No one wants to write in a vacuum.
When you publish a blog post on LinkedIn, you get help publicizing it. LinkedIn notifies your connections that you have published a blog post, they feature your three most recent blog posts on your LinkedIn profile, and they make your blog posts available to Google and other search engines.
Here are five other things you can do to get more readers…
- Publish on your own website.
Does your company have a blog on your website? If it does, see if your editor would be interested in publishing your blog posts. Many corporate blogs are looking for additional quality content, and your editor will likely be pleased to have you contribute.
One thing to keep in mind… Google can penalize sites for having duplicate content. It’s unlikely that publishing in two places will cause a problem for you (Google is more concerned about people who publish in 100+ places), but if you are worried you can rewrite the blog post slightly.
- Share in your newsletter.
If your company has an email newsletter or an email that goes out regularly to your list, talk to your marketing team and see if they would be interested in sharing your blog post. Again, marketers are always hungry for quality content, and this is a good way to reach people who have already expressed interest in your company.
- Share in other social media.
Tweet a link to your blog post several times over the next few days after you publish the post. Quote from the blog post, share a statistic, or tell people who should read it and why. Each tweet can be different. Use different hashtags to expand your audience further.
You could also share the blog post in LinkedIn Groups. We’re seeing less of this now than there used to be, but if you choose a group with active discussions, you might be able to start a conversation around the blog post.
Mention your blog post to your marketing team – they may want to tweet it, share on Facebook or on other platforms too.
- Use LinkedIn Sponsored Content advertisements.
LinkedIn allows you to choose the type of people you want to read your post, and insert it directly into their news feed, even if these people aren’t your LinkedIn followers or connections.
You can define your target audience by industry, company size, company name, job title, function, seniority, age, gender, where they attended school, and a variety of other criteria.
Thousands of people will see that you have published a blog post, so you get a lot of brand awareness, but you only pay when someone clicks through to read your post.
The cost is about $5 per click, which is very reasonable to get your blog post in front of the exact right people.
If you want help with this, let us know. With our LinkedIn Megaphone service, we set up and manage your advertising campaigns for you.
- Try to get into Pulse.
Pulse is like LinkedIn’s online magazine – it’s a news aggregation platform where all members see the same content, divided into 85 channels ranging from “Leaders and Management” to more specific topics like “Sales Strategies.” Outside news articles and posts by LinkedIn Influencers are published here.
And your post also has a chance.
If the LinkedIn Pulse editors choose your post to be featured, you can get tens or hundreds of thousands of views within just a few days.
Of course there is a lot of competition to be in Pulse, but here are some strategies for success:
- Pay attention to the Pulse editorial calendar, and blog on the topic of the month.
- Target a Pulse channel by using keywords that you think are most relevant to that channel.
- Use one or more keywords in the headline.
- Publish Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday.
- Attract LinkedIn editors’ attention by tweeting your post: “tip @LinkedInPulse.”
LinkedIn editor Daniel Roth says that the best strategy when blogging on LinkedIn is to “write to start a conversation instead of to collect pageviews.”
This is what expanding your audience means: reaching new people, in the hope that those people will reach out to you. That’s what you want, right? New, meaningful, and relevant connections that will last long after the post is published.