The Entrepreneur Cast

The 10-Step Checklist for Promoting Your Next Blog Post

Episode Summary

Sam and Jayson discuss 10 potential tactics to use in promoting blog posts, ranging from SEO optimization and social sharing, to content syndication and content re-purposing. If you're a content creator, this will help you get eyeballs on what you create!

Episode Notes

Episode #5 - The 10-Step Checklist for Promoting Your Next Blog Post

Sam McRoberts, CEO of VUDU Marketing and the author of Screw the Zoo, and Jayson DeMers, CEO of EmailAnalytics, discuss 12 content marketing ideas to get your content strategy off the ground.

With many decades of combined business and digital marketing experience, Jayson and Sam will walk you through everything you need to know as you go through your own entrepreneurial journey.

Websites mentioned in the podcast:

-New episodes go live every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 8am Pacific-

Episode Transcription

Sam: Welcome to the Entrepreneur Cast, your source for tactical lessons in entrepreneurship from a cast of entrepreneurs. I'm Sam McRoberts. 

 

Jayson: And I'm Jayson DeMers.

 

Sam: And today we're going to talk about the exact steps that you need to take to promote every blog post or piece of content that you publish.

 

Jayson: Yeah, and I'm going to start with number one. Really before you start with any other promotion activity, you need to be sure that blog post is SEO optimized. And, Sam for you and me maybe it's no surprise that we start with SEO, because that's sort of our bread and butter, our go to marketing strategy that we both know and love. 

 

Sam: Absolutely. 

 

Jayson: So, SEO is really important for every page on your site, especially for blog posts, it's going to be at least in my experience, the number one traffic driver to your pages, in many cases, especially as a startup. So, how can you make sure your page is SEO optimized? What I like to do if your website is on WordPress, you can use a plug in, a popular one is Yoast, that is probably the most well known and most used SEO plugin that I know of. And what I like about it, is that it gives you sort of a checklist for any page that you're on, including any blog post that tells you what you can do to maximize the SEO visibility of that page. So for instance, you enter into it's a module, what keyword you want this post to rank for. And then it will scan your post and tell you what you need to do, what you've done while or what you still need to do to optimize it. Examples would be, does your title include the keyword? Do your H1 and H2 tags include the keyword? And it even goes into things like, is your keyword in the alt text of any images? Do you have internal and external links? And one other element that's sort of up for debate in the SEO community would be keyword density even. Which is I know that Sam you love keyword density.

 

Sam: Exactly.

 

Jayson: So, keyword density is sort of a concept from SEO in the days of old. And it's still around today, you still see it in tools like Yoast, where they're going to essentially evaluate the amount of content on your page versus how many times you use the keyword. I really wish they'd take it out. 

 

Sam: The simple heuristic is make sure if there's a specific keyword you want to rank for, make sure you use it on the page, probably a couple times in those key places, title H1 once or twice, or maybe a little more in the body text. But at the end of the day, like make sure that you write the content that looks like it was written by a human, for a human, doesn't have keywords jammed in weird places. Like it's not that hard to tell if you've done a good job talking about your topic or not. And you don't. Yeah, they're not to go overboard. 

 

Jayson: It's true. I will say one thing though, I am obsessed with getting the little green light with a little smiley face, I think it's a little green smiley face. You know, in Yoast, when you've checked off all the boxes, on their SEO to do list and it gives you that little green face and I cannot rest until I get that and unfortunately that means that I have to get my keyword density above a certain point that they deem is appropriate. So, maybe I'm still a slave to the concept of keyword density. Even though I agree with you. It probably doesn't matter much in the algorithm, but it matters for me getting my green light.

 

Sam: The things we do for our green smiley faces. 

 

Jayson: Yes, we all want green smiley faces from Yoast, that makes you feel good when you hit that Publish button. So, that's number one. Make sure your post is SEO optimized, so that it will be found in search engines.

