Editor’s Note: We are pleased to share a blog post recently written by Amy McIlwain of Financial Social Media. Today Financial Social Media is thriving as a compliant provider for Social Media Education to Financial Advisors, Insurance Agents & Financial Service Agents.

Now that you have written optimized, relevant, original content for your audience (15-Point Blog Optimization Checklist), today I want to help you not only maximize the reach and exposure of this content, but also learn how to stretch this content as much as possible to benefit and grow your business. There are 2 crucial ways to do just that:

Pre-Plan How You Will Promote Your Blog

As a general rule of thumb, you should spend as much time promoting and sharing your blog as you do writing it. We all know the most obvious promotion technique… share your blog on all the major social networks to encourage your followers to go to your website and read the article. Below are a few tips for additional ways to promote your blog:

Don’t forget about LinkedIn groups.

Once you have joined LinkedIn groups that your ideal audience might be part of, start sharing your blog articles there just as you would share a regular LinkedIn Update on your profile. Want to increase the engagement on your posts? Make sure your title gives an incentive that is directed at the group’s specific audience. But remember, no one likes spam, especially LinkedIn Group owners, so keep your articles relevant to each group you are posting in.

Communicate with influencers on social media.

- Research and compile a list of the influencers that your target audience likely follows.

- Build relationships with those influencers; become active in their blog comment sections (not with link spam, but with genuine, high-value discussion).

- When publish a new post, ask those influencers to help spread the word. Chances are, if you have previously established a relationship and they find the content helpful and unique, they will be more than happy to share them with the world.

Utilize your email lists.

Your email list is most likely made up of clients, past clients and prospects, so these are people that you want to see, read and share your blogs! Try sending out an email once every two weeks promoting your blogs. Again, no one appreciates spam emails, so be sure to make all your emails valuable to your list.

Repurpose Blog Content For Social

Besides simply promoting your blog titile in a tweet or in a Facebook post, your blog content can be dissected to provide additional posts and updates to bulk-up your content calendar. The following steps will help break down your blog posts into shareable snippets:

• Outline the content. Create an overview of the blog post. While it takes a little bit of time, this provides a great snapshot of the content. In the future, create an outline before you write the initial piece of content to save time. If outlines are not your style, make a list of the main points.
• Highlight content that can be easily made into one-liners. Quotes and statistics are great snippets to use for one-liners. Any small bits of information can easily be turned into content for at least one social media platform.

Now this information can be adapted for a variety of social media platforms.

Different social media platforms highlight different types of content, although there’s definitely some overlap. Take the outlines, bullet points and highlighted information you pulled from your original content, and decide the best way to repurpose it. For recommendations on how to use this content on each popular social network, check out Crafting The Perfect Social Media Content.

These two methods will help expand the number of your devoted blog readers and the quality of your regularly-scheduled social posts.