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You are a subject matter expert contributing to thought leadership on a corporate blogging program. You dedicate quality time to crafting exciting blog texts. But your impact is limited when leaving the promotion opportunity to paid social media on corporate accounts. Without your active involvement in the promotion, you leave the job half done, limiting the reach and traction for your blogpost.
The two primary reasons why bloggers also need to be promotors
As a corporate blogger, you compete in a very crowded marketplace. One-third of all websites in the world are blogs, and seven million blog posts are published every day.
Limiting promotions of a blog post to paid social media and advertising require budgets and eliminates a crucial supporter group, a blogger’s family, friends, colleagues, and industry contacts.
This blog post will support corporate bloggers in changing their approach and quickly unlock the total value of their writing efforts. By adopting these suggestions, bloggers will improve their personal brand and networks, and corporations will see better traction with the blog posts.
Possible beliefs that are holding you back from promoting your blog post
The reasons why we stop after having written the blogpost vary from blogger to blogger. One or several of the following can be in play
- My personal brand recognition is marginal compared to the company I represent.
- I blog for a large corporation, and by having company blogs, every blogpost also gets a large audience once published.
- I only plan to write a few blog posts for my company.
- Acceleration of corporate blog post traction comes from paid social media led by marketing.
- I limit my professional social media presence to LinkedIn and want to keep it free from corporate promotions.
- I don’t have time to interact with readers who want to engage after reading my blogpost
- I am an Executive and leave influencing and promotion through blogs to marketing.
Independently of which one of these applies to you, they hold you back from maximizing the outcome of your creative work.
Influential bloggers have a bigger perspective on their blogging
The best corporate bloggers think differently
- realize writing is half the job – promotion is the other half
- see blogging on a corporate platform as a unique opportunity to grow your personal brand.
- View social promotion like movie trailers and book signing tours, a necessary evil to be successful.
You can change this quickly by adopting a new blogging mindset. Start by seeing every blog post as an opportunity to improve your personal brand. Second, plan to dedicate as much time for promotion as you do to writing. Last but not least, think throughout the process what is the part of the blogpost that can serve as the hook in the “trailer” you will need for the promotion journey.
When you dive deeper into the promotion part and the role of personal and corporate social media accounts, you see:
- The potential promotion impact is the sum of personal and corporate social media networks.
- Own/earned social media play a crucial role in leveraging the blog author’s biggest fans (friends, family, colleagues, and business contacts) and dedicating paid media to acceleration rather than foundation.
- An exciting opportunity is to reach the networks of your network – living one like or comment away from your own social media posts.
- Reinforce your corporate peers’ posts – don’t expect all your colleagues to support you unless you help them back.
Every blog post needs connections to recognized names to take off
The link to a great corporate brand name and an established blog platform is a great start but not enough to guarantee success. A blog post needs support by names on individuals for the promotion, like promoting movies with lead and supporting actors’ names playing a pivotal role. When promoting your blog post, you look for three types of names:
- the author/s – and how established their personal brands are.
- Industry peers who will appreciate and engage with your thoughts – both inside and outside your company.
- influencers that can amplify the reach of your blogpost
Engage in the post-publication conversations to add color and get feedback
The ultimate goal for a good promotion post is to see how other people engage with your posts. Nothing has a better impact than likes on LinkedIn and Twitter and comments. This final step after writing and promoting serves three purposes for you:
- to gauge the impact of your post – compared to when you made a similar promotion last time.
- to share additional insights with your audience – responding to questions or offering clarifications
- to gain initial insights about your audience – whom did I trigger, and what can I learn from their interactions.
LinkedIn and Twitter are two different media. You can post on LinkedIn and expect a post to be active for days. On Twitter, the life of your promotion is less than an hour, which affects the types of interactions you can expect.
Five promotion actions to take next time you publish a blog post
I have found five actions to make it easy to promote a blog post. These actions are hard for anyone else than the authors to perform.
- Provide three (3) of your personal social accounts for your marketing team to leverage, e.g., LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube Channel.
- Provide the three (3) hashtags you want to influence, two or three where conversations around your topics are already happening, and if applicable, one new you are trying to build up.
- Provide three (3) names that can increase the traction of your blogpost, e.g., someone with an extensive social network, someone whose opinion many trusts, and someone you want to see your post.
- Record a brief video with your smartphone to promote your blog post for posting on personal and corporate social media accounts. 5-15 seconds for Twitter and 30-60 seconds for LinkedIn.
- Be active in promoting and engaging on your social media accounts on top of your company’s activities on corporate accounts.
These facts will be invaluable for anyone trying to promote your blog, for yourself, your peers, and your corporate social media team.
Type of social media promotion formats to consider on your personal accounts
A corporate blog post comes with social media scripts for promotion on owned and paid media social media. As an author, you need to pay attention to what you will post on your accounts and make your promotions different. You don’t want to be another channel for the corporate scripts, but the authentic promotions from you.
Proven recipes to copy are:
- personal thoughts on why/what you want to share the blogpost
- snappy one-liners that trigger interest in your blog post
- a video of your with a short message, five to fifteen seconds long
- a customized GIF, impactful but require resources for the creation
What makes your promotions important is that they represent an authentic voice from the authors/s. Social media audiences trust people more than corporate brands, and you want to be the trusted reason why an audience should read. With the five actions in place, this is the easy part to complete.
Questions to ask yourself
- What was holding me back from promoting my blog posts properly before, lacking insights or lack of personal commitment?
- Where do I stand with regards to promotion skills today – am I ready to promote my posts well tomorrow?
- Do I have a view of the five proposed actions for my most recent blog post?
- Which colleagues’ blog posts can I start promoting to improve my promotion skills and start offering favors before asking for favors in return?
Additional reading suggestions
- 4 most effective methods for promoting your blogpost [ARTICLE] – by Lilach Bullock in Forbes
- 12 tried and true ways to promoting your blogpost [BLOGPOST] – by Mark Xavier Quadros at Hubspot
- How to promote your blog with 107 content promotion tactics [BLOGPOST] – by Nathan Ellering at CoSchedule
- The uncensored guide to promoting a blogpost [BLOGPOST] – by Neil Patel
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