So you love writing about your interests and you decided to create a cool blog? Good for you! All you have to do now is find more readers, who will follow you and read everything you post. What are the best places to harness the entire potential of blogging? Social media sites, of course.

You can reach out to many new readers and keep the current ones hooked by promoting your blog on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and others. Each platform is unique and requires a slightly different promoting strategy, but there is nothing you cannot achieve if you are persistent with your campaign and post great content on your blog.

Now that you have covered the blogging aspect, it’s not about your blog anymore. It’s all about promoting it and making it more popular. We will tell you how to do that!

Promote your Blog with Social Media

When you first consider it, blog promotion via social media sites is not that difficult. After all, social media sites are free and you can post on them as many times as you like. In essence, social media would be the perfect advertising medium if every other blogger in the world wasn’t doing the same thing.

Being unique in the online world is extremely difficult – no matter what type of content you are posting, there are many other bloggers who are doing the exact same, or at least similar things… and all of them are promoting themselves via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and other sites.

That doesn’t mean that you should give up on social media campaigns. In fact, it’s completely the opposite – you should be wiser, more organized, and more aggressive than your competition. Lots of other people are running regular marketing campaigns and they need a marketing campaign, just as you need a social media campaign if you are to promote your blog successfully.

So how can you make your blog more successful and productive with the help of social media? In the continuation, we will tell you everything you need to know. All tools are out there; you only need is to arm yourself with patience and start using them to your benefit.

Start with a Facebook Profile

This is where all the magic begins. You will need to set up a personal profile if you ever want to set up a fan page. However, with your personal Facebook profile you are able to make friends, whereas with your Fan page you are not. This gives you a great opportunity to have (somewhat) of a captive audience. Make sure your profile is set to public and accept every friend request that comes your way.

However, you cannot expect for thousands of friend requests to come as soon as you create your profile. You have to deserve the reputation and work your way towards the desired status of popularity.

A great way to start with is to contact all of your friends and family members and friend them. You may then get a few friend requests from their friends too. You should also Facebook search your own name. People will often accept friendship invitations from people with their own first and last name, because it is fun to see how other people with your name are like and what they get up to.

It goes without saying that you will have to play it cool if you are promoting a blog with your personal Facebook profile. I have seen more than enough overly-promotional profiles to know that they are unfriended very quickly (as I have unfriended plenty of them myself). Be a little more subtle and try asking if people have seen your fan page or your blog, instead of telling people to go and look at it.

Posting links to your blog on your Facebook profile is more than welcomed. However, don’t start sending personal messages to all your friends with the same link and begging them to read the post and leave comments. That’s the definition of uncool. The key to raising interest is in your blog content. Don’t spoil the fun by becoming boring for every single member of your friends list.

Create a Facebook Fan Page

This is where you really start cooking. Now that you have a nice base of Facebook contacts, you can start with an actual promotion of your content. Make sure that your Fan page is full of details about your blog. All Fan page bio sections should be filled out to perfection, making sure that what you write is very promotional, but factual. This is not the time to be humble and modest – if you want to promote your blog, you have to brag about it.

On the fan page, you are allowed to post whatever and whenever you like. However, I highly recommend that you have a structure to your campaign. This is because it is very easy to waste a lot of time creating posts that look good, or maybe even read well, but attract no blog viewers. You have to investigate the social media campaigns of competitive blogs and see how successful Facebook interaction is done.

Remember that the conversion rate from Facebook is very low. The record percentage of conversions on a Facebook fan page is 24%. That means that 24% of the viewers looked at it and followed a link to another website. So, you really need to know what you are doing when you start your Facebook fan page. Create an overall goal and then achieve it through setting smaller, measurable goals. As you achieve one, you should build on it to achieve your next.

Start a Twitter Account

Twitter gets less than a quarter of the traffic that Facebook gets, and yet it still is the second most popular social media network on the planet. The good thing is that Twitter has been known to provide better conversion rates, although nobody knows what the official conversion rate record is. That’s not important after all – you only care about the fact that Twitter will boost the traffic on your blog faster than any other social media site.

