Before the holidays, we spent some time here talking about blogs – how to create them, how to attract readers, and how to optimize your content.
One thing, however, we didn’t discuss is how to promote and publicize your blog posts, after 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, if you don’t already have one.
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 feed to FriendFeed and Twitter, so I do this late at night (after 9 p.m.) in order to hit the people up, and on Twitter, around midnight.
2. Go to su.pr and create an account, if you don’t already have one.
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, if you don’t already have one.
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.
So this is what my scheduled tweets looked like yesterday:
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 email 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?