Creating in-depth content like a really fleshed-out blog post, a podcast episode, or a YouTube video takes a lot of time and effort. You want that content to be really good after all, so you put your all into it.
But what do you do then? What do you do after you’ve clicked publish?
I used to publish a post, share it on Facebook and Instagram, maybe talk about it in my Instagram stories once, and on a good week, I’d share it to my email list. But then I would get back on the content hamster wheel and start creating next week’s content. Sound familiar?
If this is what you’ve been doing until now, chances are your content is not reaching nearly its potential for impact. So in this post, we’re going to look at what to do instead.
1. SHARE YOUR BLOG POSTS ON YOUR FACEBOOK PAGE
You can share the link on Facebook which brings people straight to the blog post when they click on the image, or you can share a snippet of text with a link included where people will need to click the link in the text.
Option 1 is easier to share and has a higher click-through rate, but fewer people will probably see your post because of the algorithm. Facebook doesn’t want people to leave the app, they want people to stay scrolling through their feed because that way they can show more ads and that’s how they make their money.
So sharing a text with an image works a little bit better but it’s a bit of extra work because you need to have an image to share.
If your audience is hanging out on Facebook, you might want to focus on this and make a little bit more effort creating content that gets better results on that platform.
For sharing the link to your blog post on Facebook, depending on your website builder and theme, you can set a text and upload an image that will be shared with the link.
However, sometimes Facebook shows an outdated version or no image and you see this in the preview when you share your link. If this is the case, don’t click share but close that preview, and open the Facebook Sharing Debugger.
This nifty little tool allows you to enter the URL of your blog post and the tool will show you what the Facebook crawler found to share.
Once you update this in your website settings, you can use the debugger to tell Facebook to crawl the page again and find the updated text and image. When that looks good, you can go back to your Facebook page, reload it, and start sharing your post again.
2. SHARE YOUR POST ON INSTAGRAM
Create an image, video, or a picture gallery for your Instagram post using something like Canva.
Write a caption based on the introduction of your post and don’t forget to add a call-to-action, since you can’t add a direct link in your Instagram caption. You can say something like “Click the link in my bio to read more or go to xyz.com/blog”. You want to make sure that you share a really easy URL because it’s not clickable, so people would have to enter it in their browser manually.
You can post this live in the Instagram app, or schedule your post using a tool like Later.
3. SHARE YOUR POST ON INSTAGRAM STORIES
Go live on Instagram Stories and use your post intro as a script – this can be short and sweet (1-minute maximum). Make sure to add captions to each story as a lot of people prefer not to have the sound on when they’re scrolling through stories and with captions you can still give them a chance to understand what you’re talking about.
Next, share the Instagram post as a story and add the link to your post to the story so that people can click it and be sent directly to your blog post.
4. SHARE YOUR BLOG POSTS IN YOUR NEWSLETTER
You can use your blog post as the foundation to write your newsletter and share the link to your post for people to get the full story. You can also expand the story a little bit, and share a few more insights, making your email subscribers feel like they are getting a more in-depth version.
If your post includes a list – e.g. “5 tips to…”, you can also share the first 1 or 2 tips and tell people to click the link to your website to read the full article. This will cause people to be intrigued and want to know more and likely increase your clickthrough rate.
5. SHARE YOUR POST ON PINTEREST
Create 3-5 images for your post using Canva or another graphic design tool and then upload these images to Pinterest, along with the title, description, and a link to your website.
Next, pin your first pin when you publish your blog post, the second one one week later, and the third one three weeks later (you can schedule your pins in Pinterest or Tailwind).
Pinterest is basically a visual search engine and it can work really well to get more traffic.
If you’re not yet using Pinterest, I’d really invite you to try it out, especially if you are already creating content. If you don’t have any content to share, it doesn’t make sense for you, but if you do it’s a really great tool.
6. CREATE A QUOTE GRAPHIC FOR YOUR BLOG POSTS
Shareable graphics with a quote are easy to create and still do pretty well on social media.
All you have to do is pull a quote, line, or piece of data from your post and create a graphic. Use the copy from your blog post around that quote to draft a caption for the post, and as always, don’t forget the call to action.
Schedule this post for 2 weeks after you publish your blog post. This way you can pique curiosity and guide people to your blog post from there.
So, I hope these strategies inspire you to put a little bit more effort into promoting what you create because I know how overwhelming it can be, to feel like you have to create new content all the time.
I strongly believe in consistency, especially when you’re just getting started because it will help you get into a routine and find your voice.
But when you’ve been blogging for a while, and you already have a good-sized content library, but you don’t see any real growth happen, it might make sense to take a break and ease up around content creation a bit – at least until you have a solid plan in place for promoting your work and sharing the content you already have.
