Episode 072: How to Promote Blog Posts for Free
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In recent episodes of Priority Pursuit, we’ve talked quite a bit about blogging, because as a creative entrepreneur, blogging is a great—and free way—to serve your customers, establish yourself as an authority in your industry, and improve your SEO.
However, it isn’t enough to simply write and publish blog posts. You also have to share your blog posts so that your ideal customers can find your content. As a result, in this week’s episode of Priority Pursuit, I want to break down how to promote blog posts for free. In fact, we are going to discuss the exact strategy my team and I use to share each and every blog post we create to generate often thousands of unique viewers per blog post.
Why is it important to promote/share your blog posts?
While it would be great if our ideal customers were hanging out on our blogs hitting refresh just waiting for new content to drop, that isn’t the case for most—if not all—of us.
As a result, it’s important to have a process or strategy for sharing your blog posts to help ensure that your ideal customers will see your blog posts, engage with them, and then become part of your sales funnel.
In addition, it’s also important to promote or share your blog posts because this content is a great way to generate traffic to your website, which is great for SEO. Essentially, when Google sees that your website is regularly receiving traffic (AKA people are going to your website regularly), this will show Google that your website includes content that people want to read and engage with. And, because this content is valuable, Google will be more likely to rank not only that specific blog posts but your whole website well.
As we’ve discussed in previous episodes of Priority Pursuit, blogging comes with a lot of benefits. However, you can only reap those benefits if your ideal customers can find your blog posts.
11 Ways to Promote Blog Posts for Free
Between Facebook ads, Google ads, and other promotional opportunities, there are certainly paid ways that you can share your blog posts. And, there might be times where it’s appropriate to invest in paid advertising.
However, for the most part, my team and I only share blog posts in free ways for the wedding or photography side of my business, and over the years, this has worked really well for us. So, today, I want to share 11 ways you can promote blog posts for free. This is the exact strategy my team and I use whenever we publish a new blog—whether it be a blog to share photos from a recent wedding or session or an educational blog post for brides.
1. Share your blog post on your Facebook page.
After a blog post goes live, the first place I typically share it is my Facebook page. Facebook makes it easy to simply write a caption, include a link to your blog post, and share your content.
While we’ll discuss sharing your blog post on other social media platforms shortly, I do want to share that while my ideal customers tend to be most active on Instagram, Facebook actually generates the most traffic to my blog posts. As a wedding photographer, this makes sense, because many of my blog posts are specifically to share wedding or engagement photos, and my couples’ friends and family are very likely to see these posts and click on them. This makes Facebook a platform that is very worthwhile for my business.
2. Share your blog post in your Facebook group.
Next, I’ll share the blog post in my VRP Brides Facebook group. This group is specifically for my brides, and I regularly share wedding tips and tricks, sneak peeks from weddings and engagement sessions, updates, and—you guessed it—blog posts.
This doesn’t necessarily make sense for everyone, but it can be very advantageous to create a Facebook group that’s either specifically for your clients or for your most engaged followers. I mean, if you’re listening to this, you’re likely part of several similar Facebook groups!
But, having a Facebook group can be highly beneficial because those in your group are much more likely to see your posts than they or others are to see posts from your main profile. Groups are intended to give Facebook users a more intimate or niche place on the platform to communicate and connect, and as a result, when you share a blog post in your Facebook group, you are almost guaranteeing a way for the members of that group to see your post.
As a wedding photographer, I share both educational blogs and wedding/engagement session blogs in my Facebook group. The educational pieces help my brides feel informed and engaged as they plan their weddings. And, wedding and session blogs excite and inspire VRP brides who are waiting for their own engagement sessions or wedding days to arrive, and they help keep me top of mind for past VRP brides as they have opportunities to send referrals my way.
Again, having and managing a Facebook group might not be right for every creative entrepreneur, but between having the opportunity to further foster your community and increasing the likelihood of your posts—both blog-related and not—being seen, Facebook groups come with benefits.
3. If appropriate, share your blog post on your client’s Facebook profile.
Speaking of Facebook, if appropriate, I want to also encourage you to share your blog post on your client’s Facebook profile.
Now, this certainly might not make sense for everyone, but as a wedding photographer, this has proven to be a great way for me to share engagement sessions and wedding blog posts with my brides and generate a lot of engagement to my website.
Basically, when a couple’s blog post goes live, I’ll share it on one of—if not both of—their Facebook profiles with a message thanking them for trusting me to be their wedding photographer. This is a great way for not only couples to see their blog posts, but it also gives them an easy way to share their blog posts if they like. Plus, sharing the post on a couple’s Facebook profiles drastically increases the chance that their loved ones will see the post and engage with it.
4. Share your blog post on Instagram as a post or reel.
There are many ways to promote blog posts for free on Facebook, but Instagram also offers a few opportunities.
First, when you have a blog post to share, I want to highly encourage you to create either an Instagram post or a reel that shares that a new post is up and entices people to visit the link in your bio to check it out.
Now, in order for this tactic to work, you do need to have a means of including a link to your blog post in your bio. While you can just copy and paste the link into your profile—meaning the link in your bio would simply link to the blog post—I highly recommend creating an Instagram-bio-specific webpage instead.
Basically, I suggest creating a webpage that you can link to from your Instagram profile that allows you to add multiple buttons that you can easily change and use to link to relevant content. You’ve likely seen this before, but in case I’m not explaining this very well, check out my Instagram link page.
For me, having multiple buttons is helpful because I’ll often have both wedding and engagement blog posts to share in the same week, and I want to make it possible for my followers to find other relevant content, such as links to my podcast or links to opt-ins.
While you should be able to build a page similar to this in theory since it’s just buttons, if you can’t, Linktree is another option. Linktree allows you to make a button-focused page to include in the link in your bio easily. However, I want to encourage you to build this page on your own website instead, because from an SEO perspective, having this page on your website is highly beneficial, because Google will see that people are going to your website and visiting multiple pages. (They’ll go to the Instagram bio link page on your site and then click on your blog post, resulting in multiple pages being visited.) When your website visitors go to multiple pages, this shows Google that your website visitors are engaging with multiple pages of your website, which is very helpful for SEO.
But, whenever we have a blog to share on Instagram, I simply create a button for it on this page, and then my Instagram followers can easily find it.
5. Share your blog post in your Instagram stories.
Another place I always share blog posts is in my stories. Since Instagram allowed us to start adding links to our stories, this has been a game changer.
Using Canva, I have a few Instagram story templates that make sharing blog posts from my story easy. I simply change words, swap photos, and add these images to my story with a call to action to click the link in the story to either see more images or find out [insert whatever the educational blog post is about]. I then include a link to the blog in my Instagram story via Instagram’s link option so that my followers can easily click on the link and go to the blog.
If this doesn’t make sense, I want to encourage you to follow me at @victorialrayburn on Instagram. I promise you’ll see stories like this on the regular, and there might even be one up now as you’re listening!
6. When you share blog posts on social media, tag peers, vendors, and clients when relevant & appropriate.
Whether you’re sharing your blog post on Facebook, Instagram, or another social media platform, I want to encourage you to tag your clients or relevant vendors or colleagues when appropriate.
For example, on both Facebook and Instagram, when I share a wedding photo blog post, I list and tag all vendors involved in the caption. And, when I share weddings via Instagram stories, I tag both the couple, sometimes their wedding party, and any relevant vendors. (e.g. If there’s a cake photo, I’ll tag the bakery.)
Tagging your clients and your vendors is a great way to share the blog post with them, and this will drastically increase the likelihood that those you tagged will also share your post/reel/story/etc., which only increases the number of people who are exposed to both your work and blog posts.
7. Share your blog post on whatever other social media platforms you use.
Now, we just discussed multiple ways you can share your content on both Facebook and Instagram simply because that’s exactly what my team and I do, because Facebook and Instagram are where my ideal clients hang out.
However, this is not to say that Facebook and Instagram are the platforms you should be using. Instead, you want to utilize whatever social media platforms your ideal customers use and share your blog posts—plus other content—there.
For you, this might mean you should be sharing your blog posts on LinkedIn, TikTok, or a number of other social media platforms. Essentially, go wherever your ideal customers are, follow the platform’s best practices, and promote blog posts for free!
8. Share your blog post on Google Business.
Next, it’s important to share your blog posts via your Google Business profile. We’ve discussed the importance of having a Google Business profile and updating it regularly in the past, and while you can learn more about this and why in “Episode 043: Why You Should Be Updating & Posting to Your Google Business Profile,” you simply need to know that Google favors businesses who are active on Google Business.
And, when you are in Google’s good graces, your website is more likely to rank higher on Google and be seen by more potential customers.
As a result, be sure to share your blog posts on Google Business. You can simply add a caption, an image or a few, and then include a link to the blog post via Google’s button feature.
Personally, I don’t get a ton of traffic to my blog posts via my Google Business profile, but this is an easy way to follow Google’s guidelines and manage my SEO.
9. Pin your blog post to take advantage of Pinterest.
To get even more traffic out of your blog posts long term, Pinterest can be another great place to promote blog posts for free.
