How to make your blog post more visible online

There’s all the excitement of writing a new post, publishing it and looking at it with admiration on your blog.

But then the days and weeks go by, and there are no comments, no likes and no shares. Why? Surely what you have written is so fabulous people can’t fail to want to read it? Your mum said it was good, and so did your best friend. So how do you make your blog post more visible online?

I’ve created an infographic for you that should explain what you need to do:

Unfortunately the web has evolved so much, it’s not a matter of writing a post, publishing it, and thousands will flock to read it. That may have been the case in 2002, but not in 2014. There is a lot of posts flying about, all newly published, and the solution is for you to try and make yours stand out above the rest by making it more visible online.

Have you really finished your post?

Make sure you’ve completed everything before publishing your post. Is the headline as good as you can make it? Does the permalink (that automatically created URL for your post’s page) match the headline? Have you allocated your categories and filled in your tags (labels)? Did you include a call to action at the bottom of your post, to encourage comments or shares on social media? All these are needed to make your post more visible online.

Do you have a feed?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and syndication is the ability to publish something simultaneously in several places at once. This means with a RSS feed URL (which you can still get from Feedburner) you can ‘republish’ your post on other sites to place it in front of a wider audience.

Those share buttons that are placed under your post use RSS to ‘republish’ your post on your friends’ social media profiles, even if the result is only the headline and link. This is why it’s so important to write an attractive and enticing headline, because that is usually the only element of your post that becomes more visible online and can draw your readers in.

How interactive are you?

One of the main features of being more visible online is not necessary showcasing who you are and what you represent. Social media doesn’t tolerate selling tactics; it works on relationship building and interaction. Therefore you need to turn your mindset onto its head and start being as altruistic as possible: sharing other people’s posts, writing nice and helpful comments, searching out other blogs in your niche or interest and interacting with them.

This means that when you ‘feed’ or paste your link into social networking and bookmarking sites, it’s not a matter of dumping the URL and leaving as quickly as possible. This is what spammers do. To counteract this, you need to show an interest in your potential readers, start a discussion or continue a conversation, share a post or leave constructive feedback – in other words, hang around and see what’s happening or what the results are, and then respond accordingly.

Have you told anybody yet?

You don’t have to rely on automated systems to tell people about your new post to make it more visible online. Sometimes a good old email to a friend, or even your newsletter list, is sufficient to spread the word, so don’t forget to use these facilities to the full.

If you are forthcoming and friendly, showing no pushy marketing tactics to cloud your generosity, then people will feel compelled to talk about you and your blog, share your posts and spread your reputation far and wide. You never know who might be waiting and watching in the wings…

About Alice Elliott

Alice Elliott, aka Fairy Blog Mother, is an award winning blogging consultant who has been looking after bloggers since 2006! Woah, that's a long time! She specialises in "explaining things really simply" about WordPress, and has twice been noted as a top WordPress influencer for 2019.

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