Just writing blog posts isn’t enough
I’m willing to bet that you know the importance of blogging by now.
As a consultant, you understand that establishing authority with your audience is key, and publishing regular content that educates, informs and inspires your prospective clients is a fantastic way to build that credibility. But here’s the catch: That only works if your audience actually sees your content, which is why just writing the blog post isn’t enough!
So, let’s take a look at some simple strategies you might adopt to increase visibility and distribution of your blog content once you’ve written it:
Check, check, triple check
I don’t mean to sound like the grammar police, but there really is no faster way to mitigate all of your great work than with simple, careless mistakes. Typos, misspelt words and lazy formatting can quickly damage your credibility and are easily avoided, so take care to thoroughly proofread your blog post before you click publish.
Don’t worry, no one expects you to be perfect, but it’s always best to avoid falling into some basic professional pitfalls that can hurt your reputation before you even cross the starting line.
Share Socially
This one is basic, and yet vital. Once you’ve published a blog post, ensure that you’re sharing it across all of your social media platforms, utilising your caption to highlight the most relevant or interesting elements for that specific audience. Playing by the rules of each platform is key to ensuring the best performance; for example, when posting to Instagram, ensure you spend some time researching and including relevant hashtags, thereby helping your audience to find your content.
Don’t be afraid to share the same content, albeit with variations on the caption, quote or image. Your audience, like you, are busy and miss about 90% of what’s posted online, even from people they follow. If you’re confident that your content will be interesting, helpful or relevant to them, sharing it multiple times is a service you’re providing to your community; don’t let fear or humility stop you from sharing the good stuff!
Re purpose your content
The chances are if you’ve written a blog post about something, it’s because you think your audience should know, or would like to know, more about that topic. So why stop there?
Different people consume information in different ways: Some of us like reading, some find listening easier and some prefer to interact with content. Therefore, attempting to reach your whole audience through a single medium is likely to fail, and you should consider re-purposing the same content in different formats.
You could lift the content from a number of blogs, creating a free PDF resource to use as a lead magnet, or even record the content to create a podcast.
Why not film yourself delivering the content and publish it as an IGTV episode? You may not be aware, but your IGTV links can be shared in your Instagram stories using the elusive ‘swipe-up’ feature, even if you have a limited audience size, so they are a really effective way to engage your followers.
Simple SEO tweaks
Search engine optimisation can be a bit of a minefield, I know. There are a million experts providing different tips on how to maximise your visibility, and who on earth has the time to implement all of them? However, it is important to give your content the best possible chance of being found, which is why we recommend using this great, free tool to sense check that your blog post is hitting the right notes.
The free version of web-based tool Answer the Public allows you two free searches per day. You can use this to find out what questions are being searched for most often in relation to your topic. Tweaking your blog title, link or content to include one or more of these search terms can dramatically improve your SEO ranking and help direct more views to your content. We’d all like to be the business that directly answers our prospects most pressing questions, and with this tool you can do just that!
Play to your home crowd
You’ve probably heard a million times that it’s much easier to win a new customer than to keep an existing one, and the same is true of those who consume your content. If you have an existing mailing list of people who have opted in to hear your updates and news, don’t neglect to share your content with them: It’s an easy win!
Your opening rates on an opt-in mailing list will be miles ahead of the visibility you achieve via social media and search engines, so don’t waste an opportunity to connect with the people who you already know love what you do. Each time you write new content, craft an email to your mailing list, sharing a teaser of the content, along with a link to the published blog.
Encourage engagement
Content that receives a high level of engagement is automatically pushed up the SEO and social media ranks and made visible to a wider audience. Therefore, you would be smart to encourage audience engagement with your blog posts, asking open ended, thought-provoking questions to spark conversation in the comments.
Inviting readers to share their own experiences and stories not only boosts engagement on your post, but it creates a stronger connection between you and your audience. These rich relationships are vital in an online landscape where every business is clamoring for your audience’s attention, as it will keep them coming back.
As Oprah wisely shared, people ultimately want to feel seen, heard and understood, and if you can build meaningful connections with your followers, making them feel like the hero of the story, you will become their trusted guide. And what more could you ask for from a blog?
If you’re stuck with your blogging distribution, let’s get together for a chat and see how we can help: hello@sero.digital