 

Sam: Number two and closely related to that is internal linking from other blog posts into whatever new piece of content you created. Now, this is huge. And I love using a farming analogy to help this kind of make sense. Everybody who links to your website from other websites, those links flow a bit of value into your site. And it's much like water flowing into a reservoir at a farm, right. Once you have your water in your reservoir, you're hooked up to that water supply, you then need to divide that through your irrigation channels out to all of your different segments of crops right, and you need to make sure that each crop is getting the right amount of water at the right time, not too much, not too little, internal linking is the same way, you need to make sure that you're flowing that value that's coming from outside inside to your most important pages. 



 

Generally, the pages that are most important would be linked to the most internally from the most prominent places using really good anchor text that describes those pages and uses the keywords you're trying to rank for. And this way, you know, you can help those pages to rank really well without having to have a whole bunch of external links pointing directly to that new piece of content or blog post that you created, which can be pretty hard.

 

Jayson: Yeah, it is hard to get to get inbound links. So, what I like to do when I publish a new blog post is, I will immediately just go back through my blog, through all my other posts. And I'll think about what posts would make sense to link or reference to this new one. And then I'll go in and I'll edit those posts, and I'll add all links in. And one thing that I really like about internal linking is that you can use exact match anchor text, in other words, anchor text, that is the exact keyword for which you want that post to rank to rank for. So, reason why that's cool is because you can't do that, at least not to any significant extent with links that come in from external websites, because that's a big spam flag for Google. But Google doesn't care if you do that with your internal links. So, it's a great way to tell Google or to sort of influence Google in exactly what keyword you want any page on your site to rank for. So really, leverage internal linking, I think it's an underrated tactic for SEO that I think not a lot of people think about, when you think of link building, you think of external links, we'll think about building links internally as well. It's almost as important.

 

Sam: And I'd say if you don't know what anchor text is, essentially, that's whatever the link says, if it says click here, or whatever dot com, or this is a great blog post about this topic, you know, whatever it is, you want the link to say, that's your anchor text. And ideally, it should say, whatever the main topic, keyword phrase of that page is within your own site.

 

Jayson: Yep, you got it. So, number three would be sharing your post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or essentially really any social media profile or account that you think would be relevant for your audience. So, one thing I like to do when I put up a new blog post is I will create a LinkedIn post to my network. And I'll put some sort of teaser text in it you know, something, maybe an interesting stat from the post or something that surprised me or really some interesting key takeaways. And, I'll say, essentially here's the new post, here's the title, here's the link. For more information, go check out the full post. 

 

So, if you check out my LinkedIn profile, you'll see how I've been doing this. And it's been working really well for me, for getting eyeballs on my posts. Another thing you can do is join relevant LinkedIn groups. So you know, if you're in a b2b space, find some b2b LinkedIn groups, and you can go in there and post your content, just make sure that the rules allow for that, many groups are cool with that, some groups aren't, so just double check. Same thing on Facebook as well. Although Facebook is more for I would say maybe b2c, rather than b2b. Pinterest and Instagram are also good, they're more for visual based content. So, maybe if you've got an infographic on your posts, or if the post is more visually oriented, you can go share there as well. So, that would be number three for me. You know, go leverage your social media audience.

 

Sam: Speaking of social, I'd say number four, Quora and Reddit. So Quora, you know, which we've talked about before is a place where you can go and ask questions and provide answers to other people's questions. And then Reddit, of course, which has, you know, more subreddits and topics and themes, rabbit holes that you can dive down than pretty much anywhere else. But with Quora, if you've written a new piece of content, you can go search Quora for questions that are about the topic you've just covered in your blog post, or you can even flip it around, you could look for unanswered questions on Quora, and then co create really good content to answer that question on your site. Go to Quora, write out a really good answer link to your post for additional information and more color on the topic. And then same thing for Reddit, you can search, you can find subreddits that are related to the topic you've written or created content for, and then post your content in there if it's within the rules of that subreddit. And if it fits, you know, if it makes sense. But those can be really great places to get in front of your target audience, in front of people who are interested in exactly what you've just created content for. Those are the type of people who are likely to link to you, share what you've created, you know, boost that for you.

