So you have a blog? Good! That means you know how to publish your posts on the Internet.

I assume you don’t write for yourself and you want to reach with your message, opinion or knowledge to a wider audience. If so, you need to know how to promote your own content.

There is some negative meaning of a word “promote”. It has some bad connotations with advertising in its worst version. I’m talking about using some tricky and not always ethical methods of selling something to somebody who actually doesn’t need it. Other words that lay pretty close are: selling and marketing.

But let’s assume you have some knowledge you want to share, or some valuable experience that can be helpful for others. Promoting that content should not be something repulsive to you. The better you will do it, the more you will help people.

There is no big value in a hidden pearl or piece of art. It needs to be shown to fully shine. Same with your blog post. You’ve written valuable blog post? Great! First point on the list is checked. But please not forget about second step — promote it (you can replace “promote it” with “tell people about it”).

I’ll divide my answer to a question how to promote your blog post into two sections: where to promote it and when to do it.

Where to promote a blog post

1. LinkedIn (linkedin.com) — past a link to your article if it’s connected with your profession.
2. Reddit (reddit.com) — past a link in thematically related subreddits but don’t spam.
3. Quora (quora.com) — find a question for which your article can be an answer. Reply with some short answer and add that more detailed answer can be found in your article (+ link).
4. Facebook groups (facebook.com) — first find and join thematic groups. Next, you can either answer people’s question and paste a link, or you can post presenting your new blog post.
5. Tumblr (tumblr.com) — post a link to your article. Remember about adding some hashtags.
6. Twitter (twitter.com) — same as above. Using hashtags is very important.
7. Forums — many of them have special topics to share blog posts.
8. Newsletters or linklogs — find most popular newsletters for your domain. Most of them allow you to submit your blog post URL. It can be presented on they webpage or sent via email to all subscribers. Try to describe shortly your content. For example for Ruby it could be https://ruby.libhunt.com/ or http://www.rubyflow.com/
9. Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com) — paste a link.
10. Slack, IRC etc. — in my opinion great way to reach out to active members of a community. They can give you very valuable feedback or share your link further.
11. Reposting — this is controversial. By “reposting” I mean when you take your blog post content and create new article on LinkedIn, Facebook, Quora, Tumblr or other blog. There are two faces of that. If you want to build your personal brand, or share your blog post with maximum number of readers, that’s definitely ok to repost. But you have to know that it can lower your position in Google as their algorithm will thread that action as spamming. I personally use that technique as I saw few publications which authors shown that this bad impact is not so bad as it seems. I do not repost every single blog post, but rather I try to pick these I think can bring biggest value to the readers.
12. Mailing list — it’s a real asset of every blogger, so you should start building it from the beginning. You can use Mailchimp (https://mailchimp.com/) for it. I use it personally. With every new blog post, I’m sending an email to my subscribers to inform them about it.

When to promote a blog post

There is a lot of studies showing when it’s the best time to post on different social networks. It’s based on few factors like: when people use it, for what people use it and how given social network is presenting posts.

These studies have a lot in common and show that the best time to post is:

Facebook

• Sunday (TOP) and Thursday — Saturday
• 9 AM, 1 PM, 3 PM
• 12 PM — 4 PM on weekends

Twitter

• Monday — Friday 12 PM, 3 PM
• Wednesday 5–6 PM

LinkedIn

• Tuesday — Thursday
• 7–8 AM, 12 PM, 5–6 PM

Sending emails

• Thursday 9:30–10:30 AM

Summary

I hope I shown you that promoting your blog post is a mandatory step. You should do this no matter if you want to reach to a wider audience but also if a blog is your method to build personal brand.

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