The reason that the conversion of a Tweeter viewer to blog viewer is better is because Twitter is a micro blogging network. People view your micro blogs (tweets) because they like what you have to say. This translates very well into getting them onto your blog.

There are two ways of using this fact. The first is by posting the occasional promotional tweet that shamelessly promotes your blog post (yes, you are allowed to do that and your followers won’t hate you for it… as long as you post good content on your blog). The second is by tweeting about the things you blog about. So, if your blog is all about dating advice, then give dating advice on your Tweets. If you do this, then people are far more likely to read your blog because they will know that it is just a larger version of the Twitter tweets they appreciate.

Get yourself on LinkedIn

If your blog is about knitting, then get on LinkedIn and claim to be a knitting and textiles expert. If your blog is on programming, then get online and create a profile saying you are a programming guru. If your blog is about cosmetics and makeup, position yourself on LinkedIn as a beauty expert. I could go on like this forever, but you get the picture.

Everyone important is on LinkedIn. Although it may seem like a “quiet” social network most bloggers forget about, this site can provide the authoritative punch your marketing campaign needs.

Your blog is where you share your opinions, knowledge, experience, and expertise in a specific niche. LinkedIn will add a lot of value to its promotion, because it will connect you to people who care about what you have to say.

Tumblr is Fun and Effective – Use it!

Bloggers didn’t seem to bother much with Tumblr until they found out what they were missing. This platform creates great prospects for blog promotion, so you should definitely include it into your social media marketing strategy.

As soon as you create your profile, you will be surprised by the number of people who are using this platform. Remember what we said about Facebook? You have to create a base of followers before you can start with a more aggressive promotion. The same thing goes for Tumblr – start creating friendships and getting involved in the community before you focus your membership on blog promotion.

You will love the way posts are displayed on your profile – it’s much cooler in comparison to Twitter and Facebook.

Create a Profile on Google+

Okay, Google+ may not be as busy as other popular social media networks, but it’s by Google and it is very important for your blog’s rank. Your marketing campaign isn’t complete until you include this tool and start using it effectively.

No matter how simple and boring it seems, Google+ is a surprisingly effective platform that allows you to share 100.000 characters. Now compare that number to what you are allowed to share on other platforms and you’ll realize that you can actually serve an entire blog post to your circles on Google+.

If that doesn’t seem important, this will: Google+ updates are taken into account for Google search results. Get it? Your blogs will get higher ranking on relevant keyword searches solely by featuring them on your Google+ profile.

Synchronize your Social Media Profiles with Hootsuite

Since there are several social media platforms and all of them are important for your promotion, it can get difficult for you to manage every profile you create. Hootsuite will make the campaign easier – you can synchronize all social media profiles with it and manage them from just one platform. You can schedule your posts too!

As soon as you start using Hootsuite, you will find it far easier to conduct all of your social media profiles. This is an essential tool for managing an efficient and successful social media campaign. It not only allows you to track conversations efficiently, but enables you to measure the results of your campaign as well.

Hootsuite is the secret weapon of all online marketing experts, and you can use it for free (of course, you can upgrade to pro when you turn your blog into one of the most successful online destination in the specific niche).

Does blog promotion seem too labor-intensive for you? It sure seems like that when you read about it, but as soon as you start using all social media platforms properly, you will see that there is a lot of fun into it. You can create connections with fellow bloggers, investigate your competition and connect with your readers on a more personal level.

The results? – You will multiply the traffic to your blog with these activities, so the extra effort is totally worth it. After all, you are working on a blog, not a personal diary, so you should do everything in your power to reach out to as many Internet users as possible. Social media platforms will give you the results you need.

Summary

When you work on a blog, you do your best to deliver great content on regular basis and devote a significant portion of your day to its maintenance. How can you make it more popular and attractive to a larger base of readers? – By promoting it on social media websites.

Start with Facebook and Twitter, but don’t limit your campaign there. You should use the entire potential of social media if you want to achieve greater success, so extend the campaign with LinkedIn, Tumblr and Google+. In this article, you can read how all these social media sites can help you promote your blog successfully.