As you might recall, a while back I told you how to write the perfect blog post. Now that you’ve written the blog post and you posted it on your blog (which, I hope, is using the perfect WordPress theme, it is very important that you promote your blog post. So, here is how to promote the perfect blog post.
Let’s say that you’ve written a great blog post and you want it to “stand out from the crowd” so to speak… and have a chance of other people finding out about it, right? Especially if it’s a very timely blog post with some sort of breaking news or something that you think can “go viral” or get others to link to it and talk about it, maybe even on Twitter.
Along with Twitter, Digg, Reddit, and other social media websites, Google’s blog search can even bring in some great traffic to your blog. And it’s a great source of links: many bloggers use it to find other blog posts to link to when they’re doing their research for a blog post. Did you know that Google recently updated their blog search algorithm? You might take note of something that Google’s Jeremy Hylton recently said: “One important changes is that we’re processing new links much faster, so the post that breaks a story and gets a lot of links is more likely to become the lead story.” So, just like I’ve been saying for a while now, the first to get the marketshare of links is going to be the winner in the long run, not only in blog search but also in the organic search engine rankings.
So, after you’ve written the perfect blog post, here is how to promote the perfect blog post, in several pretty easy steps:
1. Go on over to your Twitter account and tweet about it. Tell others that you’ve just written a new blog post. Tweet something like “New blog post: How to Promote Your Blog Post http://tinyurl.com/r478xa. If you’ll notice, I’ve included a link directly to the blog post. I like to tweet about the new blog post because it’s really kind of a courtesy tweet to all of my followers. If you give them a “heads up” and a link directly to the blog post, there’s a chance that someone might want to submit it to one of the social networking sites.
2. Go to Mixx.com and submit it. It’s important to get your blog post indexed quickly and to get a link to it quickly, as soon as possible after you post your blog post to your blog. I prefer to add it to Mixx because mixx.com is one of the few social bookmarking websites that do not use the “nofollow” tag. Links supposedly “count” there, and the link will get crawled pretty quickly.
3. Make a list of alternative headlines (titles) for your blog post. This is extremely important, especially since Google has been cracking down on duplicate content more and more. They’ve even been looking at the social bookmarking sites. If the same title appears on 12 different social bookmarking sites, with the same exact description, would you count every single site as a link to the blog post? Probably not, it’s a form of duplicate content. I prefer to make at least 5 different titles of the blog post, all of them different than the actual blog post itself. So, for this blog post, here are some possible titles:
Promoting the Perfect Blog Post
Promote Your Blog Post
Promoting a Blog Post
How to Promote Your Blog Post
Promote Your Blog Post after Writing It
Always Promote Your Blog Post
Later on, when you promote your blog post on different social bookmarking sites and mention it to others, you’ll need to make sure that you use a different title or “headline”. You never know which version will catch someone’s eye, and you don’t want to be caught for “duplicate content”.
4. Make a list of alternative descriptions. Just like the title or headline of the blog post, you will need a unique description for your blog post when you submit it to the various social bookmarking sites. You can use an excerpt from your blog post (usually it’s about 2 or 3 sentences long). Make some longer than others, though, and that you’re using different ways to describe your blog post. If you can sum it up in one sentence, that’s great. Some social bookmarking sites let you submit longer descriptions than others, so having a very long one and copying and pasting some of the text and removing other sentences might help. I usually use notepad to write the descriptions, and I always make sure that I am not using “quotes” or ‘apostrophes’ in the description because those characters can get messed up pretty easily.
5. Make a list of appropriate tags. Many social bookmarking sites will allow you to add a few tags to the submission to categorize it. If you’re wanting it to rank well later on for a certain keyword or keyword phrase, then make sure you include that phrase in your list of tags. I prefer to use a few generic ones like “business”, “internet”, and “blogs” and then a specific tag that includes a keyword or keyword phrase.
6. Once you have your list of alternative titles and descriptions, you have a few choices. If you really want the blog post to have a chance of “going viral”, then you need to start working your network. Hopefully before now you’ve networked with several of the top “social nerds” out there, and they hopefully owe you a favor. Contact them and ask them if they wouldn’t mind submitting it to (a specific site). I usually ask different people to submit it to a site. I’ll ask one person to submit it to Digg, someone else to submit it to Reddit, etc.. It’s also very helpful for them if you include the URL, title, description, and tags so they can simply “copy and paste” it. This all ensures that they all won’t submit it with the same title and description.
If you aren’t expecting the blog post to “go viral” on the social media sites, then you might consider just submitting it yourself to as many different social bookmarking sites yourself. Whatever the case, promoting it on as many social bookmarking sites as possible is going to get more links to it: which will help the blog post rank better in Google blog search as well as Google’s organic search engine rankings. Web pages always tend to rank better in the organic search engine rankings when they have links going to them.
7. Use a site like Social Poster or Social Marker to help with the submissions. I prefer to use Social Poster since it helps me fill out the forms and has most of the social networking sites I prefer to submit to, but I do use Social Marker from time to time, as well.
8. Submit your blog post to these social sites, using different titles and descriptions, not necessarily in this order:
– Digg
– Propeller
– Reddit
– Del.icio.us
– Stumbleupon.com
– Indianpad.com
– Technorati.com
– Diigo.com
– Wirefan.com
– Simpy.com
– Folkd.com
– Blogmarks.net
– Corank.com
– Megite.com/discover/
– Facebook.com (not for ranking purposes but for ‘sharing’ purposes)
– Mixx.com
– Dropjack.com
– A1-webmarks.com
– Buddymarks.com
– Jumptags.com
– Bx.Businessweek.com
– Sphinn.com
There are certainly a bunch of others to submit to, or ask your friends to submit to, and some are appropriate for certain categories of blog posts (for example, Sphinn is good for SEO, Internet Marketing, Social Media “how to” articles), while Business Exchange is great for business-related articles.
9. Promote your blog post by linking to it. Not only can you get social bookmarking links to it, you might consider writing another blog post somewhere else and linking over to your original blog post. Certainly that would be easier if you have more than one blog, but you could also ask other bloggers that you know to link over to it or see if they’ll accept a “guest post” (most will if you ask them), and it could be a follow-up to your blog post or even on a related topic. Again, you’ll want to use the social bookmarking sites to get some links to that blog post that then links over to your original blog post.
10. Tell friends about it, even those who don’t use social bookmarking sites or Twitter. We all have our list of friends that aren’t techno nerdy internet geeks that hang out online all day. Send a quick note to your list of contacts, like your brother, sister, mother, father, aunt, uncle, neice, nephew, neighbor, everyone that you know has an email address. And don’t forget your best asset here, the relative that always forwards those pesky emails to you, the emails like “don’t microwave water” and “how cute is this puppy” emails. If you’re really observant, you’ll notice that when people forward those viral emails to all their contacts, they never “blind carbon copy” (BCC) people, they will just forward to everyone they know, leaving everyone’s email address there so everyone can see everyone else’s email. Harvest that list and send out an email to all those people, telling them that you’ve just written the perfect blog post. If you’re lucky, they will send it to everyone they know.
