A blog post is not like a firework, one spark and it’s done. Blog posts can (and should!) attract customers for months after you write them. All it takes is a little planning and motivation to keep them working for you all year round.
1. Comments.
You can and should be commenting on other people’s posts all over the Internet. On Facebook, Instagram, other blogs, LinkedIn, whatever platforms your brand operates on, create the conversation that social is supposed to be about. Be more subtle than “hey read my post”, but use it as an opportunity to contribute your own story, your own learnings or perspective.
2. Backlinks within your own posts
This is one of my most effective tools as a social media manager. They say it costs 10x as much to attract a new customer as it takes to retain one – so why doesn’t the same rule apply for your blog? If you have an interested reader there, bounce them between posts and keep them on your site. This can be done in a few ways, including widgets that preview content you might be interested based on the tags attached to the post you are currently reading; or literal links in your post when that topic is mentioned. Both work well.
3. Emailing them out to clients when the question arises
This is a great one for more corporate companies. How often us your customer service writing the same stupid response to a common question? Write a blog post, and cut your work in half and ensure that consistent quality information is given every time.
4. Flashback Friday, Throwback Thursday etc.
This is a very visible Internet trend but is also just good advice. No-one else is going to talk about your older content if you don’t – and you didn’t write it for it to be a one and done deal did you? The idea of social media is also that your follower base is continually growing – so an older post will always have a new audience, and that might be the perfect piece of advice for that audience, who in turn will share and move the content, encouraging new followers who haven’t seen your content… See the cycle yet? So establish a flashback system – whether it’s #flashbackfriday #throwbackthursday or posting content that is exactly one year old; remember to push and hustle your older posts, as long as they’re still relevant. Which brings me to my final point….
5. Writing evergreen content
This is both easy and super difficult. Evergreen content refers to content that is always going to be relevant, no matter the trends, time of year or location. For example, talking about Oscars 2014 hair styles is NOT an example of evergreen content; but it is highly topical and highly searched, and so could drive significant traffic. But a blog post on how celebrity hair styles influence hair trends IS evergreen content. And these two can be used in conjunction with each other – talk about the Oscars hair on the week it’s written, then reshare the celebrity hair post the next week. By doing this, each time you write a related blog, you can share that evergreen content again, getting more and more views.
Ultimately, all of these tips and tricks are designed to be used together. None of them works as effectively in isolation as they do together, and all these things can be done without completely alienating and annoying your audience. The lesson is simply to think about your audience, their consumption and how you can best use your content to get better mileage and better engagement.
