A steady stream of interested site visitors are a Blogger’s life line. It’s the reason Bloggers sit at their computers crafting their awesome content and publishing it. Every Blogger wants to get their Blog post read.
Bloggers put in a great deal of effort to identify topics that engage their site visitor’s interests.
They research the Internet for what authority Bloggers are saying about these same topics.
Finally they identify an angle that would appeal to their audience.
Then they create an outline for their epic post.
Finally they spend hours writing, editing and polishing their Blog post, so that they can publish the very best content possible.
All of this effort is because Blogger’s want to get their Blog posts read AND engaged with. That is what satisfies a Blogger’s soul.
Then – The engagement is really small with (zero or) just one or two comments.
(Sounds familiar?).
Getting Traffic To Your Posts
Unfortunately traffic will not come to your Blogsite to read and engage with your Blog posts without You doing something about it.
YOU have to:
- Promote you Blog post
- Create a Buzz on the Internet about the post
- Place excerpts of your Blog post on various social streams where your audience hangs out
- Ask friends, family, acquaintances and more, to promote your post on their social streams
- Do some – paid for – advertising if when necessary
It’s mandatory that step out of your comfort zone AND promote the heck out of your post.
NOTE: Authority Bloggers, have time and again, said they spend four times their time and energy promoting their Blog post as compared to creating a post. Hence, ball park, if you spend an hour creating a post budget four hours promoting the same post.
How Do You Promote Your Post?
Far too many Blogger assume that promoting a new post just requires:
- Tweeting about it a few times
- Posting this on their FB time line and hitting Like
- Sharing the post once on a few social networks they belong to
This level of promotion is fine if you are an authority Blogger with 1,000’s of followers.
Until you get 1,000s of faithful followers there are only two things you can do really.
- Spend money to promote the Post
- Reach out to people – Who already have the audience you need to reach
If you are a – New Blogger – it’s likely that you don’t have the budget to pay for promoting your post. Hence let’s focus on 2 above.
Here’s a tried and tested work flow to focus on, which will help promote your posts using Blogger outreach.
Warning: These steps take time to gather momentum and deliver the results you want
BUT
When done correctly 1,000s of people will see your Blog posts and all the hard work put in to create the post will pay off handsomely.
Are you ready to spend the time promoting your post? If Yes, continue reading.
To Increase Your Mailing List Offer Irresistible Incentives – http://t.co/RoAnBUxaZH pic.twitter.com/zcSB9hmz4x
— DMTMumbai (@DMTMumbai) October 2, 2015
Know The People Who Were Interested In Your Post
Truthfully no one will share a post if its content was of no interest to them. Which raises the question:
How to find people who have shown an interest in your post topic?
Here’s how:
- Identify other posts about the same topic that did well
- Then identify the people who linked to it and/or shared the post on their social streams
Here’s how to find posts, on the same topic, that did well.
Use BuzzSumo
Here’s what BuzzSumo says right at the top of its home page.
- Analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor
- Find the key influencers to promote your content
Pay careful attention to the second line i.e. Find the key influencers to promote your content
BuzzSumo is not free it’s priced at USD 99/- per month currently, BUT the information delivered is real gold. When you want to grow into an authority Blogger then I recommend that you leverage BuzzSumo statistics really strongly.
Use Google
Google is my go to partner whenever I’m searching for anything on the Internet.
You just need to tweak the way you search on Google to get what you are looking for. When you do, the results are just perfect.
Search for great – Content Resources – i.e. people who have already done the hard work for you. Now you can just leverage that information. Here’s what I do when I search for great – Content Resources.
If I were searching for – List Building – guides for example, in the Google Search window I might enter – Ultimate List Builders Resource Guides – as shown in diagram 2.
Diagram 1
What Google returns to me is shown in diagram 2.
Diagram 2
111, links to exactly the kind of content I want.
Here are some search phrases YOU can use in the Google search window. These ought to help you find appropriate posts in almost any niche.
niche + “all time best”
niche + “best 2015?”
niche + “top 100?”
niche + “top 50?”
best niche posts “2015”
Remember to replace – niche – with the name of the niche you are searching for content in. Mix between different keywords, search for previous year’s best content and so on. This approach really works.
After you’ve found the posts you’re interested in, search for the people who linked to them and/or shared it with their friends.
Here’s how to do this. There are several tools that will help with this task:
- Ahrefs Site Explorer
- Open Site Explorer by Moz
Personally I prefer Ahrefs Site Explorer:
- Navigate to the site Ahrefs Site Explorer
- Enter the link of the popular post you found about your topic
NOTE: Choose exact URL, and click on search links
- Wait for results and click export, and then choose CSV or PDF
- Check the site owners and put them in a spreadsheet
- Repeat steps 2-4 for the rest of the posts you have
- Create a specific spreadsheet for every post
NOTE: If you export as a CSV you can copy / paste each CSV exported into a separate XL sheet.
The output of ahrefs is as shown in diagram 3.
Diagram 3
You will now have a XL workbook with multiple sheets of relevant information about all those who linked to the Blog post you’ve mentioned in the Site Explorer, search window.
Finding – Influential – People Who Shared Your Blog Post On Twitter
I’ve found Topsy to be a great tool for this job. It’s free to use. You can identify only the influential people who re-tweeted your content. Hence, you can focus on the 10% of people who deliver 80% of your results.
- Navigate to the Topsy home page
- Enter the URL of the post for which you want to find people who re-tweeted the post
- Choose tweets
- Click – Search
- Sort the results by influential only
And
- You’re done. Easy peasy
As shown in diagram 4
Diagram 4
Create a spreadsheet that identifies the influencers who re-tweeted it and/or linked to it.
Find Their Email Addresses
Once you have the list of influencers, you’ll need their Email addresses to connect with them.
NOTE: Trying to connect with an influencer via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or another social stream may not get you the results you are looking for. Although nothing says you cannot try this out.
Even though influencers get a lot of Email each day, your chances of getting through to them is higher using Email than trying to connect via a social stream.
How do you get their Email Addresses?
- Subscribe to their email newsletter. Reply to the first email you get.
- Use VoilaNorbert. Its idea is simple, you insert a name and the site URL. The tool will try to find the email in the MX records. Brilliant!!!
As shown in diagram 5.
Diagram 5
You may not come up with the email of everyone on the list, and that’s OK. Move on.
Keep at it, until you have a list of about 100 influencer email addresses to email.
After having the list ready, you have to reach out to them via email.
Reach Out To Them
This is the trickiest part, even though you are reaching out to those Bloggers who already are interested in our topic.
If all goes well when you reach out to them, you will see an awesome jump in traffic to your Blog.
Here are a few things pointers to keep in mind when you craft that all important engagement Email to then:
- Make your email short
- The recipients are very busy people. They don’t have time to read lengthy mails about you
- Make it about how you can add value to their audience. NOT about you.
- Personalize the Email content. Mention them by name. Start your Email with something about them
Having all this in your engagement email, will make your response rate higher.
Warning: A large number of people you email will not respond to you.
They may not even notice your email because they’re terribly busy. Don’t take it personally. Just expand your mailing list size and repeat this process. Move onwards and outwards.
Get Your Blog Post Read By Those Who Matter https://t.co/Kg9iQfyX10 #Blogging pic.twitter.com/PF0f9Go6j9
— DMTMumbai (@DMTMumbai) October 28, 2015
Please Leave Your Comments They Really Are A Huge Help
Please share how you market your Blog posts, my readers will be delighted if you did. They would be really grateful.
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