 

Jayson: Yep, I really like Quora and Reddit. Number five would be to tag any people or companies who you mentioned in your content. So, what I mean by tag, this could be on, really, I guess, I'm sort of talking about social media. But you could also send an email to anybody who you mentioned and say, hey, I just put up a new blog post. I referenced your quote, or your statistic here, just thought you'd like to know. And what you'll find is that often people will say, hey, that's awesome, thanks. And then they'll share it with their audience. Right, Sam? I mean, have you have you tried this?

 

Sam: Absolutely. That's the ego bait and reciprocity. One, two punch, works like a charm.

 

Jayson: Oh, yeah. So, tag people on social media, you can send them an email if you have that. Just let them know that you gave them some love, and you'll often get some love back in return.

 

Sam: Speaking of email number six, you can do an email blast, you know if you've built out an audience or an email list that you have access to, you can send out an email, a newsletter and share your new piece of content, you don't have to do it for every single piece of content you create, you could do a roundup every two or three pieces, or if it's really relevant and timely and something that you think your audience would be interested in, go ahead and do a direct outreach via email. But an email audience is fantastic, because you have direct access, you don't have to go through any intermediaries, there's not going to be an admin who takes it down. On the flip side, you know, maybe 30, or 40% of people ever actually open those emails, and some smaller percentage of those will actually click on the link. But still, you're getting in front of an audience that already has some interest in you. And that can be a really effective way to promote new content that you create.

 

Jayson: Yeah, it can get more eyeballs on your content, and you don't know who's checking it out, but the more people who find it, the more people who can share it. And if there are any journalists or authors or bloggers who come across that content, well, then they might think about it when they're doing their next article or content piece and they might reference it in that which will help them to further extend its reach. So, getting those eyeballs is super important. So, for number seven, I would say link to you to your new blog post from your guest posts. So, we covered guest posts in a previous episode. But essentially, you want to be reaching out to various external publications and creating content for them, for their audiences. So, within that content, what you can do is link to, or reference your own blog posts, which will essentially drive not only referral traffic, but SEO value to that post because of the inbound links. So, it's a pretty simple extension of your guest posting strategy to just be sure to link to your own blog posts. And I find that that works really well, helps to boost the SEO, helps get more eyeballs on your content.

 

Sam: I'm going to go down a little side rabbit hole here again. Guest posts. Google doesn't like these. They have harped on them repeatedly over the years. They just did it again, one of their webmasters, the Google web cam team commented on it. Guest posts are fine, ignore them. Google kind of dislikes them because sometimes they're paid for or compensated in some fashion. And that usually isn't revealed, the links are typically followed. Unfortunately, it's really difficult algorithmically to determine if a guest post was compensated or not, editorially given, normally written, and so on. Like Google, Google doesn't like stuff that messes with their link index, and that they can't handle algorithmically or even like, effectively, manually, you know, they don't know for sure that that guest post was compensated, and so they can't really take action. And so, it's easier for them to scare people off, but I say keep doing it.

 

Jayson: Well, I mean, I would have to look at, what is the non-digital version of guest posting, wouldn't it be like, like having somebody come to your seminar or your event and give, I guess a lecture. I mean, that would be the non-digital version of a guest post, essentially. And would anybody say there's anything wrong with having a seminar and having a guest speaker? I hope not right.

 

Sam: You're right. It's that Google, really doesn't like the pay to play. They want the link index; you know how sites connect together and they want it to be purely organic. Right? Which is kind of stupid, I think, in my opinion. I mean, the world isn't that sort of altruistic, people want stuff, there's incentives to do things a certain way. And I'm afraid it's just always going to be the same way with the web, you know, until Google figures out a way to make links be completely unnecessary for the ranking algorithm, they're just going to have to suck it up and deal with it. 

