Ding! Or perhaps Boink!, Toot! or, conceivably, Burp! The sound of your email arriving chimes through the office, and you race to your desk. There it is… your brand new WordHound article.
You read through it, your smile growing ever-brighter. “They did it!”, you gasp. A tiny tear of joy appears as you breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that you left your content creation in the right hands. Then you print it out and frame it.
Well, that’s what we like to imagine is going on in your office. Don’t ruin it.
But what are you supposed to do now?
No matter how wonderfully unique your topic is, how well planned, written, and proofed your article is, what a wonderful beacon of thought leadership you’re putting out into the world… it’s no use if no one reads it. So, how do you promote your blog to make sure they do?
How to get your article noticed in the wilds of cyberspace
The internet is big. Really big. It’s not as big as space, about which Douglas Adams said, “You may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space”, but it is absolutely gigantic and it ain’t getting any smaller. Most people need some help picturing the immensity of it – it’s a GREAT DEAL bigger than a really huge rhinoceros; more gargantuan than an abnormally capacious Sainsbury’s.
With 2.25 billion webpages and millions of articles published every day, it’s a struggle to stand out. Every month, 70 million articles are published on WordPress alone according to OptinMonster, so the chances of someone stumbling upon your article by accident are getting slimmer by the day.
There are ways to make that stumble more likely, of course:
- Write about things people are searching for, using the keywords they use
- Make your content really useful – actually answer their questions
- Make sure it’s long enough, but not waffly!
- Use headings wisely
- Don’t neglect your metadata
Hang on…
What is ‘metadata’?
Metadata literally means ‘data about data’. When you publish an article online, you can tag it with information specifically for search engines, telling them:
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Whether to index the site
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What the page is about
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Topic categories
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Keywords
And a whole bunch of other options.
However, the ones that you really want to get right are the meta title and meta description, as these are what the search engine will display when your article shows up in the search results. How well-written these are will affect click-through rates.
So when we talk about metadata, that’s what we mean; a way of telling search engines what your article is about, and giving them nice clickworthy snippets to display that’ll encourage users to visit your website.
How to promote your blog
Once you have an article that you’re sure is doing everything it can do to be found, you can go ahead and publish it. But that’s just the beginning of the journey.
Your website is your little patch of digital real estate in the great big world of the internet. No matter what you choose to do with your article next, you’re probably going to want to start by publishing it there. Unless it was written as a guest post, there’s no reason not to, and many good reasons to give it a shot.
Adding a new post to your blog is pretty simple. If you need a bit of a helping hand, this beginner’s guide to publishing a piece of content in WordPress takes you through each stage of the process, step by step. If it’s not your idea of a good time though, plenty of hosting services include article upload as part of their services.
Publishing to your own website is a good idea, but publishing only to your website is a bit like putting all your eggs in one basket, putting the basket in a cupboard, and then only inviting people you know to inspect the cupboard’s contents. (OK, perhaps some random people will discover your cupboard and its superb basket of eggs by accident. Burglars, for example. Or the gas man.)
Er – anyway, you’ll be reaching your existing customers, but your content won’t be getting in front of those all-important potential customers who may not know about you yet. So what next?
Where can I share my article?
Once you’ve published your article on your own site, you’ll want to share it. Depending on where your target audience can be found, you’ll want to consider sharing your article in the following places:
Your social media channels
Where do you and your business already have a presence? If you’re already active on LinkedIn, for example, it makes sense to share it to your business profile. Remember to write a compelling post to go with it.
Facebook page
You may have heard that Facebook is declining in popularity, but it still pulls in a staggering two billion daily users – and another billion monthly. If at least a few of your ideal clients aren’t hanging around on there, we’ll eat Ronnie’s hat. Although all the links you get from sharing to social media are NoFollow, a few extra clicks through to your site can’t hurt, can they?
Google Business profile
You’ve got that nice slice of internet, connected to Google Maps, that displays all your lovely reviews for the world to see. It’s also very under-utilised for posting articles. Share your articles there, and your Google Analytics account will even email you once a week to tell you how many people have interacted with your posts, giving you a lovely serotonin boost.
