 Welcome to The Journey. Today we're going to talk about how to promote your blog on social media. Whether you're blogging for business or blogging as a hobby that, you know, hope to one day turn into a business, odds are you work really hard on the posts you create and when you put all those hours and all of that energy into writing and working to promote your blog, there are a few things more devastating than getting little to no traffic and a great place to find more potential blog readers is on social media and you're already probably working to make sure that your blog content offers real value for readers but now you have to get eyeballs on all that juicy content. So first, here are some general rules to keep in mind for content promotion across all of the social media platforms. First off, always have a fabulous image for your posts. If you didn't add an image to your blog post before you published it, go back right now and insert a nice picture. Images are crazy important for upping your traffic. Articles with images actually get 94% more total views. So don't just swipe on from Google because there are copyright rules against it. Your best bet is to take your own pictures for your posts. And if you're not a photographer or want to go with some more stock photos, Pexels is a fantastic site to get free stock photos that you can use for personal or commercial use. And our next tip is to maintain a social media content calendar. And I talk about this a ton but content promotion takes planning and a social media content calendar really keep you organized so you have a better chance of meeting your traffic and engagement goals. Not only should be planning your content but also when to cross promote on other channels too. It all goes into this. Blasting your newest posts on every account you run at the same time will become overwhelming for your audience. You really want to try to stagger them out to really capture the most attention. So post a couple times on your most popular channels and a couple days later for the other relevant channels with your post. I could agree more with that. And speaking of social media, enable easy social sharing with icons on your blog or your website. And every blog post should have buttons that allow for easy sharing by you or your readers. I know that's something I look for when I'm reading a great blog. I want to immediately share it with my friends and family. So I look for that icon so make it easy for that button and the sharing to happen. And in the video that you're watching right now, there is the option to share it to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. Hint hint. And your blog should have similar buttons that enable your reader to easily share to their favorite social media platforms. Look at that. Extra word of mouth there. And not only will this help you gain new readers, it will also show the world that, hey, you're enough of an expert in your field that people want to share your content. That's so true. But you want to also be mindful of timeliness. How often you share a new blog post is really going to depend largely on whether or not it's a timely piece. For example, if you are promoting a blog post that is about summer fashion trends, it won't really make much sense to promote that post multiple times in the winter. On the other hand, when you update timely posts for the new year, you can always reshare them again. In other words, just be aware of what is going to be the most helpful to your audience before resharing anything. And another pro tip here is to really write those more evergreen posts than timely ones because not all blog posts will immediately get the attention on social media. So now I want to go into tips for each of the platforms starting with Facebook. So tips for promoting your blog on Facebook, don't share only your own content. Now, while the goal is to get as many readers on your blog as possible, right, it's important not to spam your page with only stuff from your website. Share useful links that will help your ideal audience while showing them that, hey, you know your stuff and don't share it too frequently. Share one blog post of yours and then something else each day. And that something else can be a meme, an infographic, a link to another website, a video or some other graphic that you've created. And now I want to take this over because it's one of my favorite platforms, but tips for blog content promotion on Instagram. So starting off really create those high quality images. We all know Instagram loves those images to highly visual platform. You're going to need some quality images to capture people's attention and also maximize your Instagram bio. Unless you have over 10,000 followers, your only place to add that link is actually on your Instagram profile page. But if you have multiple links that you want to tell your visitors about a nice little hack is either to use link tree. It'll create a little mobile optimized page with the ability to add a bunch of links or create one on your own website and modify the links as you will. Don't forget to experiment with post frequency. So if you find your engagement is going up when you post three times a day, but it plateaus or dips at four posts, well, then you'll have an indication that three times per day is your sweet spot. And again, the frequency which you should post is going to vary. But with Instagram stories, you need 10,000 followers for that precious swipe up feature that allows you to link to an individual blog post or really other links that you want to promote. But you can still use Instagram stories and talk about the link in your bio. It's going to vary depending on the audience of how often you should post but test it out, experiment and see what works with your audience. Yes, experiment, experiment, experiment. Also, my favorite use hashtags to drive niche specific traffic. So when you use niche specific hashtags to help promote blog posts on social media sites, other social media users who are following similar hashtags are more likely to find you, which is great. And now I want to move into Twitter, how to promote your blog on Twitter. First off, get creative, skip the lazy approach like tweeting out world's best margarita with a link to your post. You have 140 characters to make a strong impression to do it. Try something more exciting like want the scoop on the world's best margarita recipe? Check it out here. Hashtag cocktails, hashtag cocktail recipes, you get the gist. You know I do, but she followed up with that awesome sentence with some hashtags. You really want to use hashtags to really help your tweaking visibility when people search for specific keywords, which really can translate into more clicks, reads and even retweets. And I can't stress this enough, keep posting. Just like our crazy world, Twitter moves fast people. No, this doesn't mean tweet the same thing 20 times in 20 minutes. That one saying spread it out throughout the day to hit multiple time zones, switch it up with different tweets that lead to the same URL. Let's talk about Pinterest and it's something that we kind of forget a lot when it comes to blogging. But you can really create a pin for each post. So you want to make sure that you have at least one high quality, unique pin for every blog post that you write. And it should go live as soon as your post is live. And with this, use search-friendly descriptions. So you really want to use a description similar to your blog's meta description and try to make sure that you include the keyword phrase someone would be looking for on Pinterest. So if they're searching for margaritas, make sure that is in your description. Be sure to make the most of boards. So post your blog's pin to a relevant board on your Pinterest page. And that gives Pinterest more clues as to what your blog post is about. So for example, your perfect French toast post should be pinned to a recipe or breakfast board. An experiment with timing. I can't stress this enough on actually all platforms. But at the risk of sounding like a broken record, experiment and see what works best for your engagement as your audience may be different from the average. So you're here. We're here. And believe it or not, YouTube is a great source to promote your blog content. That's because it's more of a search engine than a social media platform. But they do have a community section that allows users to directly engage with those content creators. Still, my advice for using YouTube to promote blog posts is similar to Pinterest in many respects such as use a great title and description that someone will be searching for. And your image thumbnail should also be high quality to really catch the attention of the average user. And for the fastest results, I recommend either reading the blog posts to your viewer or showing them something related to your post. For example, if it's a how to post like a recipe or a craft, your video should be of you making the item you're blogging about. That's how fun is that. And then to direct your viewer to your blog include the link to your post in the video's description and state in the video that the viewer should visit your website for this post or others like it. And we've covered a lot in this video and I know it's a lot to take in, but that's why it's so important to have a plan in place before you just start posting randomly to various social media platforms. And remember, you don't have to do everything at once, but you need to do something in order to gain more traffic to your blog. And social media is a great free place to start. If that's a wrap, make sure you leave a comment below and subscribe to our channel. That's right and ring that bell so you're the first to know when we upload more videos. This is The Journey. See you next time.