Nine Ways to Promote Your Blog Posts
You’re writing and podcasting and videoblogging your face off and it’s starting to feel like no one’s paying attention. You want to get the right comments, and meaningful conversations started, or you want your peers to come and start a lively discourse. How do you get your best posts out there in such a way that people will come by and add to the body of work? (Note first that I’ve said “best posts” and not “every post.” If you abuse any of this, it goes poorly for you pretty quickly.) I have nine ideas to share your best posts in ways that aren’t heavy-handed, and aren’t likely to get you tuned out by the people of your various communities.
Nine Ways to Promote Your Blog Posts
- Bookmark your best posts on Delicious. Once it’s in there, there’s a chance someone might happen upon it.
- Stumble your best posts on StumbleUpon. Some folks disagree with stumbling your own work. The way I feel okay with it is that I stumble approximately 9 other people’s great blog posts to every one of my own.
- Post an intriguing title and link to the post in LinkedIn’s status message.
- If your post is about a specific industry or relates to other great blogs, find a recent blog post that has related information. (Now, this is different than what you MIGHT normally do, so pay attention). In the URL part of the sign-up form, put the link to your post, not your blog in general. In the comment body, don’t talk about your amazing post. Just offer genuine commentary on the post you read, and share your thoughts and ideas. Repeat: don’t mention the post. (If your comment is great and worthy, people will click through and check it out.)
- Share your post on Facebook. I really like BlogCast, which used to be FlogBlog. It’s got a nice interface.
- Share your post in FriendFeed automatically, and let the amazing community there decide if it’s interesting.
- Try Zemanta. Zemanta is a blogging tool that either adds on to your browser (Firefox only, I think), or comes now as a WordPress plugin. It allows you to find related stories and post them at the bottom of a post. When you’re part of the Zemanta community, I believe your stories also go into their list of potentially related stories. I’ve seen traffic coming in from Zemanta-recommended links.
- Don’t forget Twitter. I find lots of my traffic comes from Twitter, especially because I don’t ever just post a link. I ask questions, inspire comments, etc.
- Write blog posts that others will find useful. I know it’s not a technology answer, but it’s the truth. If your posts aren’t that useful to other people, they won’t be popular. People won’t care. If you’re re-blogging news that several other larger sites have covered, who cares? If you’re telling us about your day at college, who cares (unless you’re a great writer)? Make it really good, useful stuff, and we’ll come along for the ride.
**Update: Here’s what people on Twitter said you should do:
Perhaps you have some other ways to promote? Do you have any recommendations? Do you have disagreement with the ways I shared above? Let’s talk about it.
Photo credit, KungPaoCajun
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Comments
I tend to prefer Facebook to Myspace. But depending on the size of your expected audience and the topic of your post, searching for pages on myspace with interests in the topic. Politely send them a message and or friend request inviting them to check it out.
If you already have a large following, or if the topic is general enough that narrowing pages down will be difficult, this is not a great approach. Otherwise, it may be beneficial. Given the viral nature of new media, finding a handful of interested people who will tell others can be a good use of time.
Riffing of your number 4, if you participate in any active forums that where the topic of your post would be relevant to an ongoing discussion, modify your sig-file to reference the post directly or just enter your signature manually to include it. But, always be respectful of the forum rules and ethics and, like you mentioned, add value and context, first and foremost, then let digital nature take its course.
I definitely agree with utilizing social services to promote your blog posts. I would add other micro-blogging services to the list (pownce, plurk, etc) along with Twitter - twitter does drive more traffic but every little big helps right?
Maybe not as straight forward or self-controlled, but a #10 could be “Participate in an aggregator.” I.e. sites like Social Media Today and Alltop scrape feeds and present content along with like minded bloggers. Doesn’t necessarily drive traffic to your original site, which may be a negative for those who monetize impressions, but accomplishes the goal of spreading ideas.
As always, I learned a little something here; thanks Chris!
Oddly enough: Yellow Pages ads for small businesses. Yup. Has worked for clients in certain sectors (services mostly) to have people read the blog, then they seem to get calls. I call it Evidence Based Marketing (not my term.)
Oddly blending traditional and new medias…
I use a Newsgator widget that pulls relevant content into the site. Or rather it pulls in links associated with certain companies whose services are relevant to my topic area. Works a treat.
For that post to be a really good one, it has to approach topics or matters of real interest. This type of topics and matters are pretty heavily discussed on forums also, and participating in discussions on forums, and guiding the other participants to your blog post that approaches the same topic is another good promotion method.
Email the community impacted by it.
Develop a press list of your own and send appropriately.
Develop a social network community on your blog or podcast and send them bulletins.
Thanks Chris, just wanted to say I always get some value out of your posts. I find I always tend to get some traffic through Twitter and Facebook. It’s great when you get stumbledupon but I wouldn’t have thought of doing it myself. Nice tip on the blog comment too.
Another one: Make sure that your own feed is in your Google Reader, then share it with a short summary in the notes area.
You can nominate your blog for inclusion onto http://www.regator.com which launched a week ago. Regator is a hand-picked collection of the web’s best blogs with tools to make it easy to find, organize and share whatever interests you in nearly 500 categories. It also drives traffic back to your blog. You should check it out!
