Tips and Strategies for Promoting your Content.
As I mentioned in my recap of the Wordcamp Conference in Boston, I sat in on a session where the focus was on making your blog functional (see my post here) and on a session where the focus was making your blog social. Not Buddypress kind of social, but a discussion about content marketing. Being social (i.e., marketing your content) increases your web presence and sharing your blog posts grows your market; whether your goal is to sell your stuff, create a community, increase awareness of a cause or get more followers. It hopefully improves your social experience and the social experience of those who are on your site. It basically was a reminder that if you blog, you probably should Tweet and post on Facebook push your content, because if SEO is important for those that do a Bing or Google search for a topic and land on your blog, you need to be proactive too, if you have one of the above goals.
Some ways to do this are to create blogs that also have video content on YouTube or photographs on Flickr or Slideshare. Then you use Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to spread the information you created. With that one blog post, you have broadcasted in 5 social mediums. If time is a factor, there are a variety of plugins that can automatically do that for you via your WordPress blog, like Network Publisher.
Another way to promote your content is to have a subscriber list, but make sure to note it is free. Remember, not everyone understands that that your “Subscribe to my Blog” is a free thing. Especially since a lot of websites are beginning to charge people. Also be upfront with the information about your subscription list: How often will you be emailing them? Will you sell their information?
Lastly, have buttons at the beginning or end of your post to make it easy for your readers to share your post. Plug-ins or tools like the Facebook Share, Tweetmeme, Twitter Retweet, Sexy Bookmarks, Add to Any, Socialize, Facebook Like, to make sharing your blog post super easy. Just don’t make it too busy or have too many buttons. That may actually hurt your goal. Pick one or two plug-ins, or one or two buttons where you most want to have your content shared. And as always, back up your blog before you install any new plug-ins. While these are some examples, they may not work for all. Always review to determine what plug-in is right for your blog, both in the social sense as discussed here, but in a technical sense too!
So what do you think? Do you currently use any of these plug-ins? Do you have a plug-in you love that is not list here?
