You’ve got a blog, you’ve done the research, you’ve spent time and money on marketing and that gleaming website – but how do you encourage people to share your stuff naturally?
One of the most significant ways to grow a successful blog is to get your loyal existing subscribers to share it through their social media. The path to this is long and narrow, however, and requires a bit of strategy and skill. Let’s look at some great ways you can boost your viewership and gently motivate your people to share it with their friends, and so on.
Asking, With A Reason
People like to know what they’re getting into, and why.
Generally speaking, they like to know as much as possible before they jump into something, so if you’re trying to get your subscribers to share your content with others, they’ll need a good enough reason to do so.
Making the request friendly and relatable will help you with brownie points, and giving them a reason will help them in return. For example, you could suggest that their friends might like it too.
If they like it, they’ll want to share it with people they’re friends with.
Making It Easy
Adding social share buttons onto the side of your blog will be one of the most important things you do. Let’s take a look at how exactly to do this.
Here are some plugins that make adding social sharing buttons easy:
Social Warfare
Social Warfare is a WordPress plugin that has interesting bonus features to make your social sharing buttons stand out.
SumoMe
SumoMe is a free app that makes creating your social sharing buttons easy, and it also works for any HTML website outside of WordPress, so isn’t limiting in this way.
Click To Tweet
Another fantastic tool is the ClickToTweet tool. It’s free, and you can insert it anywhere in the body of your text.
If your subscriber clicks on it, it will immediately create an automated tweet that you can choose to post that relates closely to the content you’re reading and wanting to share.
If you’re a WordPress fan and would prefer to stick to what you know, Social Warfare also has this tweeting tool as a part of its bonus features.
It’s All About Balance
You’d think that the key to promoting your blog and ensuring it gets shared amongst your readers is placing social share buttons on your blog and letting them do the rest of the work. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. If you have too many social share buttons, subscribers will get overwhelmed and lose interest in sharing your content – but the same goes for the other way, too.
If you don’t have enough or there aren’t enough comments on your blog content, people will also be less empowered to share. It’s all about finding that sweet spot and here’s how to do it: Be patient and hide the number of social share counts on your content until it’s above a specific number. Luckily, tools like Social Warfare have this kind of feature.
Create The Right Content – Trending vs. Evergreen
Trending topics are topics that surge in popularity on a temporary basis, before coming back down again as people move onto the next trending topic. Evergreen topics are topics that don’t die down and fluctuate depending on trends, so it’s worth knowing the difference and how you want to approach blogging.
You can put both to good use or just one – evergreen is usually the more stable and guaranteed blog content type, but it’s worth knowing what each one is all about before making a decision.
Trending
Seeking out and knowing what’s going to be the next trending topic requires a watchful eye and due diligence. It’s worth subscribing to fellow successful bloggers in your industry so that you can potentially catch them early, but it’s also worth getting to know your audience and what they’re looking for in a blog.
The better you know your target demographic, the easier it will be to predict what they’re going to want to see from you next.
Evergreen
A good place to start when pinpointing evergreen topics is Google Trends. It’s a great tool that allows you to see what issues are popular and what aren’t.
Keeping one step ahead of the game requires hard work, skill, and a lot of luck. Even evergreen topics run the risk of falling into the trending topics category, so you can’t entirely rely on either one forever – they’ll ebb and flow and become helpful in different ways.
Do A Survey
Like other social sharing platforms, blogs are community-based that require you to get to know the people that you are attracting with your exciting content. Getting to know your readers through the likes of a survey will help you understand what they want to see and read about. This will help you to publish the topics they’re interested in and speak to them in a language that they can relate to the most.
Using a survey tool like Polldaddy will help you come up with the right questions and in return get the information you’re looking for.
Along with keeping in mind the balance factor of your buttons, there’s no limit to how many bits of text of images you should make shareable – because it’s the content that you want to be shared the most, so making it available to be shared quickly will optimize your share count.
Apps like SumoMe have an Image Sharer feature that allows you to add share buttons to images and text.
If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them
Everyone has their idols and influencers that they wish more than anything they could be like. While you might one day hope to have a blog that looks like any of the blogs you currently worship, from a business point of view why not bring them one step closer to your blog by asking them to do a small feature?
This can be as easy as mentioning them in your content so that they start to take notice, and then reaching out to them through email or a comment and asking if they would want to be in your content. You could even ask them if they wouldn’t mind being interviewed, or for an inspirational quote that you can put in your next post.
Market, Market, Market
You might have gone into the world of blogging thinking that it primarily consisted of you expressing your passion through the written form and positively influencing subscribers in doing so.
However, while this is what is on the surface of blogging, managing and running a successful blog involves a lot of behind-the-scenes maintenance, and a big part of this is marketing and promotion.
You’ll probably end up spending more of your time promoting your blog than writing it, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles – if you want your subscribers to share your stuff, you have to promote it actively.
Actively Promote Your Blog
- Build an email list
- Guest blog as much as possible
- Share your content on your other social media platforms
- Optimize every post for SEO – but don’t compromise on the quality. There’s a good balance.
- Get other bloggers and influencers in on the gig.
As you have seen, there are multiple ways to approach the long and narrow path of getting your subscribers to share your blog content.
While it isn’t easy and doesn’t make your dreams come true overnight, it’s worthwhile if you’re around for the long haul and want to create informative, helpful content that your readers will keep coming back to time and time again to read.
Anything worth doing is worth doing well, so working on the community aspect of those subscribers will guarantee you a loyal following that continuously shares your content. Stay focused and consistent, and you’ll get there in the end.
Jonathon Spire
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