Promote Your Blog After You Publish it
The majority of traffic that comes to a blog post comes within the first day or so after it’s published.
You can get bumps in traffic long after a blog post is published, but more often, the bulk of the traffic to a blog post comes sooner rather than later.
With that in mind, it’s important to promote your blog posts and increase traffic to them immediately after you publish them.
This is particularly important for posts about timely topics but applies to all of your blog posts.
Following are 15 ways you can promote your blog post immediately after you publish it to increase traffic to it quickly.
1. Tweet Your Blog Post to Your Twitter Followers
Twitter is a perfect place to share a link to your blog post as soon as you publish it.
2. Share the Blog Post on Facebook
Given how many people use Facebook, it’s highly likely that people who want to read your blog posts are on Facebook, too.
3. Share the Post on Pinterest.
Pinterest is a visual social bookmarking site. If you include images in your blog posts, then Pinterest is a great place to promote them.
4. Share the Post on Google+
Google+ is a powerful tool for blog post promotion, and it shouldn’t be missed.
5. Share the Post to Your LinkedIn Followers
If you write a blog about a business, career, or professional topic, then LinkedIn is one of the most important places to promote your blog posts.
6. Share the Post with Members of any LinkedIn Groups You Belong to.
Just make sure to only share relevant blog posts, so other members of the group don’t think you’re more interested in self-promotion than networking with them.
7. Include a Link to the Post in Your Email Newsletter
If you have an email opt-in form on your blog and collect email addresses from readers in order to send email newsletters and communications to them, then those email messages are a great place to share links to your blog posts.
8. Share the Link with Online Influencers and Bloggers You Have Relationships With
Have you been taking the time to find online influencers who have the attention of your blog’s target audience?
If you answered yes to these questions, then you should share links to your best and most useful blog posts with them and ask if they would share them with their own audiences (if they like the posts).
Make sure you don’t spam online influencers and bloggers.
Instead, be very selective about which blog posts you ask them to help you share.
9. Consider How to Repurpose the Blog Post to Extend Its Life
Immediately after you publish a blog post, you should think about how you can repurpose the content within that blog post to extend its reach and its life.
A blog post can be used as a promotional tool for your entire blog when it’s repurposed.
10. Share the Post on Social Bookmarking Sites Like StumbleUpon
Social bookmarking enables you to share your blog posts with people who are actively looking for content.
Copyright and Fair Use Considerations
Despite how it might seem from the outside looking in, there are unwritten rules of the blogosphere related to blogging ethics and etiquette.
At the same time, there are legal requirements that bloggers must adhere
to.
Citing your sources is one of the most important rules of the blogosphere that has a legal component related to it as well.
Copyrights
Copyrights protect the original author, photographer, videographer, etc. from having their original work stolen or misused.
In essence, if you did not create a piece of content on your blog, someone else holds the copyright to it.
Fair Use
The gray area of copyright law comes in the form of fair use.
If you’re reusing someone else’s material on your blog for the purpose of providing criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, or research, then you may not have to seek permission.
Unfortunately, fair use is debatable, so if you’re republishing someone else’s work on your blog, do the safe (and right) thing and ask for permission first then cite the source in your blog post.
The Importance of Linking
One of the most important parts of the blogosphere is its existence as part of the social web wherein creating communities and engaging conversations is a top priority.
Providing attribution and a link back to the source is often enough to satisfy another blogger as long as you don’t copy their content at length verbatim.
If you cite and link to another blogger’s work in one of your blog posts, be certain you add to the information provided by your source rather than simply copying it.
