How to Get 1000 Shares on Your Next Blog Post

You need shares.

Without shares, you’re wasting your time creating content only a few people past your mom and significant other are seeing. If you’re blogging for business, you can’t afford to publish for a few people. You need the exponential reach that comes from multiple shares. Here’s how you can achieve 1000 shares on your next blog post.

3 Ways to Achieve Amazing Reach

There are three ways to get 1000 shares on your blog posts. The first involves becoming a Hollywood star or top-paid athlete and then sharing something completely inappropriate or mean-spirited.

The second is using video blogging. First, buy a Chewbacca mask, wear it, and tell your dashcam how much you love it, while laughing hysterically.

Assuming you’re not a Hollywood star, an athlete, or someone who enjoys cosplay, you’ll have to follow the third path. Sadly, it takes a little longer but can be repeated on a consistent basis.

Getting tons of shares as a “normal” person requires a three-step process: building a foundation of strong relationships, writing/producing amazing content, and promoting it effectively.

Preliminary Steps to Getting More Consistent Shares on Your Blog

These steps should be done before writing that killer post. You can’t develop relationships overnight so you need to begin here.

1. Know your audience. If you don’t know who you’re creating for, you can’t figure out what they like.
2. Understand what they (your ideal customers/audience) like and need.
3. Figure out where your ideal customer is on social media and in online communities and begin to establish yourself in a polite and helpful way in these places. We’ll come back to this later.
4. Decide what kind of content your ideal audience responds to. Do they like snarky commentary or meaty educational posts? This will help you shape tone, length of posts, format, and content. 
5. Reach out to industry experts in your field as well as influencers. Start building relationships with these people. Be helpful to them first. Build up credit with them. 

Create Amazing Content

Now that you know who you’re writing for and what they like, you can start producing it.

1. Spend as much time on your title as you do on the body content of your post. Most people make a decision on whether they will click on a post based almost entirely on your title and meta data. Don’t kill an amazing post with a boring headline.
2. Create it in an effective media format that your audience will enjoy. Blogs don’t have to be written. You can use video and podcasts, entirely or as supplements to your writing. The key here is producing it in the format your audience responds to.
3. Research your topic well. Include industry experts and influencers. They may give you a little link love if you mention them.
4. Use enticing images, an easy-to-read design, and break up the text for skimming. Use tweetable text.
5. Ask people to share your post as a call-to-action at the end or design a button asking them to share it if they enjoyed it.

Don’t Forget the Blog Promotion

It’s a fine idea to imagine a well-written blog will be so deserving of an audience that the mere posting of it will alert the universe and it will attract 1000s. That’s simply not the case. A blog needs to be promoted and here’s how you can do it effectively.

1. Remember those relationships you built in the first section? How you were so busy being helpful in a selfless way? Since you did that, when you share your content members of these groups should help you out now. Make sure your groups know about your amazing post. But please do not think you can just jump into a group, without building the relationships, and plop down content. People hate that.
2. Remember those influencers and industry experts you built relationships with too? Remember how you showcased their impressive knowledge? Let them know they were quoted and ask if they wouldn’t mind sharing. If you’ve built really strong relationships, you might not even have to ask.
3. Make sure there is no friction to sharing. Use social media buttons on your site. Use teasers in your own social media promotion of the posts.
4. Ask everyone you’ve helped and built relationships with to share your post. This includes asking employees to share it.
5. Share it in your social spheres multiple times. Pay attention to posting times and rephrase your social media post lead-in with each post. That way it will look fresh and not like you are hitting copy/paste every time.

Bonus infographic:

infographic source: bloggingbasics101.

Finally, pay attention to how each post does. Are some topics or types of posts more popular than others? Are there certain popular posting times for your audience? Getting thousands of shares overnight only happens to stars and wookies. To get consistent large numbers, you need to monitor what works and make adjustments for what doesn’t. Also, build and work on relationships. That starts with you giving of yourself long before they do anything for you.