It’s no secret that writing and maintaining a blog is a time-consuming effort.
If you’re just getting started, you may wonder if all of your work is paying off.
But, before you give up on blogging, you may need to look at some ways you can get your content to work harder for you.
Here are five ideas on how to do just that:
1. Promote your content via social media.
Although you may have an aversion to promoting your blog, it’s an essential way to drive more readers to your content.
Don’t subscribe to the “build it and they will come” mantra with your blog. Get out there and use social media to promote your blog. That means share it on the social channels you use regularly and comment on other blogs.
And, by all means, don’t be afraid to share your posts more than once. After all, only a small fraction of your audience sees a given post on a social network. Give people a better opportunity to see your content by sharing each post a few times.
2. Include posts in your email marketing.
Although many of your readers will use RSS or email subscriptions to get your content, there are plenty of others who will miss it unless you share it with them in other ways, such as your e-letter or email marketing efforts.
You can build your entire email message around one of your blog topics and drive people to your site to read the rest. Or, you can share your most recent posts in the sidebar of the message.
Either way, email is a great opportunity to get your content in front of more readers.
3. Repurpose posts to create eBooks and white papers.
If you’ve been blogging for a while, you may have enough content built up to turn a series of posts into an eBook or white paper. These tools make great value-added resources to your website and also serve as a fantastic opt-in incentive for your e-letter.
Since you’ve already done the heavy lifting of writing most of the content, you just need to take a little bit of time to string your posts together into a cohesive unit and
design the content in a way that makes it easy for people to read and share online.
If you’re not sure how to get started, here’s a great step-by-step eBook guide from Michael Hyatt that will help.
4. Build presentations around it.
Instead of starting from scratch when building presentations for speaking engagements, you can use your blog content as a launch pad for your presentations.
For instance, I pulled some of the ideas from this blog post
and included it in this presentation.
Although the presentation wasn’t centered entirely on the blog post, I used the ideas from my prior writing to add a fun, visual and informative component to the end of my talk.
5. Share it with prospects as part of your sales process.
When I get questions from prospects, oftentimes, I’ll send a recent blog post if it does a good job of answering their question.
Not only does it save me the time of explaining something again, but it also shows
I’ve already shared my perspective on the topic and I’m on top of the issues that matter most to my clients and prospects.
It’s a great way to showcase thought leadership without patting yourself on the back.
Have you tried any of these? What are you doing to get the most out of your blog? What would you add to the list?
Image credit: winsordi
5 replies on “5 Tricks to Getting More Out of Your Blog Content”
Remember, too, that a blog is not a one-off tactic. It’s part of an integrated marketing mix that boosts a brand. Blogging provides more opportunity to control content — you’ve heard of “owned media?” Blogging is owned because you’re self-publishing and have ownership of what’s being presented.
Building community goes hand in hand with writing a blog; without one your blog is invisible.
There’s no greater reward, to me, than blogging and Twitter; hands down, both have changed my life.
Yes, yes, yes! Blogs are so fantastic because now you don’t have to rely on earned media or paid media to help spread the word about your business. You now have the power in your own hands!
And yes, I’m with you – blogging and Twitter have been positively life-changing for me too. Without them, I wouldn’t know you, after all! 🙂
A great way to get more out of your blog is to use content curation sites like Trap.it, Paper.li, and others. Content curation is the new buzz word in marketing and is a very powerful way to get exposure for your content and build an audience.
I’m all for content curation – but I think automating it can be tricky. People are drowning in content, so they want solid recommendations on what to read. Does automating this help? Have these tools worked well for you? I’m curious to hear what you think.
Laura, You are right, automation can be tricky. But very few curation sites allow you to automate publishing. Infact only 2 or 3 that I know of do from about dozens that I have experimented with.