If you’re new to blogging, using social media to bring about more readers can seem a daunting task to undertake, but fear not, there are strategies that successful bloggers use to achieve this and we will explain them all here.
- This should be obvious – make sure you have presence on all the big social media sites. Make it a good presence, with a full and easy to read profile. Sometimes forgotten in all of these is Google + being on here enables you to connect to another set of people and they are more inclined to +1 your posts which will share it with their circles.
- Add buttons for sharing and connecting to you on these social media sites to your blog – somewhere that is visible at all times, no matter what page they are on. You can do this but adding it to a static side bar or the menu.
- Make sure you do the same on your social media profiles, enabling dual back links.
- Ask your friends to share your page around and like your pages on social media, this will open your blog and social media accounts up to new circles of people.
- If you want to, you can use paid services for advertising that Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media sites provide.
- Make sure you share your blog content on your social media profiles, this is another thing people do forget to do.
- Link on your blog to other relevant blogs, these people will appreciate this and most will link back to yours. You can do this by back linking in a blog entry of your own to a similar blog entry of their or just link to their main blog page from your sidebar or menu (I suggest doing both, a sidebar list of blog you enjoy and follow and a menu option of interesting links so you can add blogs and websites to this)
- Create an eBook and share the download information on your social media sites and blog. This will generate interest in your blog but also give your readers something free, which everyone loves!
- Use your Facebook Insights, LinkedIn Page stats and Twitter counter to work out trends of people who are reading your posts. This includes places they live, age, sex, time of day etc. Utilise this when creating future blog articles so you can target your audience better.
- Engage with your social media network – make sure you work hard to create and develop relationships with your fans, followers and readers. Ask questions via your Twitter and Facebook pages, don’t just keep this to being about your blog, and ask other questions about them. You can ask occasionally “is there anything in particular you want me to blog about?” but don’t keep repeating it like a stuck record, otherwise your followers will know all about you and nothing else.
- Having a guest blogger is a good way to bring in new views. Try even having some of your readers and followers write a guest blog. You can even turn it into a competition of sorts – “How would you like to write a piece for my blog? If so, think and write your best article and the one with the most page views after a week will win a prize from me!” This not only attracts interest to your blog but shows you care about those reading it, increases your social media presence and the sharing people are likely to do as they’ll want their friends to see their article on your blog.
Abrar tariq is a blogger who likes to share latest social media strategies which work for him.
