This has been updated on March 31, 2020.
Blogging is becoming more and more mainstream every day. For entrepreneurs and business owners, it is often difficult to determine what is the best way to market their blog posts to reach a larger audience. I wanted to expand upon a strategy that I suggest entrepreneurs and business owners use which is to post blog posts on a platform that they control and then to repost it on more community based social networks or blogging platforms.
The reason is that you don't actually own Facebook, LinkedIn or many of the other platforms but you should focus on drawing people back to your website and increasing your email list.
This is not to say that there aren't benefits from natively posting a blog post or a video on a specific social media site. For example uploading a video on Facebook or Instagram might be more beneficial for Facebook organic reach than posting on your blog and then pasting a link to it as an update. However, I would simply say that there should be a strategy behind what you are doing.
At a networking event a few weeks ago, someone asked if they should just use LinkedIn Pulse as their blog and my response was simply that there are certainly benefits to posting on LinkedIn Pulse but don't forget that you don't actually own the platform. You are simply renting space. Years ago, posting on Facebook with a business page was a requirement for business owner. Many businesses spent valuable resources to increase their likes and over time their organic reach decreased more and more to the point that there really wasn't any way to reach the people that liked their page without advertising.
This happened with Facebook and it is the case with all the social media platforms. Remember that you don't own these platforms so I would say to follow the steps below.
- Post your blog post on your website/blog – Make sure that you actually own your domain. It should not be www.yourdomain.wordpress.com. Make sure you actually are getting “credit” from Google for your hard work.
- Share your blog on your social media platforms – If you have a Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest, post your blog on these sites. By share, I mean a direct link to your post. I would even recommend taking the time (if it allows) to cater the post to the specific social media site.
- Finally, either copy the most relevant part of the blog post or the entire blog post natively within the blogging network–e.g. LinkedIn, Medium, CEO Press (a platform I started) or even Tumblr. Make sure you link back to the original post because Google does penalize for duplicate content but you can add an attribution like this–Originally posted on CEO Press: How to Help Your Blog Reach a Larger Audience. This is known as repurposing content.
That's it! I've found that posts that I've posted natively on my site have reached larger audiences by just taking the extra step and reposting on other sites like LinkedIn Pulse or Medium. There are so many more ways to get your post out but I wanted to touch on an underutilize step that business owners could take to simply expand their reach.
Here's an example
Original Blog Post: Why You Should Start Business Blogging in 2016
Reposts: