So, this whole month has been a blogging challenge. Step up your game and blog. This is a great time for you to sell your products and grow your brand. People are shopping like crazy already! Think about how you can boost your name and brand. Getting found by Google is still key, and that Google juju is right there for you to grab, and I’ve been talking about this. But expand your view, spend the time, and branch out your techniques to get found in more places this holiday season.

Blogging is also about promotion. You know how we can get so into making the blog perfect that we spend all our energy there? Well don’t forget that after you’re done writing and tweaking and you hit publish, there’s more to be done. Remember Yoast? Remember image optimization? I will keep going over a review of some things I’ve talked about before, but I’ll also bring the new ideas. You are here for a reason, people.

non sucky blog post promotions

Now, we have blogged and we have published, and we need to publicize. Now what’s going to work best for you? For me, I pin, I tweet… I spend my time on Pinterest and Twitter rather than Facebook. That’s a personal choice, since I just don’t believe Facebook is helpful in a lot of ways for business. There are so many choices. But whatever site is your favorite thing, just don’t make the mistake of posting stuff like “Go read my newest blog!” It won’t work. You have to become a tease. Entice your audience. (My favorite way is to think about what would work on me. If I, knowing about marketing, find myself clicking on something, I pay attention to what they did!) Basically, you say something like, “Do you want to make cute and pretty graphics for your blog, free? Check this out…” Obviously, you can get more creative than that, but just don’t repeat “read my blog… go read my new blog…” Yikes. But take some content from blog post to make the audience curious about what it entails.

I know I pushed you really hard to write a lot of new blogs for this month. If you tweet to your audience, share your blog post a few times, and then tweet it again one or two months later. Schedule it out with HootSuite or Tweet deck. You can re-use good content to take some stress off of creating new content all the time, and that way when you’re recovering from the holiday season later, you can take a little break. However, spend a moment coming up with a good post that will catch the eye. So Titles matter and what you post on social media about the post matters too.

increase your blog traffic

Here are few ideas to help your blog posts stand out and get more eyeballs.

  1. Decide on your top 2-3 social media platforms that work well for your business. If you don’t know which one, I wrote a social media blog post that can help.
  2. Have a scheduling action plan for when you blog. Will you pin right away manually? Will you share on Google Plus Manually or Tweet manually? Or will you use co-schedule/hootsuite/if this then that/ buffer to spread your post on social media? Have a plan and rinse and repeat. I am still tweaking mine and hope to improve this as well.
  3.  Use unique graphics too. I love using Canva to make pretty graphics for my blog and even social media posts. It is quick and so easy to do and creates more engagement as it will catch some ones attention on Twitter. So if you are planning to post a few times on Twitter try making unique graphics and you can do this even faster by using www.buffer.com/pablo.
  4. Sharing is caring so don’t be afraid to share your posts and awesomesauce just think about different texts when you share so it is not boring but will get folks so pumped to check out your post.

    Last but not least, here are some Social media platforms suggestions for posting.

    Pinterest- Pin right away and then repin to another board 2 weeks later or a month later ( some folks use board booster or viral tag to schedule pins and get more Pinterest reach) I will discuss in full when I launch my Pinterest SEO Workbook next month.

    Twitter: Twitter is a place where you can post a few times a day about your post and it won’t be viewed as too much but get creative about it. I loved this SPI podcast interview by Patt Flynn where he interviewed Garret from Co-schedule.

    Garret stated: Send it right when it goes live, maybe 3 hours later, 4 hours later, and repeat it again.” Then what do you want to do the next day? The next day we’re going to repeat it on Twitter a couple times.Then maybe a week later we’re going to send it out again, a month later, and then you can also even choose custom days, and we do that all relatively. You can say, “In 6 days from now send out another tweet, in 7 days from now send out another tweet. What we see from most users is a 30-40% increase in traffic to a post overnight, just because they’ve created better habits sharing their content. We actually have found that it’s very useful to say schedule it and share it at least once a day every day for the first two weeks. Then after that we rotate it in with a bunch of other types of content. That’s how we personally do it.

    Patt then asked well isn’t that too much? and Garret replied: ” If you sent the same message over and over again, yes, they definitely could. I think that’s the key, is making sure you add some variety to it. We use different images every single time. We’ll pull different pull quotes or different facts from our post. If you’re just using the headline and the permalink every single time you can kind of wear them out, but pull in a different image. Sometimes we’ll make our post more about a graphic or we’ll cite a fact or we’ll ask our audience a question based on that certain topic. If you add some good variety to your sharing, you’re fine.” Check out full podcast interview here.

    I could not agree more !

    Instagram: A great recent tip I have learned from Melissa Lynn Hunt in regards to using Instagram for business is to email yourself the text you will want to post along with you Instagram Image. I had already learned from Hey Sweet Pea that using longer text on Instagram and really using it as a microblogging platform was ideal but I suck a typing on my phone. In fact I actually only type with one hand and I guess one finger, yeah I am old okay. So you can share an image with some info about your post and say link in profile to make your Instagram viewers excited about reading your blog. For more awesome Instagram tips, check out this Instagram blog post from Melissa Lynn Hunt.

    Facebook: Sorry I personally don’t have success tips with you but follow same rules as to write interesting text and have a pretty photo. I do use Yoast Share tab to write specific text I want to show on Facebook which is helpful but sadly engagement on Facebook Business Page seems like a lost cause for my SEO page at least. For my photo page, tagging folks does help and I find when I use unique text rather then buffer app automated here is my blog post I get more engagement so if you Facebook biz pages works for you, create exciting text for Facebook.

    Never forget that getting people to your blog is the main way you have the chance to delight someone who just discovered you. You want to get them there so they can fall in love with you and drool all over the place and want to share you with their friends authentically. So don’t overlook the process of promoting your blog. You’ve put a lot of total work time into that puppy! It may actually feel old to you sometimes, but never, ever underestimate the value of all the content you have created and gathered all in one place. So, go get ’em, and get blogging to get found!