10 Terrific Ways to Share Content Better

To share content better on the Internet is an art. It is almost as important as writing the post. Original content is great, but in the end you will need to go that extra mile to give your site an edge over the others. There are plenty of ways you can share content better than you ever did before.

How I try to share content better

I will be honest. I just restarted my blog and things were very slow. But good news is that I have picked up pace and rapidly heading for the Pro gallery. Now you can join me too if you can do the following things regularly. You won’t have to even look back.

1. Paid Advertisements(Optional) – If you have a good deal of money and the budget suits you, this is the easiest way to share content better. You can sign up with Google Adwords for example and share your posts. But this is not exactly what we will be focusing on. I am a great fan of organic search, where people instead of advertisements drive traffic. This is because paid ads will only give you a head-start and without a good subscriber base, you will go back to where you started from.

2. Using sharing icons – Using the sharing icons on your blog is one of the easiest way to share content better. This is something that almost all the blogs already do. You will find people sharing posts from Labnol, Hongkiat and problogger. All you need to do is to embed your sharing icons on your site and also on your individual posts and wait for the readers to share them. Social media is a huge jungle and the best part is that all this publicity is absolutely free. It is also encouraged, so if you want to get started you should look at the options.

   i. AddThis – This is one the coolest and simplest of the services that allow you to share your content without any coding in the background. Whether you are on Tumblr or WordPress or any other, you can put your share codes easily.

   ii. Shareaholic– The most popular service that helps you share content better for WordPress is this. Choose your layouts and pick your icons. Then you are done. You can install it individually on a number of platforms like Blogger, WordPress or Typepad right away, For the rest also the installation is as simple as just putting a couple of lines of code in the right places.
   
   iii. Go Manual – You may be the coding guru or perhaps you wish not to burden your site with another external JavaScript. You can simply create a CSS sprite and plug some code in your WordPress site (or any other site for that matter) to make it work. It’s no rocket science. Tracking the shares becomes much more difficult as you will need to check for each page to see how many shares you got for a single page. In that case the previous alternatives have got Dashboards that help you get the bigger picture.

3. Create Social Media dedicated pages – This is vital. You don’t want to redirect your readers to your personal page. You can simply create a Facebook page and a twitter handle for your blog to start with. Choose a simple template for the Facebook page with the blog logo and also for the twitter page and you are done. Of course, in the case of twitter, your main handle and the blog’s handle can be the same. Just make sure your don’t tweet irrelevant stuff all the time. If your blog is about gardening and your tweets are all about wrestling, it won’t help those who would be following you on Twitter. Also don’t forget to put up follow icons on your homepage and also optionally the newsletters that you send to subscribers. Shareaholic itself has options for you to choose from.

   Honorable mentions: Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Pinterest, Instagram.

Note: Re-share content from time to time – This is often missed but helps a lot and does not require much effort. You can re-tweet a post of yours following a particular schedule to reach a wider audience. Say you post it on Day 1, Day 2 Day 7 , Day 30 and then Day 90. Recycling your shares is a good way to keep your links fresh and updated. Make the necessary updates to older archives as you need them.

4. Share in niche sites and communities – This is the biggest advantage of sticking to a particular niche. You keep the domain of your readers limited and that allows you to select a smaller field to work upon. You will find plenty of communities both offline and online for any type of your choice. If you blog about modern art, you will find communities on Facebook, popular sites like deviantart and even Google Groups. Certainly printing a simple flyer from your printer and sharing physically at such a meetup is also great.

5.  Feed and email subscription – This is among the basic ways to share content better and build a subscriber base. If you are running your websites on a CMS it is likely that you will already have your feed. In case you don’t it is highly recommended that you get one. RSS feeds help millions of users to check on content from their favorite sites. Email subscription is also necessary to optimize your reach to the the readers. What these do is convert an occasional visitor to a subscriber. Here are some tips to encourage users to go subscribe to your website thereby pretty much becoming a regular visitors. I prefer Feedburner and Mailchimp for both feed and email subscriptions for my websites. This is the foolproof way to share content better as you engage with individual readers.

6. Guest Blogging – Though I am not a great fan of Guest Blogging, it can come in handy as you share content better if they are properly sanitized to remove spammy links. Guest posts often provide a new insight on things that you probably never thought about. You yourself can also blog for other sites occasionally and provide a neat backlink to your own blog. Make sure to follow the guidelines – healthy link exchanges are very much acceptable and contribute to a better web. But don’t fill it with your links. That would be spamming.

7. Speak, Podcast, Vlog – Speaking in the public as an invited expert, or as a regular podcaster is a great way to reach out to an even greater audience. However sharing content better this way might be a bit of a problem in the beginning because nobody is going to hire you to speak or download your podcast if you are a nobody. So start off small – maybe your local convention center or school hall? Any start is a good start. YouTube is also a great place to share content, unboxing and gadget reviews. It is also quite independent of your blog. Even if you are new to blogging your may become a great hit on YouTube and then redirect some traffic from there to your blog. It then can work both ways.

8. Design and Market – How about design simple T shirts or coffee mugs and give it to your friends when you gift them on their birthdays? In any case you will be gifting them something. Why not your own merchandise? It’s actually not a cheap way to do it. You can give them some honorary membership or something that suits both of yours fancy and also share content better. It simply becomes visible and in a party is sure to grab some eyeballs.

9. Write an eBook – You can either write something you fancy and sell it as an eBook or organize your blog or a part of your blog as an eBook and publish with Amazon to share content better. The links you get will be organic and you will also get some money from it as well. You can also give away a PDF copy for each subscriber. The choice is yours. Either way you can share content much better as you will be targeting the core readers – folks who don’t just browse websites, but take time to buy or download and read books.

10. Create Google Chrome and Windows apps for your Website – This is actually very simple to do and you can share content better and in an optimized format easily with platform independent coding. You may look at this excellent guide for how to create a Google Chrome app. Check this post on how to do that for a Windows app.

These 10 ways to share content better and increase your subscribers should propel you quickly in the big league. What you will need then is consistency, because let’s face it – this is hard work. So write good and share better.