blog marketing Archives - The Content Marketing Blog

Social media is a wonderful tool that helps expand the networks of a lot of people and businesses, and it’s especially great for people who want to share information. If you write a lot of articles and want them to get more attention, then there are a lot of things you can do to make this happen. If you’re not sure where to get started, then take the tips that are listed below. These can help you make the most of those articles you work hard to write so that they get more attention and you see more traffic through your social media sites.

1. Use Stumbleupon

This is a great tool for driving a lot of traffic to web pages because it finds content and then recommends it to users. It gives even smaller social media accounts the chance to get noticed, so it can be very useful if you’re just getting started. In fact, many users have had their sites get tens of thousands of hits just because they used Stumbleupon to drive traffic to an article they wrote. The best part is that if people like what you wrote, they are likely to follow you or bookmark your site for future use.

2. Use Your Connections

It never hurts to use your friends, especially when it comes to social media sharing. Get some of your friends who have popular accounts through social media. Ask them if they would be willing to share your article with the audiences that they have. Their sharing (and linking back to your websites) can result in a lot of traffic to your site and an incredible amount of exposure to your article. Tell your friends that you will share their articles as well, especially if it’s related to content you already have.

3. Submit to Editors

Article publishing is becoming much easier than it ever was before, so it’s something you might want to try out for yourself. As long as you don’t have a piece that is a complete ad for your products or company, you may be able to get it published. There are tons of websites you can find by doing just a simple search online for editors looking to publish articles. Send it out along with information about yourself so that the editor knows more about you. Also make sure you only send a portion of the article as a teaser, and so your content doesn’t get stolen. If you have a great article then it can easily lead to exposure through publications you may have never considered!

4. Publish it Online

If you only save your article on your computer and send it out as an e-mail, it is never going to get noticed. Instead of just sending it out to a few people, mass market it! Publish your article on your most popular social media site and then link back to it on all of your other accounts. For example, you could post your article on your blog and then link to it through your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and any other accounts. This is basically free advertising and can lead to thousands of people seeing your article without you have to do more than link to a page!

5. Use Digg

The website digg.com is a great website for people who are looking to get their interesting articles written. It’s packed full of great articles about political issues, science, the internet and so much more. You can submit to them a link for your article and see if it gets approved. If it does, then you will soon get a ton of traffic to your page. This can lead to a lot of views, but also a lot of loyal followers, if they enjoy the information that you write.

6. Keep at It

Don’t let one unsuccessful article ruin your writing for good. Keep doing it and you may find that your future pieces are more popular than you could have imagined. You never know what topics are going to gain the interest of the masses and get you more popularity on your social networking sites. Just make sure you still write articles that look nice and have good content, or else people may not want to continue reading them as you release them.

Author Bio: Joe Laden is the owner of WBTutorial.com where he reviews the best website builders and writes helpful tutorials like this Weebly tutorial.

Savvy business owners are always on the lookout for new forms of advertising, and unique ways to surprise potential customers. In recent years, we have seen the advent of the QR code to engage mobile phone users. Another popular method of advertising in recent years is having a viral sensation, the way the new Old Spice man has been.

Here are some other new advertising ideas that may give you some ideas of your own for your business:

Interactive ads within a magazine

You know about scratch and sniff ads, or the peel-open perfume ads. But that is just the beginning. Forbes magazine recently made an issue Wi-Fi-enabled, which means that the reader carrying it around could get free Wi-Fi. Microsoft sponsored the ad, along with T-Mobile to provide the technology to make the magazine Wi-Fi-enabled. Springwise says that “the campaign, created with advertising tech firm Americhip, simultaneously promoted the validity of Microsoft’s cloud-based program and gave Forbes’ readership another reason to carry the publication with them – killing two birds with one stone.”

You may not have Microsoft’s budget, but try to think of some interactive way that you could reach out to readers. Even something as simple as asking potential customers to identify a photo or quote, and directing them to your website to potentially win a prize, could help engage them in what you do.

Marketing to bloggers

A small business with a small budget does not have the money for a big advertising or marketing campaign. But they can easily get some good buzz by marketing to bloggers. Here’s what you can do – reach out to bloggers in your area, or your field. For example, if you market baseball t-shirts related to the New York Mets, a good way to get your product out there is to offer a free t-shirt to any blogger who gives you a plug in the blog.

There are several reasons why doing so can be appealing to you: bloggers are easier to reach than their counterparts in the mainstream media, they have a fan base and a good number of readers, and they generally are savvy in social media as well. This can help promote your business, and if the bloggers like the product, they will tell their friends, and their friends will tell their friends, and so on and so on.

Email advertising

You may already be doing internet advertising. Email advertising is less well-known, but can provide a terrific bang for the buck. Think about it – whether on a desktop computer, laptop, smartphone, or tablet computer, people will check their emails on all of the devices. So if you have an ad running in, say, a newspaper’s “Top 10 Articles of the Day” newsletter, the reader will get to read the ad wherever he or she is.

In addition, email ad platforms like LiveIntent will seamlessly update the ads, if need be. So if you had a Memorial Day sales ad in an email newsletter, but the reader does not actually open the ad until late June, you can switch out the ad dynamically to reflect the new ad in the old email.

That is just the beginning of new marketing and advertising ideas out there. Tell us about what you new ideas you have tried with your business.

Lisa Swan writes for a variety of tech and business sites, including Huffington Post. She lives in New York City.