Make Your Blog Content Viral and Linkable

Jeremy Porter at Journalistics has some great tips on how to make each of your blog postings more valuable. Choose a few tips and integrate them into your blogging!

• If you write for a newspaper or other print publication, do your articles also appear online? Are the articles available to any vistor to the site for free, or do users need to subscribe or register to read the articles? If the latter, you’re limiting your audience. Encourage management to break down the barriers. A good example of this point is PRWeek, my top source of news for the PR industry. There is so much good content I would love to share with other people, and discussions I’d like to engage in, but the subscription wall stops much of this from happening. People are less likely to share content their readers will have to jump through hoops to access.

• If you write and distribute press releases, do you write them as a journalist would write a story? Do you answer the Who, What, When, Where, Why and How in your release? Do you avoid industry jargon and gobbledygook that is so commonly used in releases these days? Would you want to write about the release if you were a journalist?

• If you do have a newsworthy press release, do you distribute your news on a wire service? Do you also format your release for social media consumption, using a social media release platform like PitchEngine? Do you blog about your own news on your site and provide and easy way for your readers to comment, share and link to your post? Your blog might reach more readers than the publicity you generate – don’t overlook this option. And finally, do you tweet about your news on the day it goes out and update your other statuses across social networks? The list goes on an on. If you’re not doing most of these things, you could be missing out on thousands of readers.

• Back to the journalism side of the equation, do you share links to your recent articles across these channels? You can’t rely on search engine visitors, email and RSS subscribers and your friends and family to pass the word along. You need to get your content into the hands of as many people as possible.

• What are you doing to help people find your content beyond these suggestions? Do you optimize all your content for search engines? If you’re not using descriptive page titles, descriptive permalinks, meta descriptions, meta keywords, alt image text and headers to your advantage, you might be missing out on thousands of people searching for the topics you’re writing about.

• Similarly, all your content should include options for sharing. Make it easy for people to tweet about your content, to share your content via social bookmarking sites, or to email your content to their friends.