Notify every person (and brand) you mention on your blog
1 Notify every person (and brand) you mention on your blog
One way to greatly increase your chances of having your content distributed, is to mention as many influencers as tastefully possible within your blog content. This is one of the most low-effort, effective strategies I’ve used to grow my blog for free over the years—it takes nothing more than your time.
The mention could be anything from including a quote by an influencer, to using their story as a case study, or simply linking back to one of their articles as an additional resource. The purpose is to build a meaningful relationship by providing value (in the form of a link) first.
As long as it’s contextual and there’s a good reason for you to mention them, you have yourself a great excuse to then cold email the influencer and ask them if your article is a fit to share with their audience. Don’t forget to make it as easy as possible for them to share (by providing them with easy copy or a link to an existing post that they can re-share).
Plus, even if they don’t end up sharing your content, this is still a great opportunity for you to network with influencers, get on their radar and plant the seeds for what could become a larger relationship over time.
2. Create highly shareable images
One of the very basics of making your content as shareable as possible (and thus grow your blog traffic) is to include shareable images within your blog post. By a quirk of human psychology, we humans are predominantly visual creatures that are far more likely to respond to pictures and videos than we are to only chunks of text.
Use tools like Visme and Canva to create social media-ready images of your blog content.
This is something I regularly do for all my articles, guides, courses and podcast episodes in order to make them more eye-catching and, consequently, more likely to get people to click through when they see my content being shared elsewhere online:
Kick your strategy on how to grow your blog up a notch by creating graphics specific to supporting sections within your individual blog posts. This can be something like a simple graph that visually represents a fact or statistic you just mentioned, or for the more artistically-inclined, you can even design a mini cartoon or comic strip like this example over on the Plan.io blog—ideally something that matches the aesthetics of your existing blog layout.
Not only does using high-quality images within your blog content make your post more readable by breaking up large chunks of text, but it’ll also make your entire article a lot more engaging to read, and far more likely to be shared.
3. Make sharing your blog content easy
The more effort it takes for someone to share your content, the less likely they are to share it.
This might seem to be a no-brainer, but there are a lot of blogs out there that don’t seem to have realized this yet—and are consequently missing out on crucial opportunities. If you want to grow your blog, then make sharing your content as painless and easy as possible for your readers to do.
Take advantage of tools like AddThis and ClickToTweet, where you can pre-prepare tweets for your audience and all they need to do is click the text and it’ll automatically share your article for them, like so:
Other simple things you can do to increase your content’s share-ability and grow your blog, is to include social media sharing buttons throughout your content and suggest which hashtags your audience can use.
4. Target the most active readers and sharers
There are influencers out there with millions of followers who haven’t created a single word of original content.
But they’ve managed to amass a large following because their followers can always rely on them to share the latest and best content within their niche—and these influential aggregators are a huge opportunity to tap into as a way to grow your blog.
One of my favorite tactics to get my content out there, is to identify who those influencers are and then to ask them (nicely) to share one of my blog posts that could be relevant to their audience.
Using a tool like Buzzsumo, I’m able to find users on Twitter who have both a large number of followers and an audience that’s likely to retweet the content (thus discovering even more people).
From there, all I have to do is send them a tweet or drop them a short email to let them know that I think they’d really enjoy my latest blog post, give them a compelling (genuine) reason why—and let them decide if it’s a good fit to share with their community.
5. Diversify your content delivery mediums
Believe it or not, everyone doesn’t consume content in the exact same way.
Some people enjoy reading long-form articles (hello there!), while others might prefer watching a video, or listening to a podcast. The great news is that you don’t need to come up with an entirely new topic, or even create any more content, to take advantage of these different content types as a vehicle for how to grow your blog.
As the name suggests, diversifying your content delivery is all about taking a single blog post and reworking it so that the same information can be expressed in a different way.
For example, if you’ve already written an exhaustive long-form article on something, consider turning that article into a pre-recorded webinar, embeddable video or podcast episode as well. Or, if your article is heavy with facts and figures like my guide on how to start a blog, it could do well spun into an infographic.
One very important thing to keep in mind before you start diversifying your content, is examining who your ideal customer profile is. There’s no point turning your blog post into mini-articles on Instagram if your audience doesn’t even use Instagram. If they do use Instagram however, consider creative ways you can employ things like Instagram automation tools to better scale your results on the platform without investing too much time as you experiment and learn.
Take a moment to think about what kind of content your audience likes to consume, and focus your efforts towards those specific types of content that stand a chance of helping to grow your blog.
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