Tools and tips to optimize your blog content and relations (through social media) to market your blog and promote your blog posts.

1. Promote your blog
in 60 minutes or less
Jude Mathurine
@newmediajude

3. Promote your blog
• Get the content right
• Get your relationships right

4. The basics
• Select a good blog name and keep it
consistent between online channels where
possible (http://namechk.com)
• Title, describe and tag your blogs
appropriately
• Link your online assets (include links to your
other networked profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn,
Flickr and YouTube account for starters)

5. Promote your blog
• Create a blog roll of four or five other bloggers
whose (related) work you read and admire.
– Find these by using blog aggregators like Technorati or
Blogarama
– Amplifiers preferable
• Use Pingomatic.com and Google’s BlogSearch to
register your RSS feed and blog site with multiple
search tools.
• Register on blog search aggregator
(Technorati/Blogarama)

6. Register on blog directories
• Blog aggregators local and international
• Technorati
• Blogscope
• http://www.blogcatalog.com/
• http://www.blogarama.com

7. Add your blog link EVERYWHERE
• Promote in your e-mail signature. Shorten your blog
URL if unwieldy via bit.ly with a custom URL
• Bit.ly will help you track clicks from your signature

8. Add your blog link to your profiles
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Twitter

9. Promote your blog
• Use aggregator like Scoop.it to find new stories
• Tag, Tag, Tag your blog
• Reward sites that link to you and link yourself to
other sites
• Find out who your POWER USERS or amplifiers are
• Share content with other websites where possible
• Link users to other useful sites (public journalism)
• Post more often

10. Find local bloggers – add to blogroll
• ThoughtLeader Top bloggers
• African Blog awards winners

11. Promote your blog
• Join the conversation with meaningful comments not
just: ‘Nice blog’
• Respond to users who comment on your blog.
• Blogs are SOCIAL MEDIA

12. Content marketing
• Kind of content
• Valence
• Write tight (400-600 words)
• Don’t waffle
• Use your data journalism and writing skills to
stay informed, research your field, offer
insight. Stay polemical but INFORMED

13. Content marketing
• Choose a legible template
• Visualise your story but don’t over-embellish with
embedded content. Less is more.
• Use writing techniques that involve the reader and
encourage to respond and engage
• Reference characters and events in history, philosophy
and popular culture
• Blog better by blogging often
• Get someone to read your blogs before posting them

14. Content marketing: Stats
• Use WordPress Stats/Analytics to determine:
– Your most popular posts (that drive most traffic)
– Posts that drive engagement (comments)
• Assess what factors may have driven traffic and
engagement e.g. search engine terms, categories,
headlines, image choice, post length, content,
valence etc.
• Use this data to plan future blog posts by
determining trends in post performance on monthly
basis

15. Content marketing: Stats

16. Content marketing: headlines
• What’s wrong with these headlines?
• On the money: Kicking the can down the road
• Video: isiXhosa stories for learning
• Finding Grahams’ Town

17. Content Marketing: headlines
• Rather prefer active tense and short words
(Grahamstown mayor elected to office)
• Personalise headlines (Our mayor wins election by
landslide)
• DON’T USE ALL CAPITAL LETTERS
• Try keep people the topic or subject of your
sentence

18. Ripenn’s advice
• Make the most of current events: Tie your headline
to news and newsmakers
• Break some “rules” of headline writing, like length
• Seek to pique the reader’s curiosity
• Never underestimate the emotional factor of a
headline
• Call the reader to action with direct action words
• Make bold claims
• Sound like a human, not a robot

19. • Buzzfeed headline
average 57 characters ,
Upworthy = 52
characters
• Guardian UK uses 5/6
word headlines and
longer headlines on
content page.
• But longer headlines are
also acceptable – see
Mail Online

20. Examples
• Which Old-School Pro Wrestling Legend Are
You?
• Is This the Airport of the Future?
• Why the Best Social Media Education Might Be
Right Under Your Nose
• 6 Things You Need to Know Today
• Awesome ways to pass highschool (video)
• Source: Buffer.ly

21. Content marketing: Ledes
• Ledes vary between 25 & 30
words
• This means like good news intros
you need to write it and then
return to edit it afterwards.
• Your lede is the main point . Is
your main point buried? Is
significant detail buried?
• Will a glocal reader know what
you are talking about?
• Challenge every word – if there is
no purpose in it delete it.

22. Relationship marketing
• On Facebook mention or tag sources in stories and
photographs (they will share or like your comments).
• Add a picture to your Facebook promo update if you
don’t have a picture in your blogpost
• Visit source Facebook pages/groups. Message or
notify them of a relevant blog post publication but
be careful of appearing ‘spammy’
• Use a quote or statistic or interesting fact from your
post instead of a summary promotional update.

23. Which works better
VS

24. Twitter
• Follow and cultivate Twitter contacts in your beat areas.
Use Tweetfind.
• Engage with potential amplifiers who may find your post
interesting in your Twitter posts. Find them on Klout.
• Retweet other bloggers who you follow on similar who
blog on similar issues
• Mention sources (newspapers, bloggers, researchers)
whose work you used in your blog post in your tweet

25. Twitter
• Cultivate a Twitter list of beat bloggers to
follow. Follow other users’ ‘beat’/speciality
lists.
• Run and save a search on particular keywords
related to your beat blog theme or area of
coverage
– e.g. ‘near’ grahamstown
– crime, grahamstown

26. Which of these would you click on?
• Tweet blog posts with images for more clicks
• Users respond to visual content. Stories with good
image thumbnails are 20% more likely to be clicked on.
• Which tweet are you more likely to click on – A or B?
A B

27. Twitter
• Schedule your tweets for optimum delivery
• Sign up with Buffer.ly

28. Community management
• Link/mention other blogs that you read
• Quote from other blogs and websites
• Mine, shepherd and seed blogs
• Link Klout.com to your Twitter account and
your Wordpress account
• Comment on similar blogs found via
Technorati, Blogscope etc.