On a regular basis, I hear clients ask how they can get more traffic to their website. As with anything that you want people to be exposed to, you have to being spreading the word yourself.
One of the easiest ways to get exposure to your blog posts, that I have found, is by sharing all of your new posts automatically to your social media networks. Your biggest fans are already following you and liking you in these places like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, to name a few…why not give them the first opportunity to read what you’ve written in your blog?
Now, you are probably thinking that you’ve already been doing this for a long time. Usually, by coping and pasting your new post urls into statuses or tweets, but wouldn’t it be awesome to automate it? Work smarter, not harder.
JetPack is a free plugin that is available to WordPress websites that allows you to access an amazing little featured called Publicize. This feature opens up the ability to automate the broadcasting of your newly published posts to whatever profile or fan page you need to! When you connect your blog to social media, you’re giving yourself easy, simple promotion in multiple channels.
If you have a Piggyback Blog, the above video will help walk you through the steps in order to activate the Jetpack Plugin. This will require a login from WordPress.com, that will ultimately be different than your logins that have been provided for Piggyback Blogs. Don’t have one? No sweat, there’s a handy dandy button that nicely asks, “Need an account?”. Why yes, yes I do, WordPress! Thanks for asking!
It helps to be logged into all of the accounts that you are planning to connect your blog with, so that you’re not put on the spot and asked for passwords and usernames and email addresses, but, of course, this isn’t necessary.
I personally have my Google+ and Facebook connected to my personal blogs. Mostly because any statuses that I share on my Facebook fan pages already gets automatically tweeted on my Twitter account and I don’t want to end up with duplicates because of automation. Sometimes you have to make sure you’re not double-triple automating your life! #firstworldproblems right?
Lastly, here are some things to think about before putting Jetpack’s Publicize feature to work for you.
Be sure that you’re ready for your posts to be broadcasted out to your social media networks. The last thing you want is to still be playing around with how things are formatted and the last thing you know, your published posts called “Test Test” gets sent out to your Facebook. It’s just a little embarrassing (especially when you have a lot of followers and you don’t catch the fact that it happened for a few days).
There are a lot of ways to style how that Facebook or Twitter blast comes from your blog, I’ll go into this more in depth when I start getting down the to the nitty gritty of the SEO Yoast Plugin. But, until then, it will usually display the first photo it finds on your website and add it as your featured image on your link that you post to social media, along with the first bit of your post’s text as the content of the status update.
And finally, Feel free to sponsor a good blog post on social media, help market yourself and your hard work by letting more and more people find your information. Become that source of information that people want!
Connect your blog to social media and let your friends and fans be your first readers and your promoters!
If you have any questions on how to use this plugin, please let us know and we’d love to help out! Just comment below!