Promotion of your blog is key. Except it shouldn’t be promotion. It should be presenting. Why?
I choose presenting rather than promoting… Your blog is a gift... a present, so promoting really is a dirty word for the power of presenting.
Perhaps the thought of promoting – or rather, presenting your blog – makes you feel uncomfortable, hard, or even outright annoying. Still, your blog depends on it. Publishing your blog post on the first step of sharing your blog and spreading the word. In order to have your posts read by any readers, including your ideal readers, they first must be able to see it exists. And that’s only possible when you start presenting your blog posts. Does this ring a bell? Are you reluctant to promote or present your blog posts across social media? Then please keep reading, because presenting your blog can be smart and simple. That sounds like music to your ears, does it not?
How does promotion feel?
Many entrepreneurs consider promotion to be like selling. And many entrepreneurs are not overly keen on selling and sales. Not because you cannot learn to become good at it, but because you have negative vibes about having to flog your blog. And in my experience this feeling is also fed by the absence of a strategy, a system. If you know exactly why you present your blog posts and how you do that, then it stops being something uncomfortable.
And I should know, because when I worked as a translator, I blogged for years without presenting my blog posts. This was in the early years of this millennium. I wrote my blog posts, and published them. That was it. It never entered my mind, in those days, to start presenting them to anyone… I didn’t know why I would or should, and I most certainly didn’t know how. That in itself didn’t inspire me at all – I felt unseen, unread, unappreciated and even sad. It was like I was a voice crying in the wilderness, even though I knew that what I wrote was valuable and relevant.
Luckily I also was noticing more and more great examples from international entrepreneurs and their blogs, and gradually I learned how to use the power of modelling and systemising to my own advantage. I developed my own system for presenting my blog posts and spreading the word effectively and naturally, by modelling others, trial and error, implementing, adjusting, and most of all, keep on just doing it.
Now, this is not the point where you think that a system is something that you set up once… and then run for years without any fine-tuning or amending. No, that’s not how it works. What does work, however, is that each of the steps in a system can be tweaked in alignment with what changes in the world around us. That is also the true power of systemising… always be doing what works. Now, you might be thinking…’hold on a minute, this post was about blog promotion, right?’. And yes, you’re right, it was 🙂
How can you present your blog posts step-by-step?
Notice how I have shifted from promoting to presenting…. 🙂 The steps I have taken to develop my blog presenting system, I took one by one. And as always I am happy to share them with you. One step at a time, is what I did, and I suggest you consider doing the same.
- Send a message to my mailing list using an auto responder (Active Campaign, in my case)
- Create a list of the social media channels I wish to use
- Create a list of the online platforms where I can find my ideal readers
- Choose the ONE platform I can work with really wel (for me, that was Twitter, at the time)
- Using that ONE platform for presenting my blog posts systematically
- Writing various (7 on average) presenting messages
- Sharing one presenting message on one social media channel
- Create a list of the results (effect) of my presenting actions
- Send a message to my mailing list about my latest blog post
- Create a list of my presenting sites, so I can simply click and post each time
- Adding one presenting channel to my presentation system (for me, that was LinkedIN status updates, at first, and later also LinkedIn groups)
- Keeping tabs on which types of messages got the most response
- Keeping tabs on which platform my ideal readers prefer to respond
- Choosing the frequency, type of messages, and channels I wish to include in my presentation system
- Discovering that sending all messages at ONE time… I miss an awful lot of ideal readers… to pacing my times and days across various social media channels… dripping, I call it 🙂
- Tweaking the times for my blog presenting messages in alignment with readers’ behaviour
- Adding a third social media channel (for me, that was Facebook)
My entire blog presentation system is listed in Excel, and include the associated hyperlinks. This means I spend the least amount of time on this, never overlook anything important, and allows me to tweak when necessary. This is what I mean by smart and simple. Creating a system once, and benefit from it time and time again!
Why make life harder than absolutely necessary? Promoting is good. Presenting is great! It’s like a little race with yourself (if you like a bit of competition, that is). Checking what could be improved, go faster, be easier, feel like more fun, next time. Without ay stress, of course, because you only take one step at a time.
How about you?
Has this inspired you? Do you feel relieved? Are you now sensing that you could do this much better than you did before? I bet you can!
So, please comment below and tell me what is the first thing you will be doing, now, about presenting your blog posts?
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xx