Am printing this out for my “to do” list on gaining more publicity for my blog. Thanks for the post! I really appreciate all the comments and unique tools list from other readers, too. I just love other people’s experience!
[…] reach as many people as possible. Feeds and social networks have made it easier, but this morning Chris Brogan highlighted a few easy ways to promote blog posts that reaffirmed most of what I do after each post […]
Don’t forget your customers. They’re not all subscribed to your blog or in your Twitter following. Email your best posts to your clients and share the love with them. After all they are already among your greatest fans!
A fantastically useful post for me, the ingenue blogger. Thanks Chris, again, for practical and usable information and advice.
Wait. Didn’t your posts have a by-line before?
Is my memory faulty?
Didn’t they say ‘by chris brogan’ under the title formerly?
Thanks Chris - these are quite useful tools to help us grow traffic and credibility to our sites!
Miss Gisel B.
[…] Nine Ways to Promote Your Blog Posts | chrisbrogan.com - "Write blog posts that others will find useful. I know it’s not a technology answer, but it’s the truth. If your posts aren’t that useful to other people, they won’t be popular." Useful can mean a lot of things — entertaining, informative, educational… […]
[…] 19th, 2008 by Hans Nine Ways to Promote Your Blog Posts tells you the places where you should stick that post of yours to promote it. It also includes […]
There are some the different tips are offered like adding favorite on zemanta and BlogCast.
Over all great post. Thanks
One critical aspect is timing. Try to figure where the majority of your target audience lives (American professionals = US East Coast; American arts = US West Coast). Then try to release your post and link it to all of the above near peak blog traffic times relative to those areas. Requires a bit of geographic understanding, but effective bloggers understand their audience quite well. I’ve seen great blog post slip under the radar for days because they posted it after 5pm on a Friday. Just my $.02
[…] Chris Brogan wrote a great post with 9 ways to promote your blog. I agree with all his tips, especially sharing your best blog posts (not all your blog posts) […]
Thanks for great advices. I think these tips are especially useful for those of us who are relatively new in the blogosphere. I can’t make myself to put my own blog on StumbleUpon though…But someone else did it today! :)
Thanks, Chris, for a great post. I’ll share the post with my audience. I also put a link in appropriate forums to promote.
Very helpful post. I didn’t even know about Zemanta. The other sites, although I knew they were there but, the tips you gave for each site, gave me some good ideas.
Cheers and thanks!
That’s quite a few good tips there.
One more I might suggest..
Get a Firefox addon that allows you to change your referrer. And change it to your blog or a blog post. Then visit your favorite blogs. This will bring in some traffic from webmasters who dig through their visitor logs ;)
I like what RachelSterne mentioned in the Twitter ideas about swapping blogroll spots. I think it would be worth it to try swapping spots with blogs that relate to yours and writers you admire.
[…] of some of Zemanta reviews with a blog post of Chris Brogan, who mentioned Zemanta in a blog post: Nine Ways to Promote Your Blog Posts: Try Zemanta. Zemanta is a blogging tool that either adds on to your browser (Firefox only, I […]
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Thanks for the tips on how to promote my blog posts. I only submit my posts to digg but I will also join to the site you have mentioned above, thanks a lot. It will help a newbie like me.
[…] me) use it for absolutely anything and everything and other’s (the douchey ones) use it to personality-spam their followers. The soul of twit, Damein […]
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[…] muchas más formas de promocionar tu blog, pero de seguro estas nueve recomendaciones dadas por Chris Brogan en su blog te serán de mucha ayuda y sobre todo podrás optimizarlas de acuerdo a tus necesidades, […]
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Good stuff! Another great tool is propeller.com. I use this site and I notice some click through traffic from it.
im using FB but this is the first time i hear blogcast…
ill try it when i have enough time…
thanks for the great tips ;)
[…] through my favorites in explorer earlier today and found a link to a post Chris Brogan wrote on 9 Ways To Promote Your Blog Posts, back in August. Great tips and thought I would share them with the A/E folks who read the […]
Great post..
Now just another one that reads something like this
“10 ways to make money from your blog” :)
Seriously though.. I liked quite a few points here :)
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If you are a music blogger, you can get more readers by submitting your site for inclusion in idiomag. Also check out the tool at http://idiomag.com/bloggers
If you blog about music, you can increase your readership by submitting your blog to idiomag. Also check out the tool at http://idiomag.com/bloggers for a great way to make some cash off your blog
Leave a comment
FriendFeed had this many likes and comments: hide-
reminded me that I haven't checked in to friendfeed in WEEKS. Thanks!
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Chris - maybe you should have linked those folks comments at Twitter instead of only shown their comments in a screenshot? A little more effort for you, yes, but this would help send people directly to them. Some of your readers would have liked the help and the fact that you were showing how you promote others.
I know this sounds very old-school, but sometimes I will e-mail closer blogging colleagues a link to a post that I want to draw particular attention to. This always draws more comments on the post than just “hanging it out there” with the other methods…