Social Media Creates Awareness for Your Blog
Make a splash when you promote your blog on social media!
Whether you write your blog daily, weekly or monthly, you want people to read it. Even if you hire a service like Ray Access to write and edit your blog, it doesn’t do you any good unless it’s being read. Unread blogs — especially when they’re really well written and full of interesting, engaging material — are like packets of vegetable seeds left to rot in the pantry.
To get the most out of these seeds, you have to open the package, plant the seeds in dirt, water them, give them sunshine and nurture them until it’s time to reap the rewards. To allow others to get the most out of your thoughtful writing, you’ve got to promote your blog. You must find places it’ll be found and enjoyed. You’ve got to tout its content … and yes, even its existence!
Start Writing
An important step in marketing through social media is to create good content. Blogs are not ads and they aren’t tools to tout your company, your products or your services. Instead, blogs are a means to drive traffic to your website — where you get to do all those salesy things.
Blogs are intended to create a buzz about your expertise, your trend awareness and your interesting take on the latest news. Blogs should be informative and entertaining. They must implant an idea in your readers’ minds that make them want to learn more about you and your business. (If you don’t have the time, the energy or the ideas to write your blog, contact Ray Access for assistance.)
Social the Heck Out of It
Marketing your blog through social media means more than posting it on your company Facebook page, though that certainly is an integral part of how to promote your blog. In fact, one of the biggest reasons that more small business owners aren’t taking better advantage of social media to promote your blog is that it can be really time-consuming.
It’s easy to set up a few random links to automatically post to your social accounts every time you add new content to your site. It’s quite another proposition to position yourself in front of your target social audience on a regular and consistent basis — can you say daily?
It’s not enough just to share it once and then sit back and wait. Use your social media to promote your blog the same way you use your social accounts: in and out throughout the day, reposting, retweeting, rehashing, renewing and reviving the same post over and over and over. Tease your blog in different ways on various platforms, but get it out there more than once.
Stick to a Schedule When You Promote Your Blog
Just like a daily work schedule that gets you out of bed every morning at 7:00 am to catch a train or make it to your desk by 8:00, so a posting schedule guides your blogging. Write it on the same day of the week and post your blogs consistently at the same time every week. If you don’t have time, assign the job to someone else. Assign the schedules while you’re at it.
Then promote your blog on a similarly rigid schedule. It may seem like the new marketing trends that include social media are more flexible and fly by night, but the exact opposite is true. The more unstructured your platforms are, the more disciplined you need to be about meeting your deadlines and making those posts.
Keep It Friendly
Likes and retweets are signs that you’re someone who offers readers something valuable for their time. You’re providing information or entertainment they want to share. Whether you’re the go-to source for the latest workout or diet plan, or you make your readers smile with charming turns of phrase, you want your blogs to be liked, loved and passed on. So play nice.
When you promote your blog, you don’t want to come off as a spammer, stalking your friends with the same posts all through a single day. Consider the source. For example, you wouldn’t want to post the same blog on Facebook within hours. But on Twitter, the feeds run so quickly that the odds of running over your own blog are remote. Know your platform and then play by their unspoken rules of etiquette.
Short and Sweet and to the Point
One final thought (among many more possibilities) is that you can save yourself a lot of frustration and energy-zapping time by writing really quality blogs. Pull-out quotes from your extensive blog library make for great posts to platforms like Twitter and Instagram. Give Google+ a toot with a little jingle jangle from a blog you wrote last year. If you make every sentence as powerful as possible, each can almost stand on its own!
Add a cool caption to a crazy picture you took of the weather that ties in with an enticing blog you wrote last month about freakish weather-related services you offer. In other words, use creativity to promote your blog through social media. It’s mostly free, but it can take up a lot of time. If done right, though, you may be the next big social hit that everybody else wants to copy. Post that!
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.