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Organic performance is a significant advantage of a good company blog. But that doesn’t mean paid blog promotion strategies aren’t worth considering occasionally to get even more mileage out of the content.
In this article, I discuss the following:
- What are paid blog promotions?
- How to decide what promotions to run?
- What’s the goal of paid advertisements?
- How to create paid blog promotions?
What are paid blog promotions?
There are several ways to promote blog posts, including:
- Your email list
- Social media channels
- People find the articles by searching for terms on Google
- Paid distribution strategies
Paid promotions of company content, in the simplest terms, is any strategy where the company or blogger spends money to get the content in front of the audience. Some people may call that advertisement and it can include:
- Social media ads
- Recommended content (native content ads) like Blaze
- Paid insertion into industry newsletters
- Google ads – including remarketing
How to decide what promotions to run?
As Rokas Golcas, author of “Google Ads Blueprint: An easy-to-follow Guide for Getting Results with Google Ads,” said on “The Business Storytelling Show,” it all comes down to your goals.
Blog posts can be written for the different parts of the funnel – awareness, consideration, conversion, and loyalty. With that, paid promotions that send people to blog content should consider where the person is in the funnel.
Read next: What’s the difference between promotions and distribution strategies in digital marketing?
What’s the goal of paid promotions?
As always, the goal should be to make potential customers aware of the topic at hand. Sometimes that can include a product comparison like:
- The advantages of one type of pool over another
- Tips from the leading companies in <this specific vertical>
- Five ways to do <one thing or another>
So from there, we need to decide what the goals are, which could include:
Increasing audience
For some blog articles – especially the top and middle of the funnel ones – we wouldn’t expect a conversion (i.e., a purchase), but they are a step in the process of moving the right consumers toward buying from us. It’s a numbers game, so the larger the relevant audience is, the larger the relevant audience in later stages will be.
Once we drive more audience to those blog posts, consider the following:
- adding calls to action so they can sign up for updates by email.
- launching a remarketing campaign and serving them additional ads once they leave your site. Those ads can then go to landing pages that make sense as the next step in the customer journey.
Convincing consumers that your product is the best
That’s where more product-specific blog posts come in. Sometimes they discuss a new feature – for example, how to conduct remote consumer research. Other times, they may list the ten best ways of doing one thing or another, and one (or more) of those ways includes things your product can do.
Read next: Boost Conversions With Highly Effective Inline Ads
Conversions
Chances are that if you know people are ready to buy, you won’t send them to an informational blog post to learn more! Don’t keep marketing when they don’t need any more marketing. Send them to a landing page to purchase the product.
Read next: How to Use Social Media Promotions to Grow Your Business: ways to promote and defining your strategy
How to create paid blog promotions
Many of the platforms have made this way easier than in years past. You can simply insert the link of the article where you want to send people. Some platforms now even give you recommendations for what the copy should be based on the content at the link. The image gets automatically adjusted to look fine on that network. That doesn’t always work, however. For example, on Blaze, the WordPress paid blog promotions platform, the image from the article doesn’t look great:
As you can see in the image, it doesn’t fit, and the most important pieces are cut off. What is nice about Blaze is that you can easily pick blog posts from a list to promote. To do this, use the Jetpack app.
Consider redesigning the images in a way for them to work on the blog and also in the promotions – if you want to go that route. Personally, I find this hard as a non-designer content creator and would likely hire a freelancer designer to help me.
Paid promotion strategies might be worth it, and as Rokas said, you might not even have to spend a ton of money. Set a budget with a goal and target audience in mind, and try different things each month until you hit your sweet spot with your paid blog promotions to help with business goals.