Whether you’re a small business trying to attract new customers, or a professional blogger trying to gain notoriety, new visitors are the lifeblood of any blog.Unfortunately, attracting new readers can also be one of the most difficult parts of successful blogging, and that’s where widgets can help.
The following four widgets offer several innovative and proven methods to help you grow your fan base. From original ways to encourage readers to share your content, to finding new readers in old places, these simple tools can help you work smarter rather than harder about promoting your blog.
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1Create Share-Locked Content with Social Locker
When someone clicks on one of your social share buttons, the shared post appears in their news feed for their followers to see. And because that person’s friends are likely to have common interests, they’re also likely to share the post and read what you have to say. This endorsement acts as a form of social proofing for your blog, which can further perpetuate the sharing of that content through a sort of snowball effect.
Of course getting the ball rolling is half of the battle. One way to increase initial sharing is share-locked content. Social Locker is a WordPress plugin that allows you to restrict your readers to only seeing a portion of a post, enabling them to unlock the rest by sharing. This encourages your readers to help give you the sharing you need to broaden your readership, while also while giving them a little something extra for the effort. Share-locked content shouldn’t be applied to every one of your posts, but when used on content that’s valuable enough to make the trade worthwhile, it may help increase your social sharing by more than 30%.
2Easy Sharing with SumoMe
Often times, sound bites or snippets are the content that’s most worth sharing, especially on networks like Twitter where brevity is crucial. SumoMe is a WordPress plugin that can make sharing these snippets as easy as possible. Whenever one of your readers highlights a portion of your blog content with their cursor, SumoMe launches a sharing window citing the passage they’ve highlighted. This window includes icons for both Twitter and Facebook, allowing your readers to share the most important portions of your content in as little as two clicks. The easier is to share your content, the likely that it will be shared, and SumoMe makes sharing exceptionally easy.
3Streamline Article Distribution with Dlvr.it
Would you like to automatically publish your content to some of the Internet’s most popular social media platforms? Dlvr.it can help. By enabling you to publish Google Alerts directly to your Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Twitter, or Facebook account, Dlvr.it combines RSS feeds and Google Alerts in a way that’s never been done before. By expanding the reach of your content, you’ll ultimately increase how often your content is shared. This tool also makes it possible to publish highly targeted, keyword-driven Google Alerts, which can encourage readers to click, head to your blog, and share. If you want to capitalize on RSS traffic from Google Alerts, Dlvr.it can streamline the entire process in a matter of minutes.
4Promote Veteran Content with Evergreen Post Tweeter
Many of your older posts may be some of your best content, but without sufficient promotion, that content does little to further the success of your blog. Evergreen Post Tweeter is a plugin that allows you to dig up that content from the depths of your archive and pull it back into the limelight. With Evergreen Post Tweeter, you can automatically schedule your old content to be posted to your Twitter account, allowing you to give your veteran content the attention it deserves. You can also target the posts you want to schedule by category or age, which allows you to prevent over-promoting content that’s still fresh, or to pass by content that’s no longer relevant.