How To Build A Better Blog: How To Promote Your Blog Post

No bullshit social publishing news and opinions. Follow Brandon.

Day 3 of 31 Days To Build a Better Blog (which you can purchase here) asks you to promote a post through a variety of methods.I have focused on promoting this post through Digg,  Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed.

But first, you need something worth promoting …

10 Reasons Blogs Are Not Dead

There are a lot of idiots out there who try to stay relevant by saying stupid things like, “Blogs are dead” and “Twitter is the new Walter Cronkite.”  We know they’re embarrassingly full of shit, but sometimes it’s worth pointing out why they’re wrong so your friends don’t get lead astray. So:

1. Facebook Pages are difficult to customize whereas with Blogger (or WordPress with Thesis) it’s a snap to organize a professional blog.

2. If you share enough interesting content on a social network, your readers will want to know more about you. An About page is critical and not just for readers, but for clients and advertisers.

3. Your posts on social networks will be indexed by a search engine, but without relevant information to accompany it.

4. Your existence on a social network is based entirely on the whim of that network. From a business standpoint, putting your fate in someone else’s hands (when they can and do make arbitrary decisions about your existence) is fatal.

5. The blog serves as the cornerstone for your campaigns. Remember that not everyone uses (or wants to use) the latest and greatest social networking tool. Reguardless of what social platform one uses, they can refer to your blog for details.

6. The blog is personal and takes a lot of work. A social networking profile takes minutes to make and seconds to abandon.

7. The blog gives you an opportunity to become an authority or expert and create a pool of knowledge over time. The most you can do on a social networking site is point people to this information, and since information flows so fast, it is not likely your content will be noticed.

8. On a blog, if I don’t like something in a post, I can go back and fix it. On Twitter or many other networks, once something is out in the wild it is out in the wild. You can’t edit it later.

9. A blog post can be shared and distributed easily on any number of social platforms and (perhaps more importantly) via email. It can also be printed and collected in any number of ways. You can do this with tweets and status updates, but the results are usually disjointed and not accessible to everyone.

10. Finally, although social networks suffer from the same BS oligarchy that blogs do (too few control the debate and too many simply repeat the few), a blog allows you an opportunity to cut through the oligarchy over time with persistant, quality content.

Ready To Promote Your Post?

On Twitter: Up to three times, several hours apart, you can tweet out a link to this post. Just make sure you change the headline. It’s ok to send something out more than once as people are not on Twitter throughout the day … normal people anyway.

Remember: For every one link you send out that’s self-promotional, always send out five that are not related to yours.

On Facebook: Never send a message to your fans, instead post on the wall to let people know of new updates.

On Digg: Ask a friend to submit your post until your fans start doing so on their own. Never submit something of your own.

On Friendfeed: Forget it. Friendfeed lost all value as soon as Facebook bought it.

Ping.fm and others like it: Never, ever, use this service or other “update all” services. This is lazy, inauthentic, and spam worthy. Take the extra few minutes to update your selected services yourself.

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Tagged as: Blog promotion, Blogging, How To Build A Better Blog