Are you sharing your blog around? How are you making sure your content is found and then shared? Are you promoting yourself via social networks? These are all vital questions to be asking yourself to get out your content.
Are you simply using the standard sharing options - Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc – or are you thinking of ways you can be a little creative when it comes to sharing your blog socially?
Let’s face it, if you’re using your blog as a business platform then the more eyeballs it gets, the better for finding potential new clients or customers. Even a personal blog can benefit from extra visitors.
So here are a few ways you can get outside the normal views of retweets and shares, and promote your blog to a bigger crowd that may miss it otherwise.
Social Sharing Groups
The most often used method of sharing a blog post is via social sharing buttons on the post itself. They are located either at the top and/or bottom of the post, or to the side. Why not take this a little further and create a sharing group?
One of the best resources for traffic to your blog and mine is Stumbleupon. This is a great social sharing platform that lets you "stumble" the web. Also it allows you to give either a thumbs up or thumbs down to the site you are currently on (you can also leave reviews).
What happens then is that the site is put into the Stumbleupon library, so anyone else using the stumble option could land on your blog. If they then like it, they give you a thumbs up and your currency increases on Stumbleupon. It’s easier than it sounds, and it’s a great passive traffic generator. So create a Stumble group.
Grab about 10 of your online friends, and help promote each other’s blogs. Anytime a new post is published, have one of the group stumble it, then you can give it a thumbs up.
You can then take this idea to other social bookmarks - Reddit, Digg, etc. Just make sure you also highlight a lot of other great sites too – don’t create the group just to promote your work, that’s just spammy.
While traffic from Stumbleupon can be great, bounce rates can be affected (the amount of time someone stays on your site), so keep an eye on that in your analytics.
Try reading: This is Social Media: Tweet, Blog, Link and Post Your Way to Business Success
to maximise your chances with Stumbleupon.
Turn posts into e-books
You blog. You write. A lot. Depending on whether you’re a niche blogger or not, you might have a lot of posts on similar topics, or even run a blog series of interconnected posts.
So why not turn them into an ebook?
The market for ebooks is huge, and offers a great way for you to either give back to your blog community for reading you, or sell them as part of your business offerings. So you would be mad not to give it a shot. I am currently in the planning stage for creating my ebook. I am excited and will post on here, so watch this space!
Write a DIY blog? Put together some of your favourite tips and publish as an ebook. Chef? Collate some of your favourite recipes and sell them via your blog. And so on – the possibilities for what’s in your ebook are endless.
Use slideshare
One of the best platforms around at the moment is Slideshare. Essentially taking PowerPoint presentations to the next level, Slideshare also allows uploads of PDF’s, documents and other presentations.
It then turns these into slideshows that you can either grab the embed code for or download to your hard drive, as well as the normal sharing options on Twitter and Facebook, etc.
You can even add audio or talk tracks, or turn your slides into mini-movies. So working from your ebook idea, collate some of your best posts on a topic and create a presentation. Edit the posts accordingly to make the best use of Slideshare’s capabilities (perhaps a connecting image, statistic or similar), and then upload and choose your sharing settings.
If people like it and decide to embed on their own blog, you instantly have a new audience. That could go one step further, and businesses could pick up your kick-ass presentation and use it as a training resource.
The next potential step from that is to bring you on board to expand on your initial ideas – so now your original blog post has become both a training resource and a client lead.
Tweet first, blog later
The reason I say so is because they should eliminate the mind-set that “you can get a Gazillion traffic off Twitter“. Sure, you can get traffic from Twitter but it requires you to engage with your followers first before you spam the hell out of them with links to your blog or website. I had bloggers sending me links of their blog post to read, then I’ll check to see if I had communication with them in the past and how they engaged with their followers. If they engage with people, I’ll read it and RT it if I like it or find it interesting.
Twitter requires you to actually give more than you take. There are many people out there that post nothing but tweets about their latest blog post or selling a product. Sure I used to do this and realised that I did not have any success with twitter and I also kept losing followers.
Twitter helps you find the topics or subjects that you would like to talk about in your blog. I’ve met some great people on Twitter whom only just started blogging recently, they started Twitter first before blogging and their blogs are doing very well now.
Conclusion
The thing is, just because you already have sharing options in place doesn’t mean you need to stop there. The great thing with blogs is that they can be essentially timeless, given the right post and topic. Why not use that?
