Writing a blog post is just half the battle. You need to know how to distribute your content to gain maximum visibility. Most of our early growth at TINT came from strategic blogging that helped get traffic to our website. In our early days I wrote several blogs for TINT, including How to Get More Customers and How to Get More Facebook Likes. These posts were critical to our early customer acquisitions, and still bring us significant traffic today. Here’s what I did that made them so successful:
1. Pick a really good title
Sometimes all it takes is a compelling title for someone to click, read, and subscribe. Don’t be afraid to spend some time picking a title; it’s worth it! Hubspot has written a great article on how to pick a kick-ass title. There’s tons of good advice out there on how to write a good title. Don’t settle for the first title you think of – be specific about what you’re offering and give your readers a reason to click on your content (no clickbait please!).
2. Make high quality content
Writing helpful and quality content consistently has some powerful benefits:
- Content that adds value or solves a problem will be shared more on social networks, via email, and by linking back.
- Content that is published regularly will keep readers coming back for more and your subscribers will grow.
- Google will recognize your content and will rank you heavily for those keywords
3. Let them find you
Blog about topics that are frequently searched on Google that are relevant to your industry. For us, this includes topics like “How to Pick a Good Hashtag.”
4. Share your blog post on Quora
Some of our best leads from the blog posts come via Quora. This is one of the posts that Ryo (Co-founder of Tint) shared on Quora and it has 1.2k upvotes! Imagine all the free referral traffic your blog post can get if you put your knowledge in front of the right audience:
5. Talk about other brands/ products in your blog
Another excellent way to get free traffic to your blog is to mention brands or individuals in your blog (do this naturally, don’t force it) and once the blog is published, tweet it out to them. The chances are that they will retweet it to their followers. Check out how we got UserVoice to tweet our blog post –
6. Email subscribers
Email subscribers are the ones who have already endorsed your blog content and the ones with high intent to read your blog post. In short – they trust your brand and want to be your brand advocates. Make sure to reach out to your email subscribers and engage them on a periodic basis. Again the rule is not to overdo it; more is not always better. The goal is to figure out the right frequency that derives more engagement. If you’re looking to increase your email subscribers, I’ve compiled a list of blogs that can help you achieve the same –
7. Share your content on Social Networks:
It’s the classic chicken and egg problem: you need great content to get more followers, and you need more followers to share your great content. Don’t be overwhelmed by this – just start creating great content and sharing it on social media. The followers will (eventually) come. Using relevant hashtags can help your content be discovered – especially on Twitter where hashtags are a critical part of how content is sorted and found.
Use social media monitoring tools to keep track of popular hashtags. If you just happen to be blogging about those topics, make sure to use those hashtags when you share your content on Twitter. The chances of your content being discovered and spread will increase. Don’t exhaust yourself sharing content to every social network. Focus on finding your ideal networks where your intended audience is already reading and sharing.
8. Reach out to your Influencers:
This one is easier said than done. It requires a long term strategy. The best way to reach out to influencers is to build a strong relationship with them. There are tons of resources online on how to build a strong relationship with the influencers –
2) http://www.likeable.com/blog/2013/11/engage-industry-influencers-twitter
3) https://blog.bufferapp.com/4-ways-to-use-social-media-to-connect-with-anyone-and-make-them-act
Below are some of our blog posts that have been tweeted out by Joel Gascoigne (Co-founder of Buffer) & Bill Gross ( CEO of idealab).
“Our team does not have individual sales commissions, rather team bonuses to encourage team work & aligned interests” http://t.co/aoMhPN5wMW
— Joel Gascoigne (@joelgascoigne) August 26, 2014
Here’s how our company Tint got more than 750 paying customers in just 3 months: http://t.co/zqIwDEppE3
— Bill Gross (@Bill_Gross) May 21, 2013
FUN FACT: One of the reasons that TINT/ Hypemarks secured funding in the early days is because Mark Cuban tweeted about our product. Tim (CEO of TINT) reached out to Mark Cuban during our early stages and he responded with this –
and it didn’t stop there, we also had Robert Scoble, Tim O’Reily talk about us –
The important lesson we learned here was to never shy away from asking help.
The techniques I’ve listed here are just a piece of the pie. Good SEO helps these posts to stay relevant long after we’ve stopped actively promoting them. Creating content that will be read and shared widely is a constantly shifting challenge, that requires bloggers to be agile and creative. I’ll be sharing more lessons from our successes and failures here soon – I hope they’re helpful to you.
In the meantime, here are some resources from others that can help you with your blog promotion:
1) https://blog.kissmetrics.com/17-advanced-methods/
2) https://blog.kissmetrics.com/overcome-content-distribution/
3) http://learning.hubspot.com/Portals/137828/docs/7-steps-to-promoting-your-blog.pdf
4) http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/paid-earned-owned-content-promotion
What has worked for you? How do you get the right eyeballs on your content? Tweet your answers @ TINT. We’d love to hear from you!
