The blogger’s signature cry is “content is king.” These words express the need to churn out quality, entertaining, engaging content in order to survive. Simply publishing content, however, will not build you the expansive reader base you need to become an authority in your field. Writing the content is easy. The true battle comes in skillfully promoting it to attract a attention, and consequently, followers. Today, we explore five ways to get the most of the content you produce.

We will spend very little time discussing the need for original material, as it is assumed that if you are reading this you are a serious blogger with useful articles. Instead, the bulk of this reference focuses on tips for getting the most eyes on your content as possible.

1. Get Featured

Knowing how to get an article featured on a top blog is an important skill that allows small blogs to gain credibility and tap into new audiences to promote their content. Above all else, when approaching big players in the blogging world, you must make sure your content is relevant and useful. Recycled, unoriginal ideas will almost always be shot down, and once you get rejected by a particular blogger for poor content it can be hard to earn your reputation with them back. For a more detailed guidelines and ideas for approaching large blogs, the blogging experts at HowToMakeMyBlog have outlined a series of strategies for getting content featured in prominent online publications.

2. Circulate On Social News Sites
If you aim to get your content in front of as many eyes as possible, it is imperative that you begin circulating on social news websites. Popular sites such as Digg.com and Reddit.com have millions of dedicated readers hungry for new content. These readers have the power to determine whether or not a story gets shown to the majority, or buried down so far that no one will ever see it. This is the difference between traditional news sites and social ones: the community, not an editor, decides what is worthy of making the front page.

A story’s position on a social news site is accomplished through a simple voting system. If a reader likes your story and finds that it was worth reading, he or she might give it a positive vote. Conversely, if he or she did not enjoy it, or found factual problems with the content, it may receive a negative vote. When posting to a social news site, it is important to make sure that your content is original and not spammy. As SEO strategy blog SEOContentGirl reminds us, readers on these sites have no patience for blatant product promotions or plagiarized stories and will quickly squash your post before it gets anywhere near the front page.

It also does not hurt to consult powerful users within the communities, to see if they may have interest in promoting your content to the social sites. If they are willing, you may benefit from the following that these ‘power users’ have generated, and subsequently the approval (diggs, upvotes) of their followers.

3. Share Your Content On Social Networks
The use of social networks is considered standard. Networks like Twitter and Facebook provide you with access to millions of connected users, many of whom are looking for the sort of content you offer. The first step is to register for accounts with the popular networks and invite all readers of your blog to follow or friend your new profiles. Every time you write a new piece of content, use these channels to post a link to it along with a few descriptive sentences.

This sort of promotion helps you make the most of your content in two important ways. First of all, social networks help you build loyal, repeat readers by ensuring that they are alerted of your new posts instead having to remember to check out your blog on their own. The second major perk of social promotion is that it has the potential to grow your reader base. Some of your more avid readers will likely re-post your articles or comment on them, which encourages their friends to check out the content and possibly subscribe to your profile as well.

4. Encourage Re-Posting
A blog’s own promotional efforts can only take its content so far until they have done all that is in their power to do. This is when it pays to encourage re-posting so that your readers can circulate your publications even further. In order to make your content “share-friendly,” make sure that each of your articles contains the following elements:

  • Eye-catching headlines.
  • A short and enticing first paragraph for SEO and Facebook previews.
  • Twitter and Facebook re-post buttons.

These are the staples of share-friendly content. SocialMediaToday reports that “an average site visitor will spend 30 seconds checking out your article to decide if it’s worth their time to continue.” This is why the first two bullets cannot be stressed enough, as they will keep your reader locked in to the end.

Re-post buttons make it easy for a reader to recommend your article to his friends on the social networks. As readers seed your content around the social networks, it will attract new readers to your blog who might also re-post your articles to their networks. The desired effect is a snowball– more people sharing your content for you.

5. Feature Guest Posts
If you want to create a storm of interest around your blog, consider featuring a guest writer for a day. Blogging authority ProBlogger notes that building content is only 20% of your job, the rest is all promotion and strategic partnerships. Begin contacting popular bloggers in fields related to your own and offer to exchange guest posts. Don’t be afraid to pay for content, or exchange favors. At the end of the day, others will be more willing to help you if there is an incentive to do so. Also, because content is social by nature; you don’t want to be known online as selfish.

Guest posting can be immensely helpful to both parties. The blog publishing the post gets a new piece of content and promotion on the writer’s blog, both of which have the potential to reign in new readers. Ideally, the guest writer will have his/her own following as well, who would be keen to see what new content is being produced. In short, invite writers that already have audiences.  On the other hand, the contributing author gets exposure to an entirely new group of readers who might now visit his or her blog and become new subscribers. Once the content is published, feature the steps mentioned earlier.