How to Promote Your Blog Content
I share often that even if you’re not “a blogger,” blogging is a great way to engage with your audience, establish yourself as an industry expert, improve your SEO and ultimately grow your business!
Blogging is, in and of itself, a form of marketing.
Content marketing, to be exact—a strategic approach of sharing valuable, relevant content that does not explicitly sell a product or service, but rather attracts and retains a specific target audience interested in your area of expertise.
Content marketing works by establishing your business as a helpful authority in your topic area, building an audience of people interested in this specific content, and driving interest in your paid products or services over time (as it also builds trust and rapport with your audience while doing that!).
The (many!) benefits of content marketing
Content marketing is a great way to grow your business by:
sharing valuable, helpful content with your audience
establishing yourself as an industry expert
building trust and rapport with your audience
sharing more about the products/services you offer and why they’re important (what need do they fill, what problem do they solve?)
growing your audience and connecting with new potential customers/clients
building SEO on your website
How to develop a content marketing strategy
An effective content marketing strategy has two parts:
Create high quality content relevant to your target audience
Promote your content to your target audience
Blogging is just one method of content creation (social media and YouTube videos are also options). But blogging is the foundational one we recommend here because it’s so text-heavy—aka, keyword-rich if you’re doin’ it right.
So, blogging also helps to grow your website’s SEO while providing the basis of your content marketing strategy—a double whammy for growing website traffic!
I’ve shared lots of blogging tips and resources before, so check those out for more details on things like writing quality blog content, structuring it to be SEO- and reader-friendly, and giving your blog a professional look and feel.
Once you’ve completed step 1 (writing quality, relevant blog content), we’ll get to work promoting it to the right audiences!
How to promote your blog posts with content marketing
Here are some of my favorite, cost-effective ways of promoting your blog content to grow your audience, industry authority, and ultimately your business:
Most people think of Pinterest as “just another social platform” but it’s actually not as much a social media platform as it is a visual search engine.
Wait, what?! Yes, Pinterest is another way for your content to be searched for and seen by people who are actively looking for it (i.e. potential clients).
How to promote your blog posts on Pinterest
Pinterest is one of my very favorite strategies for growing your website traffic (especially if you’re a new business or have a new website!).
Here’s how it works:
You create pins promoting your blog content.
You write keyword-rich descriptions that help your pins get found (same principles as website SEO!).
You share your strategically-captioned pins on your own boards and group boards.
Other Pinterest users re-pin your content, sharing it with even broader audiences.
As people come across your pins and click through to read the associated articles, they’re connecting with your website—and your exposure to new audiences grows.
Pinterest is highly effective at connecting your blog content with new audiences who are actually searching for that specific content. (Win-win!)
Pinterest content marketing tips & resources
While Pinterest alone is a great content marketing strategy, there are additional tools that help to manage Pinterest content and increase your exposure and rate of growth.
If you’re serious about growing your audience via Pinterest, here are even more details on optimizing your Pinterest strategy to promote your blog posts and grow your website traffic.
Squarespace social share buttons
There are a couple ways you can easily set up your Squarespace blog to encourage readers to share your blog content with their own audiences:
Encourage readers to pin your blog content
As Pinterest is one of the best places for promoting your blog content, you’ll likely want to encourage your existing blog readers to help you share your content there.
To do this, you can turn on Squarespace’s built-in Pinterest Save Button under Marketing > Pinterest Save Buttons. This button will then appear on the corner of any image you share on your blog, encouraging readers to pin the post (see below).
With this method, it can be helpful to include a properly-sized Pinterest-friendly image for users to pin, along with a message encouraging them to “Pin it!”
Here’s an example:
Encourage readers to share your blog content to their social media
Squarespace also has built-in share buttons that appear after each blog post, allowing readers to quickly and easily share that specific blog post to their own social network. With one click, readers can share to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Tumblr or Pinterest.
Access these buttons in the back-end of your Squarespace website via Marketing > Share Buttons. You can also stylize them in your style editor (Design > Site Styles).
With the social share buttons, we also recommend including a little note to accompany them, encouraging readers to take action (and also clarifying what the buttons do).
For example, here’s a note at the bottom of a wellness blog post encouraging readers to share the wellness-related article with someone who could benefit from it:
These built-in Squarespace features make it easy for readers to share your blog content on their own social platforms—which means more free content marketing for you!
