How to Get More People to Share Your Blog Posts

The whole goal of creating blog posts is to get people to read them and to share them so others will read and share. But this goal is getting more challenging to achieve as more and more good content is being published across the web. Here are a few tips to give your blog posts the boost they need.

Pay attention to your timing.

If you send out automated emails to your subscribers, set them to send when your subscribers are in their inboxes reading their emails. You don’t want your email to hit your subscribers’ inboxes at the same time they receive a dozen other subscription emails. Most people just don’t have the time to read all their emails, and if yours is buried, it likely won’t get read. You can accomplish this by analyzing your lists for a common time of highest engagement, or you can use a tool like Seventh Sense to deliver each email to each subscriber at his or her best individual time.

Make it easy for readers to share.

Include social share buttons in your post, as well as “Forward to a Friend”—so readers can email the post.

Show share counts (or not).

Social proof is a powerful thing, and it works both ways. If you’re getting a decent amount of shares already, let others know that “everyone else is doing it” and they’ll be more inclined to share as well. On the other hand, if you have only a couple of shares, people will tend to not share when they might have otherwise—so leave off the share counts from your share buttons.

Include images.

A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say, and people like images. In fact, research shows that tweets with images receive 18% more clicks, 89% more favorites and 150% more retweets. And on Facebook brand pages, posts with photos see the most engagement—accounting for 87% of total interactions.

Add CTAs.

Give readers more reasons to share. When you offer an eBook, video, or other type of premium content and encourage readers to click for more, they just might find even more they want share.

Optimize for mobile.

Mobile isn’t just for B2C. The latest IDG Global Mobile Survey reports that 77% of business decision-makers use their smartphone to research a product or service for their business. If your blog posts don’t look beautiful on mobile, you’re missing out.

It isn’t enough to write insightful pieces anymore. You have to make it easy for your audience to find, read, and share your posts if you hope to get those posts out and about to as many others in your target audience as possible.