Blog marketing is quickly becoming a critical part of any online marketing strategy but having a blog isn’t enough – you have to promote it. Your blog could be jammed packed with brilliant and useful ideas but it will have no effect if it has an audience of one!
I am going to outline 2 easy and more importantly FREE ways you can promote your blog online.
Automatically publish your blog posts to social media.
Let your social media followers know you have a new blog post by publishing a brief notice and the url on the major social networks like, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. You can post manually to your social networks or you can install some WordPress plugins or Facebook applications that update your networks automatically.
I really like a third party service like Twitterfeed. Twitterfeed uses your blog’s RSS feed to identify new blog posts and then publishes a notice to your networks. You can set it up once for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and then forget it! It does all the work for you!
Pinging
Pinging, in blog terms, is a push mechanic that notifies servers when content has been updated. These servers then publish a list of blogs that have new content. WordPress has a built in Ping feature that will automatically ping services when you publish or edit a blog post.
There are two big issues with the built in ping feature – #1 the default list of ping services is insufficient (a typical WordPress install just has a couple services set up) and #2 we don’t want to ping the services when we edit a post. If we send a ping every time we edit a post (especially if we do it multiple times) we run the risk of being blocked as a spammer. No Good!
I recommend that you install http://www.maxblogpress.com/plugins/mpo/ This plugin prevents WordPress from pinging services when you EDIT a post. It only pings when a new post is published. This will help prevent your blog from being blocked by the various pinging services. Be sure to update your pinglist. I currently have a list of almost 200 didn’t services to ping with each blog post. (If you want a copy of this list – send me an email)
Just a quick note – Sometime clients worry because their tweets or Facebook posts do not happen instantly. There is usually a small delay between when you publish the post and when the notification appears on the social networks – this is completely normal.
Don’t wait around hoping visitors will find your website and blog – take action and start actively promoting your blogging brilliance!
If you have any questions, about promoting your blog, automating your social media marketing, or setting up your pinglist send me an email.
