Creative Social Sharing to Promote Your Blog
How are you sharing your blog? How are you making sure your content is found and then shared?
Are you promoting yourself via social networks, or are you leaving that to your readers? Do you make sure potential clients know about your blog, if you’re using it as a business platform?
Are you simply using the standard sharing options - Twitter, Facebook, etc – or are you thinking of ways you can be a little creative when it comes to sharing your blog socially?
Let’s face it, if you’re using your blog as a business platform then the more eyeballs it gets, the better for finding potential new clients or customers. Even a personal blog can benefit from extra visitors.
So here’s a few ways you can get outside the normal views of retweets and shares, and promote your blog to a bigger crowd that may miss it otherwise.
Social Sharing Groups
The most oft-used method of sharing a blog post is via social sharing buttons on the post itself.
These are either located at the top and/or bottom of the post, or to the side. I use a mix of both – Digg Digg to offer the floating share bar to the left of this post, and Share This at the bottom.
But why not take this a little further, and create a social sharing group?
For example, one of the best resources for traffic to this blog is Stumbleupon. This is a great social sharing platform that lets you “stumble” the web, and allows you to give either a thumbs up or down to the site you’re currently on (you can also leave a review if you like).
What happens then is that the site is put into the Stumbleupon library, so anyone else using the stumble option could land on your blog. If they then like it, they give you a thumbs up and your currency increases on Stumbleupon. It’s easier than it sounds, and it’s a great passive traffic generator.
So create a Stumble group.
Grab about 10 of your online friends, and help promote each other’s blogs. Anytime a new post is published, have one of the group stumble it, then you can give it a thumbs up.
You can then take this idea to other social bookmarks - Reddit, Digg, Sphinn, etc. Just make sure you also highlight a lot of other great sites too – don’t create the group just to promote your work, that’s just spammy.
Turn Posts into Ebooks
You blog. You write. A lot. Depending on whether you’re a niche blogger or not, you might have a lot of posts on similar topics, or even run a blog series of interconnected posts.
So why not turn them into an ebook?
The market for ebooks is huge, and offers a great way for you to either give back to your blog community for reading you, or sell them as part of your business offerings.
Write a crafts blog? Put together some of your favourite tips and publish as an ebook. Chef? Collate some of your favourite recipes and sell them via your blog. And so on – the possibilities for what’s in your ebook are endless.
I put together a bunch of my short form posts on Posterous as a free ebook with some simple marketing ideas, and so far it’s been downloaded just over 2,000 times. So ebooks are definitely a great way to both give back and get back.
Turn Your Blog into a Slide
One of the best platforms around at the moment is Slideshare. Essentially taking PowerPoint presentations to the next level, Slideshare also allows uploads of PDF’s, documents and other presentations.
It then turns these into slideshows that you can either grab the embed code for or download to your hard drive, as well as the normal sharing options on Twitter and Facebook.
You can even add audio or talk tracks, or turn your slides into mini-movies.
So working from your ebook idea, collate some of your best posts on a topic and create a presentation. Edit the posts accordingly to make the best use of Slideshare’s capabilities (perhaps a connecting image, statistic or similar), and then upload and choose your sharing settings.
If folks like it and decide to embed on their own blog, you instantly have a new audience. That could go one step further, and businesses could pick up your kick-ass presentation and use it as a training resource.
The next potential step from that is to bring you on board to expand on your initial ideas – so now your original blog post has become both a training resource and a client lead.
Just Getting Started
These are just three ways that you could take the normal social sharing option, and add a little extra to help promote your blog.
You could also use the WordPress application on LinkedIn, or Networked Blogs for Facebook as another couple of alternatives. Or you could re-purpose old posts for publication elsewhere.
The thing is, just because you already have sharing options in place doesn’t mean you need to stop there. The great thing with blogs is that they can be essentially timeless, given the right post and topic. Why not use that?
How about you – what are you doing to extend the reach of your blog? Feel free to share your tips on what works for you in the comments.
23 Responses to “Creative Social Sharing to Promote Your Blog”
Great idea with the ebook options, Paul. I think I did some stuff with the Simple Marketing one, though not to the extent you share – so definite future steps to keep in mind, cheers.
Danny,
Nice advice to get us to look around and spread our wings a bit more. I would add cinchcast.com to the list.Keep doing good things!
Justin
Justin McCullough recently posted…. The Power of Positive Interaction
Thanks for the heads-up on CinchCast, Justin. Hadn’t heard of that one, but adding to my radar to check out.
Thanks for the advice, Danny. I appreciate that you’re always so willing to share. Great timing too! Someone on #blogchat mentioned StumbleUpon as a great tool. I have to explore that a little more.
–Coreen
Coreen recently posted…. Boost your creativity- Stop readingI actually wrote this post after #blogchat that week, Coreen, as I found it didn’t really go into the how too much. Glad to know this might help introduce you more to the delights of Stumbleupon
Talk about the secondary and tertiary channels, Danny. You’re so much in the money – as always
Typical herd mentality is to follow the leader – in this case the big three (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook). But there’s so much untapped potential in the other channels you mentioned here as well. We just need to pick and choose – and establish them formally as secondaries and tertiaries.
