5 ways to get your blog posts in front of more people.

If it’s not obvious by now, it’s time to get clear on the concept that your blog should be the centerpiece of your content marketing strategy.

Today’s online best practices prove that if you consistently add new content to your blog, its real value (beyond just SEO) increases exponentially over time.

Spread your blog posts and wide.

However, if you’re approaching your blog with a “publish it and forget it” attitude, that’s so over. Your #1 job should be to get your content seen and shared. Because the time and resource investments that you make demand spreading the word as far and wide as possible about the expensive assets that you create.

To that end, this shortlist of tips should help you extend the reach of your blog content.

1. | Share your blog posts in your owned media.

One of the easiest ways to get your published content in front of more people is to enable subscription to your content via email. If you capture a visitor, prospect or customer’s email address with a subscription field on your blog, they’ve raised their hand to say that they are interested in what you have to say and share. So it makes sense to include your recent posts in the email’s that you send to these self-selected subscribers.

You should also integrate a simple button link on your blog for readers to get your content in an RSS feed. And if you author content on other sites, give your readers easy access to it by integrating a logo button that highlights the other site name and takes readers directly to your content on that site.

2. | Share content across social media.

You have a bunch of social media accounts, right? Well rather than filling them up with silly cat photos or worse, letting them sit dormant, you might put them to use as a broadcast medium to reach some new prospects or leads.

How many people do you know that post to Twitter, Instagram or Facebook so infrequently, that it’s questionable why they even have an account?

Invest a little time to make sure that you’re using the social platforms that your audience favors. Then, incorporate social sharing buttons on your blog and on every post to make it easy for users to spread your content for you. Consider using great plugin’s like AddThis or ClickToTweet that make sharing by others even easier.

If your goal is to attract and build an exclusive audience of fans or followers that you want to reach, then getting your social media accounts and profiles shaped up to present your brand value consistently is a good place to start.

It’s important to remember that the goal of your social media accounts should not be to have the biggest tribe. Focus instead on how to develop the best community of fans and followers that align with your interests and desired target profiles. Consider them the prospects, customers or influencers that want the value and insights that you have to share.

3. | Check in and comment in the forums.

Find where your target audience hangs out and participates on a regular basis so that members of these communities start to look for and read your content.

Be forewarned. Participation requires considered effort and time. So you want to ensure that your contributions to these venues present your thinking and value in a way that is personal, credible and authoritative.

There is an ever growing list of these online discussion venues including: Quora, LinkedIn Groups, Facebook groups, TweetChats, and many more.

4. | Guest author posts on high-traffic and influential blogs.

Write and produce tailored content for other blogs or media entities in your domain of expertise.

If these sites choose to publish your content, you’ll gain valuable links back to your blog that will increase your domain’s authority and improve your search results ranking. Having your content appear in other high traffic sites or blogs is also an effective way of driving traffic to other popular posts on your blog.

5. | Consider old-school paid advertising.

This is a tough recommendation because it’s counter to today’s conventional wisdom that distribution and reach should cost nothing. However, promoting your blog content with reasonably priced advertising (such as on Facebook) may make sense for the right organization or brand.

Make no mistake, sites like Facebook have been collecting, organizing and segmenting the likes, interests, profiles, and content for millions of users for years now. The benefit to you is that you can now pay Facebook a nominal fee to deliver your content to a very granular, highly detailed profile of people you might want to reach.

The only requirement is to have a Facebook business page connected to your personal page and profile. And, of course, an ad budget.

6. | Take the long view.

The old adage of “Publish or perish” has never been more true today. By consistently publishing and distributing content on your blog, readers and visitors will come to view you as an expert in your field. Let the advice of content strategist and author of Youtility, Jay Baer be your guide: “Don’t just make content, make content that matters.”

Remember that building your brand marketing content online is a long marathon, not a short sprint. So don’t let your readers down by publishing and distributing content that does not meet a consistent standard of quality.

What else?

If we missed anything, let us know. We’ll add it to our list of tips on how to extend the reach of your blog content.