How To Freelance Tuesday: Getting the Word Out

I was at an event about a year ago (when we could still go to events and talk to people in person), chatting with someone who wanted to get into writing. She first wanted to start with a blog.

“Great!” I said. “But you’re aware that half of writing a blog is promoting it and getting it out there, right?”

Did you know that? As someone who started my first website back in the mid-1990s (long live Geocities), and started a blog in the early 2000s, it’s not enough to just start a blog. You can write and write and write, but unless you do something to get the word out, you won’t have any traffic. Blogging is not a “If you build it, they will come” situation.

Here are some simple ways to get the word out:

Social Media: Use social media. And don’t just use one platform, because each platform has a different demographic attached to it, and you’ll find different kinds of followers on each. (For example, there are a lot of writers on Twitter, but not really on other platforms.) Post about your blog on each of these platforms, multiple times. But more importantly, interact on these platforms so that you’ll have a community who wants to read it. Only surfacing on social media to post once is going to be the same as only blogging and never telling anyone about it.

I’ve watched people do some cool things, but never promoted it, never got the word out. They thought that people just weren’t interested, and stopped doing those cool things. It wasn’t the cool thing, it was the broadcasting.

Hashtags: Hashtags are a way for non-followers to find you on social media. They essentially group all posts of a similar topic under one category — for example, if I like Boston pics, I may follow the #Boston hashtag on Instagram. If I want to interact with other writers, I may follow the #WritingCommunity hashtag on Twitter. Make sure to tag your post about your blog with a few different hashtags so people can find you.

For example, I just wrote a blog post about when the Hindenburg flew over Boston. I tagged #Boston, #history, and #airships — and I got some good traffic from the #airships hashtag!

Medium: If you want a platform with some built-in community, consider starting your blog on Medium, which is a slick, professional online publication that anyone can join. Users of Medium are more likely to see your posts, and the Medium editors review blogs and promote them if they think they need more widespread readership.

These are certainly just a few of the many ways you can get your blog post out, but start here and you’ll start increasing your readership.