LinkedIn page and personal profile
LinkedIn is all about networking and forming connections beyond organisational boundaries. You’ll find your reach is much greater on your personal account than your business page. Is that because the LinkedIn algorithm prefers your personal account, or other LinkedIn users do? Hard to say. Either way, sharing on your company page is good so that any visitors see you’re active, while sharing on your profile is more likely to get views.
What is syndicating an article?
Syndicating an article means taking the same piece of content that’s been published already and republishing it (with permission, if it’s not yours) on other sites. Usually, it will include a mention on the page that gives the original source.
Should I syndicate my article?
If you’ve written a useful piece of content that just needs more eyeballs on it, syndication is a great solution. Content syndication will increase the reach of your content, and can boost the return on investment of your article by getting it in front of a wider audience. Simple.
Where can I syndicate my article?
Ah, that’s the big question. Luckily, it’s a really simple one to answer. The fact is that there are loads of places where you can republish your own content so more people can see it.
Good starting points to try out are:
Medium
Great because it maintains a canonical URL to the original source, so no duplicate penalties!
Tumblr
From text and videos to links and images, you can syndicate practically anything here.
Find your most relevant subs, and share your stuff with pre-made audience pools.
Demandworks
Quite literally built for this exact purpose, this site offers powerful syndication solutions.
Repurposing your content
Although you’ve shared your content directly to your social media profiles, that’s not the end. Break up your content into standalone posts. Each post should be short, to the point, useful on its own, and include a link back to your article.
How to repurpose your content
The whole idea here is to reduce (the amount of work involved in creating content), reuse (the great stuff you already have), and reformat (existing content into new configurations). The last bit is pretty important. Why? Because you can’t just expect one arrangement to work everywhere.
It’s a bit like having an amazing pair of jeans. They’ll suit everything from a morning of cow-wranglin’ to a fancy night out, but you just need to tinker with them a little first to make sure they’ll look good wherever you’re choosing to wear them. Essentially, repurposing your content is like washing out the cow stains before wearing your jeans to Claridge’s.
Repurpose your content for LinkedIn
When it comes to LinkedIn, the most important thing to remember is that this is primarily a business network, so your content may need to be tailored to bring direct value from a business perspective. Beyond that, consider incorporating some of LI’s standout features. For example, strategic hashtags, to get your content included in relevant conversations, and mentions, to name drop a few influential profiles.
Repurpose your content for Instagram
Insta is aaaaaall about the videos. That’s what the people want, so give it to them! You’ll need to get creative, but there are tons of possibilities. How about picking out some bits that can easily be represented in visual form? Or filming a quick Q&A to answer your article’s hottest questions? If you’ve got a few different ideas tucked away within the same article, you could even go down the ‘Instagram carousel’ route to keep everything connected.
Repurpose your content for Facebook
So let’s be honest – very few people settle down for the evening with a glass of wine and think, ‘Right, I’ve got a few quiet hours to read some long-form thought-leadership pieces on Facebook’. People using FB tend to fast-scroll through their feed, looking for quick, rapid-fire snippets of interesting stuff. So look at turning your lengthy posts into short-and-sweet alternatives. Pick out some quotes from your article to share, or turn any data into an easy-to-absorb visual.
Use hashtags to make your content easy to find. And if you want even more of a boost, tag WordHound and we’ll share your article with our audiences, too.
Keep the content coming
Don’t stop now! Even though you may have done everything you needed to, and ticked all the boxes for getting your new WordHound article in front of the people that matter most, now isn’t the time to sit down and take a rest. It’s not fair to give your audience a taste of the good stuff and then snatch it away.
That beautiful moment when you’ve just received your new article: that’s the time to start thinking about another one, and the one after that. It’s all about momentum, so talk to us about your next piece of content writing. And don’t worry if you can’t think of a new idea straight away; we’ve got ideas aplenty.