 

Jayson: Agreed.

 

Sam: Agreed. Which brings us to number eight, a text article, right. So, you can syndicate the content that you've created on places like medium on LinkedIn pulse, often a lot of other places. In some cases, you can even get content if it's really good syndicated on major sites, you know, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, like they also take guest columns in syndication in some cases. There are some risks here with this, like duplicate content can be a potential concern, generally as a non-issue as long as you have it up on your sight first, you make sure that it's been indexed by Google. And then when you do put it up or syndicated on another platform, make sure that those places link back to your original post as the original source just at the bottom of the article, you should be fine. This can be a really good way to get your content in front of a completely new set of eyeballs. Some people search for content within medium or search for it within LinkedIn or search for it on these other places. And so, it just gives you more opportunities to show up in front of people that may not have seen it in your original posting location.

 

Jayson: Yeah, absolutely. What I like to do is, I like to wait maybe a week or so after I've posted a blog on my  own website, just to give Google enough time to make sure it's indexed and categorize it and assign me and my website as the canonical source or essentially as the original source, and then that's to save time span away, and then you can take that article and you can post it up on medium.com or LinkedIn polls. And and as Sam said, there are sites as well, but those two are just two that come to mind as easily accessible sources for anybody that have good reach. And the goal here is not to get those articles to rank in Google search results, because actually, if they were doing that, that would probably mean that they use sort of your own websites, blog posts as the canonical source, which is not, that's not good. 

 

But, what can happen is people who are on medium can search within medium for instance, and find the article there, where they might not have performed that search in Google, maybe they'll perform the search in medium. And same with LinkedIn pulse, you can find LinkedIn articles the same way there. So, it's a good way to extend the reach of your content. You don't have to change it, just put the same thing up. And just make sure you wait long enough, maybe a week or so you know, until after you post the original just to avoid any duplicate content, risks or concerns. So, number nine would be to repurpose your blog post into other formats. 

 

So, you can do this in a number of ways. Just let's take an example. I recently put up an article called the 77 remote work statistics to know in 2020. So, what I did with that post was I took my 10 most interesting statistics from that list of 77, at least the 10 that I thought were most interesting. And I had an infographic created for those 10. And then I was able to take that infographic. And by the way, I titled that infographic 10, remote work statistics that are interesting for 2020. Same blog, same title as the blog post, but just a smaller number. And I took that infographic and I shared that on Reddit and on LinkedIn, and various other places where it makes sense to share visual or image content. And that extended the reach of that post. Of course, I included a link back to the original blog posts and I put the infographic in the original blog post so that it's all sort of there in that hub. So, that's an example of how to turn text into an image. And by the way, if you need help creating an infographic, I recommend Fiverr. I have a guy on Fiverr, who use to help me turn data into infographics and he's great. And it's like 60 or 70 bucks per infographic, which is pretty cheap.

 

Sam: I feel like Fiverr is kind of like a flea market, like you really don't know exactly what you're going to get. Sometimes, it's absolutely fantastic, and sometimes it's absolutely terrible, but at least you're not out very much

money. 

 

Jayson: No, you're not. And if you can find a hidden gem, just keep working with that person, you know, and at least you know, you've got a good source. So, aside from images, like infographics, think about if you can turn this blog post, maybe into a YouTube video, can you go on camera and sort of talk about this topic for five minutes? Well, you could make that into a video. Can you take this topic and turn it into an audio podcast? Perhaps, podcast. Well, you probably can, because podcasts are becoming, they've been popular for a long time, but I feel like their popularity is still climbing rapidly, don't you think so?

 

Sam: Totally. I mean, when we've done all this, I actually did this recently, I read a really long blog post a while back that's done fairly well on diagnosing traffic drops. I've turned it into a webinar, we covered a bunch of pieces from that in one of our previous podcasts, we've totally used articles that are performed well as inspiration for some of the podcast subjects, like, you know, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to create one thing and then get it out in different mediums get more bang for your buck, like why not?

