As fantastic as blog post content alone is, because a blog is a social resource, it’s important that you take the time to get your content out there.
Think of it as if your blog was a shop and your blog posts were highly attractive, affordable and in demand products – it doesn’t matter how many items you have available to sell, if people don’t know they’re there, they’re not going to be able to find them and they’ll therefore stay unseen and unsold.
Of course, as the shop becomes established, visitors will return time and time again, but even after several years you still need to ensure that you’re doing your utmost to get your products out there to your target audience so as many people as possible know about them.
And it’s for this reason that as part of our business blogging services, we offer social media management. Covering a range of different aspects, the basic premise behind it is to ensure that all blog posts produced are continually distributed to the most suitable social media platforms possible for the client.
Although the actual process of promoting blog posts to ensure they get shared may seem like a straightforward one, we regularly hear from numerous bloggers who don’t know what they’re doing wrong, as their posts aren’t going anywhere.
Simply put, the reason blog posts don’t get shared is very often to do with at least one of the following seven reasons – fix it and chances are your posts will start to be distributed regularly amongst your audience.
1. You don’t have share buttons
One of the most common reasons why blog posts aren’t shared, it’s the one that most people believe they’ve always got covered, but which they end up realising they’ve forgotten about.
Visit your blog and look at it from a reader point of view – if there’s a great post there and you want to share it, but there’s no facility to do so, what do you do? You could of course take the time to share it manually, but do you really have the time to do that?
2. Your content is of a poor quality
Your readers aren’t going to just share your content for the sake of sharing. Remember, they’re going to be sharing it with their friends, family, colleagues, customers and industry followers. They therefore don’t want to be seen sharing content that is of a poor quality, as although it wasn’t produced by them, their followers may link them with poor quality content, potentially impacting upon their reputation.
3. Your titles are misleading
As we talked about earlier in the month, blog post titles can make or break a blog post. They are the few words your potential readers see before they click through to find out more, making your blog post titles very much like sales copy.
However, no matter how good your titles are, if the content doesn’t live up to what was suggested initially, your readers are almost guaranteed to click away. And readers who click away are readers who don’t share.
4. Your long blog posts don’t keep your readers interested
There’s nothing wrong with long blog posts, just like there’s nothing wrong with short blog posts. We always try to keep our clients’ content between 400 and 800 words, as we’ve found this to be the optimum length, but it’s all about quality more than anything else.
If you’re going to go for a long blog post, you need to ensure that it keeps your readers interested until they reach the end, as if it doesn’t, you’ll end up with readers who leave your piece (and as mentioned above, readers who leave your blog posts are readers who don’t share them).
5. There’s no reason to share your content
Read your content from a customer perspective. Is there anything that would make you want to share it? Does it offer information? Advice? A ‘How-To’ guide? News on the latest industry developments? Details of a new product?
Or is it simply your own personal thoughts?
If it is, that’s fine. Personal blogs are great and very often develop into business blogs – but just don’t expect your content to be shared until you start to offer real value.
6. You’re not offering the right share options
You’ve published your quality blog post content onto your blog and you’ve put some share buttons up there, but still no one is sharing your content.
So, take a look at your share buttons again – how much time did you actually spend deciding which ones would be most suitable? For example, chances are you put Twitter and Facebook up there as a minimum, but did you consider LinkedIn? What about StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit? You may not have heard of some of the resources, but that doesn’t mean your readers don’t have a huge presence on them.
Don’t forget e-mail, either. It may be one of the older methods of communicating digitally, but it’s still a reader favourite.
7. You don’t publish content regularly enough
We always recommend that our clients publish at least two blog posts per week. If more is a possibility, that’s great, but two per week allows for a sufficient amount of content to be published that shows the blog is active, topical and up-to-date.
If you visit a blog that’s only updated once every few weeks, it’s instantly going to make you think that the company isn’t overly bothered about their blogging activities and / or they don’t have a vested interest in their online customers and blog readers.
Therefore, the content that’s published is going to have to be nothing short of spectacular, discussing something that has never been talked about before or offering an insight into something that is in particularly high demand to ensure readers who visit believe it’s worthy of being shared.
Updated regularly with high quality, unique, customer-focused content, your blog will grow and develop overtime. By ensuring your readers can easily share your content, however, you’ll find you see success much quicker and on a much more beneficial level.
