Maintaining a solid blog schedule is extremely important, but it's equally important to market and promote your blog post after it goes live.
There are a number of things you should be doing after writing and publishing a blog - these relate to simple marketing, improving on your work and SEO.
Sharing your blog post on social media is a quick and easy way to market your post. Social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ will often generate an image with an introductory piece of text for you, making it a very visually-led post to your followers.
According to social media expert Jeff Bullas in 2015:
- There are just over 3 billion active Internet users (45% of the world’s internet users);
- Nearly 2.1 billion people have social media accounts;
- 3.65 billion mobile users have access to the internet via smartphones and tablets;
- Close to 1.7 billion people have active social media accounts
This means that the potential reach on social media is huge, and the potential benefits can be too. Sharing your content on a network like Facebook or Twitter does not have to be time-consuming either - just give the reader enough of an incentive to click through and read the full post.
You may also want to consider using a social media management tool such as Hootsuite or Buffer so that you can schedule in posts for the near future so that your blog post gets maximum exposure.
You should not rely solely on social media traffic and search engines for blog views. You should consider featuring your blog prominently on your company website - this is usually done by a feed of latest posts somewhere prominent such as the footer area.
As you can see on the Cosmic website, we have a feed of latest news and our latest blogs on the home page. This immediately puts our posts in front of any website visitors - by doing so, it reassures visitors that we are experts in our field as they can easily see all of the content we write in our specialist areas.
A great way of getting your blog post directly to your target audience is via an e-newsletter campaign. Recipients will have opted in to your e-newsletters because they want to receive that type of content, so you know that your audience will want to read it. A link to the blog post, alongside a picture and a snippet of text is a good way of introducing the blog post to the (potential) readers.
Cosmic does this for the services we offer; for example, we have a regular 'website news' e-newsletter campaign that goes out to our readers that features solely blog posts related to the upkeep of your website, handy tips and guides for maximum website optimisation.
This can also be a relatively low time consumer - you will not necessarily need to create content for your e-newsletter, just curate. You can take the existing wording and imagery used within the blog and use it in your mailshot for a quick and easy marketing campaign.
Did you know:
- The total number of worldwide e-mail accounts is expected to increase to over 4.3 billion accounts by year-end 2016. (Radicati Group)
- It’s projected that in 2014, 191.4 billion e-mails will be sent and received each day with about 108 billion of those being from the business sector. (Radicati Group)
- 78% of marketing e-mails are sent to a personal e-mail account. (ChoozOn)
- There are 3x more e-mail accounts than Twitter and Facebook accounts combined. (Radicati Group)
- 57% of e-mail subscribers spend 10-60 minutes browsing marketing e-mails during the week. (ChoozOn)
- Knowledge workers on average spend 13 of their working hours each week in their e-mail inbox. (McKinsey & Company)
- 92% of online adults use e-mail, with 61% using it on an average day. (Pew Research)
- One survey found that 90% of business people use e-mail as much, or more than they did last year. (Osterman Research)
About a week after publication, you should check your analytics to see how well the post is being received. You should focus on:
- Time on page: It would be a negative sign if users spend just seconds on the post. This means that they don’t read it or don’t find it fulfilling their expectations.
- Bounce rate: If the bounce rate is high, consider revising the call-to-action that took the user to the post.
- Traffic sources: Analyse if the post receives any organic traffic, how successful was any e-mail marketing, if your social media marketing worked well etc.
- Any other metrics you usually monitor.