How To Promote a Blog Post on a Budget

Certainly you’ve seen the suggestion that every blog post or piece of content should be accompanied by equal, or even greater, time spent promoting the post itself. So if you spend four hours writing a post then you should spend four or five or even six hours promoting that post. But if you have to write and then promote a blog post with equal vigor, it can be hard to know what to do.

Ok, sure. Right after you get done running payroll, hiring employees, managing clients, closing sales, filing taxes, running to the bank, managing that next release, so on and so forth.

It simply is not realistic to act like a small business owner has hours and hours to promote a single blog post. Now consider that regular posting is a good idea and suddenly your entire workday is supposed to be spent promoting blog posts?  

Get real.

Even a Little Effort Can Be Worth A Lot to Promote a Blog Post

Thankfully there are a number of things you can do to promote a blog post that take no more than ten minutes. Over time, these efforts start to compound and drive meaningful engagement with your posts. And when your posts are getting attention, the value of your entire blog starts to grow.  While your business may well grow to have a marketing person or team to do the heavy lifting, the only way you’re going to get there is to grow the business you have right now. By following a few simple and easy to execute tactics, you can start growing your blog post engagement a little at a time.

Here are five ways to promote a blog post in just a few minutes each day.

Get social

Social media is a great way to share a blog post. The entire point of social media is for users to consume content in some form. With that in mind, your blog post will feel right at home on your favorite social platforms! Sharing your post on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook is a great way to find new readers.

When sharing, choose two or three hashtags that relate to the content and add them to the post. Some people follow or search for hashtags and this will help surface your content to them, exposing you to a new audience of readers.

The thing you may be missing is that sharing via your personal accounts is likely to earn more readers. A business is a faceless entity, and it is easy for people to ignore what the business has to say. But when a person who works at the business – you – shares content then you can count on your contacts to be a little more interested. 

Share it again

One of the biggest mistakes we see when it comes to promoting content of any kind is treating something evergreen as important only once. If you’ve written a post about an event happening in your town or an industry event, it is true that the post will outlive its usefulness in a matter of days or weeks.

Most content, however, does not fall into this category. Most posts will be as relevant in a few weeks as they are now. Even better, a large number of posts will be relevant months or even years into the future with a little updating. As a result, you should reshare old content with regularity. Recognize that a number of readers will find the content for the first time. Just because the words are not recent to you does not mean they should be lost to digital history.

Ask for help

Recently a friend was asking how to generate more views for a video series he had put together. I encouraged him to choose five or ten connections on each social platform and ask them to share the content as well. These can be friends, former coworkers, connections in the industry, or someone else entirely. By asking others for a small, twenty-second favor, his video content will be directly injected into a new audience. 

Make note not to go to the well too often with the same person. But you will find that, by and large, if the content is of good quality people are often happy to lend a hand and share to their network of followers.

Send it out

Using email to share a post or piece of content is also a great way to promote a post. Sure, if you have a subscriber list then that is obviously efficient. We are talking about simply emailing the post to individuals you think would be interested. Remember, a good blog post is not about generating a sale. It is about bringing the reader closer to who you are and what you are doing. Over time, they might become a customer. But for now, the focus is on getting them to know who you are and read a post for the first time. 

Sending a blog post via email is a great way to let someone know you are thinking of them without being annoying. A post sent via email is a great way to build rapport. Sending a post via email is also a great way to give the recipient a simple way to share the post as well. They can simply forward the email along!

Link it up

Another great way to increase the number of visitors to a post is to link to it on another page, another post, or another site entirely.  Believe it or not, people often DO click on the links in a blog post if the phrasing of the link and the content around it are interesting. Cross-promoting other posts on your blog to and from each other is as old as blogging itself. For some reason, however, we come across an extraordinary number of posts that only link to product pages and contact forms. 

This, of course, is a mistake. Readers are smarter than given credit for. When it comes time to get in touch or learn more about what service or good you are selling, they will be able to find your main site with little difficulty, I promise.  You certainly can use a call-to-action at the end of a post, we do it often as well.  But that shouldn’t be the only thing clickable in the post. Do not forget to add internal links to blog posts. 

If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it…

If you publish a post or any piece of content, you should take the time to ensure that someone actually reads it.  Over time, your blog readership may increase to the point where marketing each post is not as important. That said, even the biggest and most well-known brands in the world spend resources on marketing their content. If your ability to promote your content is constrained in any way, the five suggestions above will give you a leg up on the vast majority of posts being published each day.

Believe it or not, most of the blog posts, whitepapers, ebooks, and case studies published online receive very little proportional effort after they are published. By investing even the smallest amount of time and energy in promoting your content you can be a step ahead of the competition.