5 Tools to Effectively Promote Your Blog Posts

Writing a successful blog post does not end after you hit publish. Content marketing for your business should reap certain rewards, and by that I mean you have to write blog posts that convert readers into followers and eventually into potentially paying customers.

But before your content convinces enough people, though, it should reach enough eyeballs first.

The rule of sales is persistence, so after publishing your article, make sure you effectively promote your blog posts.

Here are five tools of the content marketing trade to help you do so.

1. Buzzsumo: Influencer outreach

One way to make sure more people care about and share your blog posts is to invite influencers to contribute.

Cite them as sources for your article. After all, influencers already have their own set of followers who will definitely care once they see the name of someone they consider a thought leader featured in your post.

You can either pick a topic and feature various influencers to offer their points of view.

For example:

• Is exact match keyword optimization dead?
• Does guest blogging still work?
• Should you quit your day job to build your startup? Why or why not?

Next, find your influencers. There are various ways to find influencers in your niche, and I’ve written extensively about those too. For this post, let’s assume you’ve already found your influencers and have their contact email on hand.

So, you send in your pitch. For this, you can either:

• Ask for a call or video interview, with permission to transcribe.
• Interview them via email (so you won’t need to transcribe anything); just send in your queries and wait for their reply.

Don’t send to only one or two influencers. Chances are, for every 20 influencers you email, you might get only five or even one reply, so don’t be conservative with your outreach.

Buzzsumo is a great tool for finding those experts to reach out to. It helps you identify authors who write on relevant topics and even provides additional information on each author, like social media profiles, other articles, and email).

Once you receive answers from those who do reply, pick the best quotes from their answers and incorporate them into your blog post. Once you publish, proceed to step number two.

2. Muck Rack: Tag or email your influencer sources

Once you’ve published your article, alert your influencer sources.

When sharing on social media, don’t forget to tag your sources. Just run a quick Google search to look for an influencer’s Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. It shouldn’t take too long; after all, influencers are supposed to be very visible online.

You can also send them an email to let them know the article you wrote featuring their answers has been posted along with the link to your blog post. Amicably suggest to the influencer to share the post with his/her circle. If the content and your own following are decent, many influencers usually would.

The ideal end goal here is for the influencers to share your post with his/her own followers, as this creates a ripple effect where the influencer’s own followers end up checking your site out too.

Muck Rack is a great resource for finding those influencers, following them everywhere, and finding their social media IDs to tag them.

You can also set up a newsletter to keep your influential topics informed of your future collaborative articles. WP Beginner has a step-by-step guide on how to do that.

3. Visme: Create social media “snippets” to last you through your promotion period

Don’t stop promoting your post after one or two social media shares. Blog promotion should last for weeks—months, even. To make this last, pick certain parts from your blog article that you can reshare.

To target your influencers and their followers, pick the quotes attributed to them, and reshare. You can either repost using plain text, or something more visual like an infographic or picture-quote.

Aside from quotes from influencers, these “snippets” can also be:

• Study or statistic citation
• Strong statements

Once you have your list of text and graphic snippets ready to go, proceed to step four.

Visme has a handy AI integration allowing you to create multiple visual updates automatically. Visme is an online image editor that is well-known for its infographic creator feature. One of its newest features is the ability to create infographics using prompts. I had the most success with creating visual checklists to repurpose my content into social-media-friendly and downloadable assets.

Describe what you want to create and ask a few follow-up questions from Visme AI bot.

You can regenerate your image or use the online image editor to customize it.

4. Agorapulse: Schedule social media promotions

When you’ve gathered enough snippets of your blog post for social media promotion, schedule everything using Agorapulse. With it, you can keep promoting your blog post on social media without having to be there manually crafting every post every single day.

Use varying hashtags and schedule one post every other day or weekly for one month and see how it goes.

The great thing about these automated sharing tools is that not only do they centralize the platform with which you can post all your social media shares, but they also allow you to schedule everything in advance for a week, a month, or even more, complete with built-in analytics, so this frees up so much of your time and work hours.

Once you’ve gone through these steps, proceed to step number five.

5. Linktree: Consolidate everything on one page

Multi-channel social media marketing is overwhelming as you are trying to be everywhere. Yet, spreading out is as important as staying organized. You need to consolidate your cross-channel updates on one landing page to start gradually growing your following and engagements everywhere.

Linktree is a great tool that allows you to create a consistent brand experience across many channels. Linklab has a great guide on how to make the best of the tool.

Bonus: Forum participation (Quora, Reddit, etc)

This is not a specific tool but still a step not to miss.

Posting on forums is one way to gain organic traffic for your blog post. You’re chatting with real people with real questions, and if you can link to something that can truly help point them towards solving their problems, then that’s a plus.

However, this strategy is a little trickier and could possibly backfire if you’re not careful. Some threads can be very strict with the type of links they allow, while other sites are inundated with so many links and post suggestions that nobody bothers to engage.

Q&A sites such as Quora and certain threads on Reddit can be some good places to start promoting your blog post. You can search for questions related to your niche, offer a truly valuable answer, and then link to your content for readers who want “more details.” Of course, this is given that you’ve already built a history with the forum or other thread participants and didn’t simply appear out of nowhere just to promote yourself.

This strategy can be a hit or miss, especially with stricter sites. Once it does hit, though, you’ll be seeing tons worth of organic traffic for your blog post.

About the Author

Ann Smarty is the co-founder of Smarty.Marketing. Ann has been into Internet Marketing for more than a decade, she is the former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable. Ann is also a frequent speaker at Pubcon.