Do you struggle with feeling like the right way to promote your history blog posts is to put it on every single feature of every single platform, and if you don’t then you’re either missing something or doing something wrong?
At first glance, the feeling of needing to be everywhere makes sense. You’ve worked hard on your latest history blog post which is sitting so beautifully on your blog page – the title is amazing, it’s neatly formatted and has striking images. After all this effort you quite rightly want as many people to see it as possible.
But trying to be ‘everywhere’ in your history blogging (or any other) should not be your end goal.
For a start it’s exhausting. My head hurts trying to keep up with the latest features on social media and it can often feel overwhelming. It’s also time-consuming especially when they all want different dimensions, formats, cover pages – urrrrgh!. Plus, trying to be everywhere can look extremely inauthentic. You can tell when someone has used a scheduler to push the same piece out to multiple platforms. I have done this myself, which now seems perverse, as I engage with this type of post the least.
So if it’s bad practice not to share your stunning history blog post as well as bad practice to share it everywhere, then where does that leave you?
Put simply, your goal should be getting in front of the right people and being where it counts.
Would you sell a history book in a mobile phone shop?
Here’s a slightly daft example but it resonated with me.
If you have a book called Anne Boleyn: Guilty or Not Guilty, your strategy could be to sell it in bookshops, supermarkets, on Amazon and perhaps get it into schools and libraries. But would you sell it in clothes shops, shoe shops, hardware stores or mobile phone shops? No, This is because you’re not going to reach your intended audience who are there for a different reason. Instead, you would decide where your readers were and then keep applying all the marketing techniques you had.
How to decide where you need to be
To move forward with your blog promotion strategy you must first answer these two questions:
- Where is my audience?
- What is my core content? Blog post? Podcast? Video?
The first question can be based on analytics on your blog site or generally where you get the most engagement and good vibes. In part, it should be based on where you feel most comfortable, but if the history community in your niche is on Twitter, and it’s not your cup of tea, then you have a decision to make about whether you join in or channel your efforts into somewhere less popular.
How to not be repetitive when focusing your history blog promotion
So let’s say your audience is on Instagram. Using one blog post on Anne Boleyn you could do a story, reel, poll, regular post, image carousel, and live or recorded video.
But won’t this be repetitive I hear you ask?
No. Not if you get creative, space it out, and point people in the direction of your blog post from different angles and with different tones. Here are just some of the ideas for our post on Anne Boleyn:
- A poll about whether she was the most influential Queen of England?
- A carousel of your favourite images of actresses who have played her?
- Ask a question about whether people think she was guilty?
- Do a follow-up post reflecting on the answers you got to your question
- Post a picture of Hever Castle and either say how much you loved it or would love to visit
- Do a personal video about what attracted you to writing about Anne Boleyn
- Take snippets from the video above and put it into a story
- Pull a quote out from your post or from someone else about her
- Do a post reviewing the top 5 books you’ve read about Anne Boleyn.
So, I would advise you not to look at what everyone else is doing. You need to use your instincts and your analytics and plow your own blog promotion field. Not being everywhere has its perks. Your time will be spent on quality meaningful engagement, writing more wonderful posts, and creating the space for opportunities you may never have even thought of to appear.
