEO and help you get in front of the right audience.
Yoast SEO is the most popular SEO tool, that is widely used by big name companies, news websites and personal blogs. It allows you to write better content with relevant keywords, helps you write better headlines and meta descriptions, insert image alt tags, and checks the overall readability of your posts. It comes with a snippet preview functionality, which lets you instantly see how your posts and pages will look like in search results.
Track your efforts
Doesn’t matter what you do to promote your blog and your posts, it’s crucial to track and analyze the outcomes. You blog traffic, number of pageviews, comments, and time on site can give valuable information about what works for your blog, and what needs improvement. You can identify which post types generate the most traffic or which of your posts get the most number of clicks, view traffic sources and see where your audience come from, track user demographics and more. This is a proven to work way of getting the most of your blog posts, since stats are valuable piece of information you can use to better your blog and your site content.
Google Analytics is a great tool to get detailed stats on your blog and see what areas need improvement. It tracks almost every click and move on your site,and reports the stats in your GA account.
Here are some simple promotions strategies that you can use to promote your content and your blog. You can experiment with some of them to see which one works for your blog and your audience. Also, you can combine or mix some of the strategies to come up with your own ones.
