Five Simple Ways to Promote a Blog Post

Being a writer, marketer, and blogger, I’m always interested in the best ways to promote content: to put it out in front of the people I’d like to see read it.

I look at every new blog post and article as a publication and an announcement. I don’t have a large audience but I like to let those with a similar mindset know when new material appears.

In that spirit, in addition to writing and publishing a post, here’s my drill for promoting content after I post it to the Web. Maybe these ideas will help you as you promote your own content.

1. Go to TinyURL.com–Since I’m going to promote to twitter where I’ll be limited to 140 characters, I’ll need a short URL. I used to use the shortlinks that are available on WordPress where I run my blog, but I noticed that the WordPress shortlinks sometimes cause problems when posting to LinkedIn. TinyURL shortlinks seem to work better with LinkedIn status updates.
2. LinkedIN – Since my blog is professional, I post a status update on LinkedIn for each new article. I keep the description under 140 characters so I can also post it to Twitter at the same time. To post to Twitter, make sure that before you click the LinkedIn Share button that you also change the Share with option to Share with Public + Twitter.  Here’s what the LinkedIn status update and Share with options look like.



3. Twitter – This is where the Tiny URL comes in. I use the tiny URL on my tweets to save space. If I’m promoting a non-promotional post, I post it straight to twitter and skip LinkedIn. Otherwise, I connect my twitter account to LinkedIn and use the LinkedIn status bar to post to both services at once.
4. LinkedIn groups – I also check to see if there’s any LI groups that might be interested in reading this post and put up a link, if relevant. This might be tricky depending on the group’s policy on links but if the group allows it, it’s a nice way to alert readers and build traffic.
5. Pinterest – I recently started a Pinterest account and I put up a board that contains Pins to all my joehertvik.com content. After putting up a new post, I pin it to my Website board as an alternate Web site.

This is the basic drill I use for promoting content from my Web site. If you have any other ideas for the best places to promote content, feel free to drop me a line or post a comment here.

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Follow Joe Hertvik on Twitter @JoeHertvik. You can also add Joe to your professional network on LinkedIn by clicking here.