After a new blog post goes up, Emma—my VA—always adds them to Pinterest for me. While we might not get a lot of engagement from Pinterest immediately, content on Pinterest lives much longer than content on social media. And, Pinterest content is also very likely to rank well on Google.
If you have questions about how Pinterest can work well for your business, I want to encourage you to check out “Episode 048: How to Use Pinterest to Help Your Small Business Make More Money in 2022 with Chelsea de Araujo of Chelsea Joy Creative.” In this episode, Chelsea breaks down all things Pinterest and makes this platform feel much more approachable.
10. Share your blog post with your email list.
Another great way to promote blog posts for free is to share your blog posts with your email list.
Now, for some, it makes sense to share blog posts in the traditional email list sense, meaning you write an email to your whole list or a segment of it and share your blog post.
But, for others, this might not be the case. For example, the wedding industry is a little funny in that—hopefully—your clients are just one-time clients, because they’ll only get married once. Because I (1) don’t want to be annoying and (2) know that couples no longer need my services after getting married, I don’t send a regular newsletter or anything like that out to past VRP couples and wedding inquiries, because in my situation, that just doesn’t make sense.
But, with blog posts, I do:
- Include links to relevant blog posts in the email series my couples receive from me throughout their engagement and the wedding planning process.
- Email wedding blog posts to both my couples and their vendors when they go live. (I send this message with a gallery of photos that are in the blog post so that they can also download these images as a little element of customer service!)
But, whether you have a traditional email list—which is a very powerful thing—or you could email the blog post to relevant parties, email is an excellent way to promote your blog posts for free and generate more traffic to them.
11. Optimize your blog posts for SEO so that they can be found on Google.
Now, you know we couldn’t go a whole episode of Priority Pursuit without discussing SEO!
While social media, email, and other tactics can be great ways to generate traffic to your blog posts quickly, Google is a great way to generate traffic to your blog and website long term. For example, when I blog a wedding, my website receives approximately 300 unique visitors per blog post within the first week of the blog being published. And, that’s great, especially considering I’m not paying to advertise these blog posts on social media or other platforms.
However, thanks to Google, I have blog posts that have been viewed more than 30,000 times over the last few years. And, these blog posts have both led to more business for me as a photographer and overall better Google rankings for my website as a whole, which has led to more business.
Want to learn how to optimize your blog posts for search engines? Tune into “Episode 068: How to Optimize Blog Posts for SEO to Improve Reach”!
While blogging is a great way to serve your customers and generate traffic to your website rather quickly, optimizing your blog posts for SEO will give your blog posts long-term value and allow you to reap the benefits of writing those posts for years to come.
If you’d like to learn how you can optimize your blog posts for SEO, be sure to tune into “Episode 068: How to Optimize Blog Posts for SEO to Improve Reach”!
Don’t just complete these steps once. Promote every blog post again & again.
If you complete the 11 tactics we went over today every time you publish a new blog post, I can almost guarantee you will see increased traffic to your website. However, blogging is an investment of your time. And, you want to get as much out of every blog post as possible. So, complete these steps more than once!
Because, between social media algorithms, the fact that humans are forgetful, and the fact that you will likely always have new people becoming your ideal customers (e.g. In my case, new couples get engaged every year.), sharing a blog post a single time drastically limits its effectiveness.
With this in mind, share your blog posts more than once. For example, if you have an educational blog post, share it again and again. Or, if there’s a reason a past blog post becomes relevant again, reshare it. (e.g. You’re a wedding photographer and it’s actively raining, so you do a throwback to one of your favorite rainy wedding days.)
When you have systems, workflows, and templates in place, you can likely create a blog post much faster than you think. But, blogging is still an investment of your time—which is an invaluable resource in your small business. As a result, share your blog posts more than once to get the most for your time.
Again, we’ve been discussing blogging quite a bit on the podcast lately, and if you haven’t checked out “Episode 066: What to Write About When Blogging Your Work as a Creative Entrepreneur (AKA a Template for Blogging a Wedding or Session as a Photographer)” or “Episode 068: How to Optimize Blog Posts for SEO to Improve Reach,” I want to encourage you to go back and listen to those episodes.
But, long story short, blogging is a great way to serve your customers, establish yourself as an authority in your industry, attract customers, and lead prospects through your sales funnel. However, blogging can only accomplish these things if your ideal customers can find your blog posts. So, whenever you publish a new blog and as long as the blog remains relevant, be sure to share and promote your blog posts!
Links & Resources Mentioned in This Episode
Instagram Link Bio Page Example
“Episode 043: Why You Should Be Updating & Posting to Your Google Business Profile”
“Episode 068: How to Optimize Blog Posts for SEO to Improve Reach”
“Episode 068: How to Optimize Blog Posts for SEO to Improve Reach”
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