 

Jayson: Yeah, definitely. And, for every piece of content that you create, whether it's repurposed or not, repeat steps one through seven, that we covered, essentially, to promote each of those individually, using these various steps that we've covered. So, don't just promote the one piece and then repurpose it and then not promote the repurpose pieces. What I'm saying is promote every piece of content, even if it's repurposed and you'll get the most bang for your buck.

 

Sam: And that brings us to number seven, boosting what you've created with paid ads. Now, there are a lot of ways you can use paid ads to do this. Facebook and Twitter are probably the most common some of the easiest, but there's also Reddit ads. I don't know if stumbled upon ads are still a thing, but those actually used to be quite useful.

 

Jayson: I was looking for the ad Sam, I was looking into that, stumbled upon is actually dead. It's dead. 

 

Sam: Oh, they died? 

 

Jayson: Yeah. Like, if you visit it, like it redirects you somewhere else, but they're gone. Yeah. Because I was looking into this recently. So, it's just sort of an interesting aside, no, they're not.

 

Sam: Good to know. Yeah, I haven't used them in ages. Not since the point is, but yeah, like there are all these places, right? And the key is to figure out, where your audience is spending their time, right? That's always the key. So, does it seem like your audience is mostly on Facebook, mostly on Twitter, mostly on LinkedIn, mostly on Pinterest, you know, wherever it is that they're spending their time. That's the place to promote your content and get it in front of them. It also depends a lot on what type of content right. If it's video content, then promoting it on YouTube is probably a great idea, if it's image content then Pinterest or Instagram, maybe Facebook, but Instagram is better for image stuff at this point, but using paid ads to boost that content and get it in front of the right people who could then potentially link to it, share it, comment on it, you know, lift that up, and it doesn't take much. You know, I found typically for a piece of content, 20 bucks on Facebook or Twitter ads is more than enough to really get it seated and running.

 

Jayson:  It's true. And you know, we've talked about, I'm not sure did you mention Reddit ads, Sam? Because, we've talked about Reddit in a couple episodes. But one thing that you can do without having to worry about pissing off any of the users of any subreddit is you can actually buy Reddit ads where it looks like a post that you made, but it can be as promotional as you want, because it's tagged as an ad. And people don't mind that at all. So, if you want to just skip the you know, tiptoeing or walking around on eggshells and making sure you don't irritate any Reddit users you can just try Reddit ads too.

 

Sam: And they can be really effective, especially if you get Reddit humor and you know how to write an ad that's going to appeal to your audience. They're like, it can perform better than an organic post. So, you just have to know what you're doing, know your audience.

 

Jayson: Yep. And you can choose what subreddits your ad will appear and and all that so, it's pretty cool. You can drill down with that, which is nice. 

 

Sam: I was going to say I'm pretty sure the cost per clicks there, they're still lower than a lot of other places. That is spot to death advertising.

 

Jayson: That's what I was just about to say, is that we are in the midst of the COVID-19, Coronavirus crisis right now. And I have heard from several different people who are in the know that paid ads are seeing something like a 50 to 60% drop in average CPC right now or cost per click. So, it seems like there's some nice opportunity out there to go get some paid ads. If you haven't dipped your toes in, it might be a good time, right. 

 

Sam: I'm also hearing conversion rates though, aren't as good. It depends a lot on on what space you're in. If its contents, you probably okay, if you're trying to sell something, even though the cost per clicks are lower, the conversion rates are also lower. And so, that may not work. But for content promotion, it should still be fun.

 

Jayson: Yeah, agreed, well, hey, these have been the 10 steps that we would take to promote a blog post. You know, hope that these steps, hope you find them useful. You know, give it a try and the next time you got a blog post and see if you get some more eyeballs on it.

 

Sam: Definitely. Thank you so much for listening. And if you'd liked what you've heard, it would help us a lot if you subscribe, rate and review the podcast in whatever platform you're listening to.

 

Jayson: Have a great day.