How about you – what are you doing to extend the reach of your blog? Feel free to share your tips on what works for you in the comments.
Are you simply using the standard sharing options - Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc – or are you thinking of ways you can be a little creative when it comes to sharing your blog socially?
Let’s face it, if you’re using your blog as a business platform then the more eyeballs it gets, the better for finding potential new clients or customers. Even a personal blog can benefit from extra visitors.
So here are a few ways you can get outside the normal views of retweets and shares, and promote your blog to a bigger crowd that may miss it otherwise.
Social Sharing Groups
The most often used method of sharing a blog post is via social sharing buttons on the post itself. They are located either at the top and/or bottom of the post, or to the side. Why not take this a little further and create a sharing group?
One of the best resources for traffic to your blog and mine is Stumbleupon. This is a great social sharing platform that lets you "stumble" the web. Also it allows you to give either a thumbs up or thumbs down to the site you are currently on (you can also leave reviews).
What happens then is that the site is put into the Stumbleupon library, so anyone else using the stumble option could land on your blog. If they then like it, they give you a thumbs up and your currency increases on Stumbleupon. It’s easier than it sounds, and it’s a great passive traffic generator. So create a Stumble group.
Grab about 10 of your online friends, and help promote each other’s blogs. Anytime a new post is published, have one of the group stumble it, then you can give it a thumbs up.
You can then take this idea to other social bookmarks - Reddit, Digg, etc. Just make sure you also highlight a lot of other great sites too – don’t create the group just to promote your work, that’s just spammy.
While traffic from Stumbleupon can be great, bounce rates can be affected (the amount of time someone stays on your site), so keep an eye on that in your analytics.
Try reading: This is Social Media: Tweet, Blog, Link and Post Your Way to Business Success
to maximise your chances with Stumbleupon.Turn posts into e-books
You blog. You write. A lot. Depending on whether you’re a niche blogger or not, you might have a lot of posts on similar topics, or even run a blog series of interconnected posts.
So why not turn them into an ebook?
The market for ebooks is huge, and offers a great way for you to either give back to your blog community for reading you, or sell them as part of your business offerings. So you would be mad not to give it a shot. I am currently in the planning stage for creating my ebook. I am excited and will post on here, so watch this space!
Write a DIY blog? Put together some of your favourite tips and publish as an ebook. Chef? Collate some of your favourite recipes and sell them via your blog. And so on – the possibilities for what’s in your ebook are endless.
Use slideshare
One of the best platforms around at the moment is Slideshare. Essentially taking PowerPoint presentations to the next level, Slideshare also allows uploads of PDF’s, documents and other presentations.
You can even add audio or talk tracks, or turn your slides into mini-movies. So working from your ebook idea, collate some of your best posts on a topic and create a presentation. Edit the posts accordingly to make the best use of Slideshare’s capabilities (perhaps a connecting image, statistic or similar), and then upload and choose your sharing settings.
If people like it and decide to embed on their own blog, you instantly have a new audience. That could go one step further, and businesses could pick up your kick-ass presentation and use it as a training resource.
The next potential step from that is to bring you on board to expand on your initial ideas – so now your original blog post has become both a training resource and a client lead.
Tweet first, blog later
The reason I say so is because they should eliminate the mind-set that “you can get a Gazillion traffic off Twitter“. Sure, you can get traffic from Twitter but it requires you to engage with your followers first before you spam the hell out of them with links to your blog or website. I had bloggers sending me links of their blog post to read, then I’ll check to see if I had communication with them in the past and how they engaged with their followers. If they engage with people, I’ll read it and RT it if I like it or find it interesting.
Twitter requires you to actually give more than you take. There are many people out there that post nothing but tweets about their latest blog post or selling a product. Sure I used to do this and realised that I did not have any success with twitter and I also kept losing followers.
Twitter helps you find the topics or subjects that you would like to talk about in your blog. I’ve met some great people on Twitter whom only just started blogging recently, they started Twitter first before blogging and their blogs are doing very well now.
Conclusion
The thing is, just because you already have sharing options in place doesn’t mean you need to stop there. The great thing with blogs is that they can be essentially timeless, given the right post and topic. Why not use that?
How about you – what are you doing to extend the reach of your blog? Feel free to share your tips on what works for you in the comments.
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