Posted by Chuck Swanson on Friday, March 1st, 2013 at 12:58 pm
CATEGORY: Content Tags: blog tips, blogging, content

You have a blog, and while that’s a great start you need to start getting people to read it. Preferably the right people – prospects, customers, partners, industry colleagues, etc. While it can take time to generate a solid following, don’t give up. I see too many companies with blogs that started strong, yet the last post was five months ago. Had they kept up their momentum… well I guess they’ll never know.

After you post your blog what do you do? You don’t need to spend hours posting it all over the web, though I suppose depending on where you post it that couldn’t hurt. You can, however, take FIVE minutes and do these FIVE things.

1. Post it to your social media channels. Assuming you don’t live under a rock and you have a Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, and LinkedIn account get your blog up there. Using a tool like Hootsuite, this task should take you a total of 50 seconds to a minute, tops!
2. Share your blog at some content aggregator sites. If you’re blog doesn’t have ‘share’ buttons this can take you a little longer, but assuming that you’ve set up your blog correctly you should have the necessary buttons to share your blog at Reddit, StumbleUpon and other sites like them. Total time here… maybe two minutes.
3. Post your blog in relevant LinkedIn Groups. I’ve already mentioned LinkedIn above but that would be your personal news feed. Here I’m talking Groups. There’s a well-attended Group on LinkedIn for just about everything, and I find that more conversation (comments and discussion) happen when I post my blogs there than at the actual blog itself – which is fine by me. You can post using Hootsuite as well, so the total time here… maybe one minute.
4. Find some other blogs on the same topic and comment. If you’re like me, you probably have a number of blogs that you follow regularly to keep tabs on your industry. Maybe they’re set up in a Google Reader feed so it’s easy to stay current. You’ve more than likely found some articles or blogs on the topic you’re writing on, so it should be easy to comment on one and insert a link to your blog. If you’re not being spammy, and you’re adding value, I’m sure your link will be approved. Total time here depends on how organized you are, but figure one minute for a well thought out comment.
5. Distribute your blog to your subscribers. Your blog or site should have some way of collecting contact information. On our site, we collect email addresses so we can stay in touch monthly with people interested in who we are and what we blog about. With a short amount of setup time, you can easily create a monthly newsletter template in Constant Contact or MailChimp that pulls all your blogs in a given month and sends it to your email distribution list. Once set up, this takes zero minutes to manage.

These are five things that you can do to increase your blog readership. Okay… so there might be a little setup time, but once that’s done and behind you, your total investment is about five minutes per blog. There’s a ton more you can do, but these five are we call the raw minimum. What have you done that works?