There are also two more perspectives I wanted to share:
1. Social sharing cannot come at the expense of our base camps. So often do I see missing (or weak) base camps – with all the effort being spent on social media. Not a good idea.
2. Synergy in social media happens when we can cross-pollinate channels. Putting YouTube videos on blogs, blogs on LinkedIn and Twitter – a lot of possibilities to explore there and an equally large number of combinations to experiment with!
Kapil Apshankar recently posted…. A Five Step Formula To Fulfill Your Social Media FantasiesThanks, Kapil. Agree completely about the strong basecamp to build the goodness from. And you might be interested in an experiment I’m prepping with cross-pollination in mind – details soon…
Some great advice here Danny, both from you and your readers! I love the idea of starting groups to comment on each others blog posts and to share them on several social networks. I am involved in just such a group and the traffic it brings to my blog is better than expected! We take it a step further and comment, tweet, post, etc on many social sites for one another.
I haven’t tried Slide Share, but am going to look into it! Thanks!
Blessings,
Celene Harrelson
The Happypreneur recently posted…. 10 Top Business Lessons From Jimmy D BrownWhat I like about groups is that, while you might share similar interests, you also have varied ones too. Which introduces you to great new sites and blogs – which can never be a bad thing.
You’re a big WordPress plugin promoter, I’ve noticed. I used to, too… and then I realized one day I wanted to reduce server load times for visitors and tinkered with PHP and CSS to create plugins without the plugins.
For instance, at the bottom of every article when you click my name you will see an author box and directly above and below that are assorted links for people to click. And, many do.
Ari Herzog recently posted…. Sharing TogetherWell I only really promote two in this post, Ari – the rest are either browser tools or embeddables.
But yeah, I’ve cut down on some plug-ins and when Headway releases 1.7, I’ll be cutting down on some more due to built-in tools.
Thanks for sharing Danny,
I used a few of them especially Digg Digg and it really worked out well for me. I’ve not tried the ebook and slides yet. Would love to try them in the future.
What do you think about wibiya? Seems like a lot of blogs are using them recently. Mari Smith talked about it as well on Social Media Examiner Tv.
Aaron
Aaron recently posted…. 6 Clever Ways to Use Twitter to Get Your Blog NoticedSocial media share bars offer a great way to extend the process. I’ve actually experimented with a few here previously (Wibiya, GigaOm and Meebo).
The only thing I dislike about them is the real estate they can take up. It can either distract from your reading, or add load time to a page.
But that’s just my own view – they’re very popular on many blogs. There was a great comparison recently over at Heat Web:
http://theheatweb.com/awesome-social-sharing-toolbars-blog-website/
Thanks for the article Danny,
I would like to add Video blogging “Youtube for Example” it is a great traffic’s generator especially if the video is customized well..
And Of course Guest Blogging …
Have A Great Day…For sure, Firas, and YouTube is something I’ll be taking a deeper look at in the near future.
Cheers for stopping by
Sharing is caring. Sharing external resources that benefit users immediately or in the long run is a great way of increasing authority online. I usually share most of external resources via twitter..
Danny, I used to do the SU thing and we had about 25 in our group. It worked great for a month or two, then obviously SU picked up on what we were doing with it’s algorithm and it became less and less effective.
We tried all sorts of ways to get round it, but eventually gave up. Is there anyway round that?
I still get a lot of inbound traffic from SU but the bounce rate is usually up around 85% and time on site about 1min 20sec. My single best source of quality traffic is from YouTube with an average read time of almost 8 minutes!
Tim Brownson recently posted…. Is This FreedomHey there Tim,
What I’ve used in the past (and perhaps SU’s algorithm has changed) is different posting points.
Instead of just submitting the blog URL, share on another site and Stumble from there.
Additionally, only Stumble posts that you’d like to see more traffic to, as opposed to every single post. And make it sparse – if you have 10 in the group, you only post something from yours every 10th time.
Every other submission is a non-group one.
@Tim Brownson I agree with the bounce rate from Stumble but it is good for additional eyes. Interesting to know about the group being found less than effective with their algorithms. I am part of a similar type group, though ours is with Twitter.
Since I am not familiar with your site what type of videos do you have on YouTube that are leading to such an incredible amount of time on your site?
Great post, most of these I already use however the one thing I would like to create is a short video about what I blog and talk about…thanks…for the reminder.
Purpleb recently posted…. And you thought I was lost“Turn Your Blog into a Slide” is the point for me.. Thanks Buddy..
Arif Nezami recently posted…. Gmail Introduces Priority Inbox
This was a much needed nudge for me to get those share buttons up on my site!
I’ve had a lot of success with sharing my blog posts in the Linkedin groups as news discussions. I make it a point to post the link in my status (on Facebook too)
One thing that I do whenever I put out an E Book is cross pollinate that effort a bit by putting a “PS” with a link in my auto signature. I will also send it to everyone in my network with a simple rule: “If you like it, pay it forward, if you don’t it deserves a one way trip to the round file” The last page of my E Books always have a “Cool Next Steps” page which include a link to subscribe as well as a link to my Linkedin group.
Looking forward to reading additional comments!
Respectfully,
Paul Castain
Paul Castain recently posted…. Is That All You Got