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This post contains affiliate links through which I may earn a commission if you choose to purchase, at no additional cost to you. As always, these are products or services I personally use & love!
Social media
A caveat before jumping into social media as a form of blog promotion: promoting your blog content on social media is typically most effective if you already have an audience to promote it to. (The exception being paid promotions, which we’ll get to below.)
If you have a substantial social following, by all means link them to your website content. (Social media is great for growing community, but in most cases you’ll be making sales via your website so will want to get people over there!)
If you don’t have much of a social media following (yet), you can still share your blog content if you’d like—it’s just not likely to be the most efficient way to drive traffic to your blog.
How to use social media for content marketing
Here’s a general overview of how each social platform relates to sharing your blog posts via content marketing specifically:
Twitter: Twitter is one of the easiest platforms to share content without an established audience, as you’ll be able to use hashtags to connect your post to new audiences.
Facebook: You can share blog posts to Facebook, either on your personal page or business page. Squarespace will automatically use your blog post title, thumbnail image and post excerpt when sharing to Facebook.
Instagram: Instagram is a little more limited in sharing clickable links—your options are either to change your link in bio each time you have a new blog post (meh!), or to share the post with the swipe up link in Stories (if you have 10,000+ followers and access to the swipe up feature).
LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a great place to share content with your industry network—though your professional contacts may not be your target audience, they might re-share your content to their own audiences.
Promoting your blog posts with Facebook & Instagram ads
Facebook’s advertising platform offers the ability to “boost” a Facebook or Instagram post with a paid promotion to display it to new audiences that don’t yet follow you (so wouldn’t come across your post organically). This can be a beneficial way to expand your reach to new audiences who are likely to be interested in your content.
It may seem counterintuitive to spend advertising dollars promoting blog posts rather than your paid products, but many social media experts have found that new “cold” audiences that aren’t yet familiar with your business do require a bit of free content (like blog posts or freebie opt-in gifts) to grow trust and interest before purchasing paid products.
In this sense, your advertising dollars are going toward attracting new audience members into your broader sales funnel.
Email marketing
Do you have an email list for your business? (If not, here’s why you should start one! 😊)
It’s a good idea to use your email list to keep your subscribers engaged with your content by regularly sharing new blog posts via email.
How to promote your blog content with email marketing
Of course, you can use your branded email newsletter template to share your regular blog post updates.
In most cases, I recommend including no more than a one-paragraph post excerpt in your email—you want to share a little teaser that encourages readers to click through to read the full article on your website. This brings them to your website “hub” where you can easily connect them with additional content they may like and continue building that relationship with them. (And, of course, it helps your overall SEO to get more page views on your new blog posts.)
Note: If you share affiliate links in your blog posts, some affiliate programs (like Amazon Associates) have policies against distributing links via email—this means you’ll definitely want to avoid sharing full-length posts via email, and instead opt for sharing blog post excerpts that link back to your website for the full post.
Another way of promoting content via email is to include in your e-newsletter an invitation encouraging readers to forward the email to a friend who may like your content too.
Guest posting
Contributing content to another publication or blog typically comes with the added bonus of being able to link back to your own site. Partnering with a more established publication in this capacity can be a beneficial way of promoting your content to a larger audience.
Do a little research to determine which other websites or publications may be a good fit for you. Which industry publications do you read regularly yourself? Which sites do you know of that share content similar or complementary to yours?
Most major publications that accept content from bloggers and independent experts make their submission process and guidelines clear on their website.
Additionally, if you follow a blogger (or a business with a blog) and think your content would be a great fit for their audience—you can reach out and ask if they would be interested in having you contribute content via a guest post.
Content Marketing Tip: follow the 80/20 rule
In content marketing, it’s often said that 20% of your time should be spent creating content and 80% should be spent promoting it.
While the exact ratio may vary by business (and I definitely don’t recommend skimping on producing quality content!), it is true in most scenarios that you should spend at least equal time promoting your content as you spend creating it.
The rationale is: once you have amazing content ready to be shared, it’s only useful to your business if prospective customers/clients see that content. So, we’ve got to get it in front of them!
Try the tips above to promote your blog content to new audiences. And, be sure to grab my Blog Post Checklist for specific tips on producing those high-quality, SEO-friendly blog posts to use in your content marketing strategy:
Blog Post Checklist
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Grab my free Blog Post Checklist:
