by Gini Dietrich, for wwwstumbleupon.com
Published: Feb. 15, 2010
Here are six auxiliary sites and tools which prove fast and effective in spreading the word about your blog content.READ online:
Six tips for promoting your blog content
I've spent some time talking about blogs—how to
create them, how to
attract readers, and how to
optimize your content.
One thing I haven't discussed is how to promote your blog posts once they’ve been published, in order to attract readers who don’t yet know about you.
This is the process I follow every time I hit publish:
1. Go to Delicious and create an account.
Save your blog post, with the original link (not a shortened link), as a bookmark. I have our Delicious page set up to automatically feed my FriendFeed and Twitter accounts after it’s been posted. To learn how to do that, Scott Hepburn has an easy-to-follow blog post on the topic here. He even goes so far as to suggest you do this with Google Reader. I don’t do that, because I want to have read the content I tweet before I actually distribute it.
It takes a couple of hours for Delicious to post to FriendFeed and Twitter, so I do this late at night (after 9 p.m.) in order for my content to appear around midnight—the beginning of the day in Europe.
2. Go to su.pr and create an account.
I love this URL shortener because it:
Adds your content to StumbleUpon (which helps with SEO and attracting new readers);
Gives you times of each day that your tribe retweets you most often on Twitter (so you know when to post);
Shows you all of the retweets each post has received and who did the retweeting; and
Gives you pretty accurate traffic information you can then overlay with your Google analytics.
I don’t, however, like to use the timed feature in su.pr, because it tends to act wonky at least once a week and it sometimes “loses” your links. So I go there only to shorten the link so I can use it in other places.
3. Go to SocialOomph and create an account.
I like using this service to time my tweets (I do one an hour from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. CST) Mondays through Thursdays (I don’t tweet news on Fridays because of #FollowFriday).
Based on what su.pr tells me, I schedule our blog post (using the su.pr shortened link) to tweet three times the following day. For instance, I know on Tuesdays, 9 a.m., noon, and 3 p.m., are the times I’m retweeted the most. So I set up our blog post to be tweeted at those times every Tuesday.
For every other tweet during the day, I set up news, articles and blogs I read that support my thinking but aren’t self-serving (i.e., not information coming from Arment Dietrich).Keep in mind that you can not use the same copy for the multiple scheduled tweets. They must be different copy, or Twitter will consider it spam.
4. Go to Facebook and, using the original blog link (not the shortened one), I let our fans know what they can read about on the blog.
5. Go to LinkedIn and, again, using the original blog link, update my status to drive my connections to the post.
6. Answer all comments you get on your blog. I typically answer on the blog, but also send an e-mail to the commenter thanking them. This not only makes people feel good, but sometimes creates an offline conversation that builds my relationship with that person.
Rinse and repeat each day. I know this sounds like a lot, but I timed it when I wrote this post. It took me eight minutes.
Are there things you do to publicize your blog posts that are not listed here?
Gini Dietrich was recently named the number one PR person, according to Klout and TechCrunch, number one on Twitter, according to TweetLevel, and blogs at Fight Against Destructive Spin.