Blog Promotion sites

What’s your most successful method of promoting a blog post or other single piece of content?

So without further ado, here are their answers!

1. Empower your readers with social sharing buttons.

Empower readers to share your content as they consume it by placing the Digg Digg floating social share bar along the left side of your content as people scroll down the page. This enables them to easily promote your content to their favorite social channels. A good tip is to make sure it appears only after people have scrolled a bit down the page. See it implemented at Social Media Examiner.

~ Mike Stelzner is the founder of Social Media Examiner and host of the Social Media Marketing Podcast.

2. Link out to bloggers with large followings.

So I’m assuming you don’t have a huge mailing list to share your latest post with. And I’m also assuming you don’t have a massive budget to run an advertising campaign. So how then does a blogger successfully promote a brand new blog post? Well, a lot of it is about contacts.

One tricky little thing I do is to write a massively useful post and in that post link out to bloggers/authors who have large followings on Google+ or Twitter. When the article goes live you shoot them a message letting them know that you mentioned them and nine times out of ten they will share your content. If you’ve mentioned them in a nice way with a high quality article you’ll often find yourself with new friends and contacts and a big new flood of traffic.

3. Target content topics for the people you want to promote them.

The post promotion that was my game-changer was taught to me by Jon Morrow of Boost Blog Traffic, to give credit. It’s to write a post on a topic that you know a particular top blogger would find interesting, and then to target it specifically to them on Twitter, at a time when you see they’re on there, with a reach-out like, “@bigblogger – your readers might enjoy [blog post title] [LINK].”

You can see the one I sent out being retweeted by my intended target, Darren Rowse of Problogger, below. This crashed my server it sent so much traffic over, and was really the start of my blog being discovered by a wider audience.

— Darren Rowse (@problogger)

4. Connect with influencers in your market.

In today’s world, content marketing is where it’s at. People are looking for valuable things to share with their followers and fans. If you have a valuable piece of content that you want shared more widely, make sure you have built up connections with other influencers in your niche. This doesn’t happen overnight. Start by sharing their content (be a giver before you ask for a favor) and connecting with them either live in person or through things like Skype or Google+ hangouts.

Once you have built up connections with other influencers, they may naturally share your great content but they might also miss it. You can do things like e-mail them and ask them to share it. Have a pre-written 140-character tweet that they can easily cut and paste to make it easy. Or tell them which article you want share and make sure your social buttons are easy to find for them to share it. I am part of a couple of groups that do this for each other such as The Best Keynote Speakers. Another way you can do this is through tools like Triberr or Social Media Buzz Club. Make sure you are sharing their content as well and only occasionally asking for shares to salesy content.