You’re finally writing consistent content for your blog, which you’re sure will send leads pouring into your funnel—though, in reality, it seems like your Aunt Wanda is the only one reading your business blog.
What are you doing wrong with your content??
The fact is, writing good content is just one component of a solid content marketing strategy. The other component—quite possibly the more important of the two—is promoting it to ensure that it reaches the widest audience possible. If your content is still coming up short, you might be doing a few things wrong on the promotion side.
1. You set up social media to automatically share it . . . once
Any time a new blog post is published, it automatically gets shared on your Twitter, Facebook, etc. profiles. But that’s the extent of the effort you’re putting into social media promotion.
Think for a moment about how you use social media. You probably check in for about five minutes, scroll through your feed to see what’s interesting, then go about your life. There’s a ton of content you’re missing simply because of how often your network posts updates.
So if that one social share happens at 8 a.m., what about all the people who check their feed an hour later? Or the next day? They’ll likely never see it.
That’s why you need to also write manual shares and schedule them for the days following the post’s publication. Another reason for this: the automated share usually just takes the blog title as its social text. Handcrafting your updates gives you the opportunity to be more engaging. You could pull a statistic or quote from the post or ask a question that clicking to the blog will answer.
Buffer, MeetEdgar, and Ops Calendar are examples of tools that let you easily schedule social shares of your content.
2. You’re not asking your network to share
I get that you might be uncomfortable emailing your contact list every time you publish a new post to ask them to share it, and you might annoy them if you do. But when you have a really important post that you’d like to extend the reach of, there’s nothing wrong with pinging your contacts and asking them to share it. Let them know you’d do the same in return.
Actually, you could also create a group of like-minded folks in your industry who share and support each other’s content and content marketing efforts. It’s a great way to bolster what you’re doing on your own promotion-wise—and you make great contacts.
One specific strategy here is to create an experts’ roundup post, asking a question to several well-respected thought leaders in your space. Once you publish the roundup, ask the experts to share the post. Most will be happy to do so, and you’ll get your content in front of their sizeable audiences.
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3. You have no goal
You’re writing content, yes, but do you have a purpose behind it? Or is it just one more thing you want to check off your “how to market my business” list?
Every piece of content you publish should have an objective, such as:
- Educate your readers about something (that you can help them with)
- Address a common problem your audience suffers (that you can fix)
- Establish expertise on an industry topic
- Drive leads
- Drive sales
I know articles out there pound into your head the importance of writing, writing, writing—of having tons of content on your site. But I’m going to play devil’s advocate here and say if a piece of content doesn’t have an explicit purpose that drives more business (even if it’s just through brand awareness), then don’t write it.
4. You’re ignoring what your audience is telling you
You write content based on what you think your audience wants to read, not what they actually do want to read. You’ve missed the mark for no reason, because it’s incredibly easy to figure out what they’re interested in.
Your blog analytics dashboard will give you all the data you need to see which of your articles are attracting the most visits, clicks, and shares. See which topics are resonating with your audience, and which aren’t. From there, you can brainstorm additional content ideas to piggyback off the success of past articles. (Bonus tip: Create internal links to your most popular posts when you write about related subjects.)
You’ve already got great content. Now put in a little more effort to get more readers and subscribers to your blog.
RELATED: The 8 Essential Elements of a Successful Blog Post