You were up all night brainstorming ideas for your blog and spent all day working on it. You’ve ensured it met all the great SEO guidelines you’ve acquired over the years, so it’s ready for Google to crawl it and understand it. This is great and all, except for one thing… you have to wait for Google to rank it before anyone will ever see it. Yes, Google is a lot faster in 2013, but depending on a number of factors it may not get to that content as quickly as you’d wish. How do you get this content in front of people… NOW!?
The answer may already seem obvious to many… share it through social media! If you pay attention to the sites you typically read you’ll probably notice their greatest content has social sharing icons that typically include sharing their content on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Tumblr and even more.
Social Networking
Being active on the big three social networks (Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus) can be very beneficial to your blog. Once on these networks you should identify like minded people and connect with them. Before even promoting your own content, build some trust by starting with these steps…
- Get involved in some conversations you can add too.
- Answer questions people have about your subject matter.
- Share someone else’s posts that you find interesting.
Once you’ve done the steps above you’re ready to start promoting your own content but be mindful not to over do it. You want to keep the followers you’ve acquired so don’t annoy them by talking about yourself too much.
Social Bookmarking
In my opinion, Social Bookmarking is one of the best techniques when promoting new content. Since it’s original birth, with sites like delicious.com, there have been hundreds of clones. For years, black hat SEOs have created and submitted content to bookmark sites that they built. This gave social bookmarking a bad name. The truth is that Social Bookmarking can be an extremely valuable traffic source, as well as a great SEO signal, but like anything worth doing it has to be done right. If you come across a social bookmarking site you never heard of, then check out what ranks well on the site. If it appears to be questionable content, then run, run away! Next Google the sites name and see what comes up. Are there reputable sites talking about it?
Now that you have a list of quality bookmarking sites share each of your blog posts on them! Sites like delicious.com, stumbleupon.com, reddit.com and pinterest are great ways to get your blog posts in front of a relevant audience. Build profiles on these sites and keep them active just like you do your twitter of facebook pages. You may also want to look for other social sharing websites by checking out this list provided by the addthis plugin.
The Short Answer…
- Promote your new blog posts to the community you’ve built on your social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
- Share your posts on bookmarking sites like delicious and stumbleupon.com.
I hope you’ve found this post useful! If you have any comments or questions, please post below!
Chris Barber
Chris, as an inbound marketing professional, has helped hundreds of websites improve their SEO and Social Media performance. Blog Hands was started as way to provide the strongest of those techniques, blog writing and promotion, at an affordable rate while still keeping a strong level of quality that you'd find from a large internet marketing firm.