Social Bookmarking Is Just The Tip Of The Iceblog

Yeah, iceblog. Because this here piece is all about how social bookmarking is just one (albeit critical) part of socially advertising each and every blog posting your company creates.

We’re clever.

No matter how awesome your blog posts are, if you don’t find a way to get the word out, no one is going to know that James in the Web Department (or Michael the ghostwriter in Seattle) is pumping out awesome content for your website. Sure, if he keeps it up for a year or two, someone will eventually stumble upon him and he’ll blow up crazy large, but until then, you’re basically sitting on your thumbs.

So, you advertise your blog — how? Well, the natural place to start is on social bookmarking sites like Pinterest, Digg, and so on. Why is that the natural place? Because if you really have killer content, it’ll speak for itself and the social bookmarking sites will vote you up — which means more traffic.

Of course, once you’ve done that, you’re done, right? Of course not! Did you even read the title? This is all about all of the work you put in “under the water” trying to get your blog posts read. What else should you be doing?

Interlinking Your Content
When you mention something relevant to a different piece of content in your current post, link it! Not only will you increase the amount of time people spend reading your content, but you’ll be sending clear messages to Google about which pages of content are about which topics.

Submitting Old Posts as Articles
After a post has been up for a few months, it’s lost it’s “new content” shine, and it’s more than OK to syndicate that stuff. Put it up on article directories, get permission to repost it as a guest post on other blogs, wherever it’ll fit — as long as every copy links back to the original.

RSS Aggregators
An amazing number of people get their news through RSS aggregators — the moment after you hit Post on your blog, go to the top 5 RSS aggregators that deal with news relevant to your blog and ping that page.

Is that all that you can do to promote your blog posts? No. Not by a longshot — but it’s a good start and gets you a good way toward the point of diminishing returns.