promote your blog articles through social media outletsSo you researched, gathered information, brainstormed, and wrote a great article. Next you sit in front of your computer screen waiting for the traffic to come running right? Wrong! Go promote that article.

There are many, many ways to promote an article after you have written it, but I am going to only concentrate on a few of my favorites and you are more than welcome to chime in with yours in the comments below.

Twitter:

Depending on your niche, Twitter can provide an amazing amount of traffic if you use it properly. I usually tweet my article as soon as I am finished writing it, which on most days is in the morning here on the east coast (US). I don’t have an enormous amount of followers, but the ones I do have are targeted (and like most, my following grows on a daily basis).

I am not a big fan of automated or timed tweets with your links in it (like HootSuite) because it can make you look like all you are on Twitter for is self promotion. I prefer to manually tweet my own articles immediately after I write one, then I may tweet about it once or twice more throughout the course of the day.

An important key to getting people to re-tweet your articles is to re-tweet other peoples articles. If I am reading an article I like, and the blog owner is smart enough to put a re-tweet button in the post, I will usually use it to send their article out to my followers.

I use TweetMeme plugin for my blog. I like it because I can go into the settings and replace the “RT @tweetmeme” with RT @kbloemendaal and then I know that someone re-tweeted my post.

Remember to share the love, re-tweet articles for others, and it is more likely that yours will be re-tweeted.

Facebook:

Post your articles here too, I have followers/friends on facebook that aren’t on twitter. This is a good way to get traffic to your article that wouldn’t have normally found out about it. I recently made a fan page for NeedInformation, (so go be a fan :-0) and I recommend you do the same, is is really easy to do and you can put a widget in your sidebar that links to it. If one of your friends comments on your page then their friends can see that and may be curious, so it can become somewhat viral on its own.

BlogEngage:

I also immediately submit my article to blog engage. I encourage you to submit it your self to make sure it gets in the category and tags that you want. The community at blog engage is incredible and it is one of my best traffic sources. I also sign up for their email updates which emails you published articles on a regular basis. This is a good way to discover blogs you don’t read already and you can network with those bloggers.

After you submit your article, take the time to see if there are some articles that interest you that you can vote on as well, remember you must give to receive.

Blog Comments and Forums:

I try to wait until after I publish an article everyday to go through my Google Reader and start commenting on blogs. There are a couple of reasons for doing this and it does NOT include getting backlinks! Promoting an article by commenting on blogs can get your article indexed faster if the sites you frequent have a high PageRank (yes there are some uses for having higher PR) and they have comment luv it is even better.

Commenting on blogs with commentluv after you publish your article gives you a great opportunity to promote your article because other commentators and the blog owner will see the title of the article and if you are good at writing title, they may be encouraged to click it.

Conclusion:

There are many other ways to promote your article like StumbleUpon and Digg which I use as well, but the ones I mentioned above are where I always start. What methods do you use?

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