![\"5](\"https:\/\/www.theedublogger.com\/files\/2019\/03\/5-Ways-To-Share-And-Market-Your-Teacher-Blog-The-Edublogger-rvigps-1q4417m.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nIf you don’t yet have a blog, that’s no problem. You can get one for free by heading over to the Edublogs homepage<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And if you want to be walked through the process of setting up your blog, check out our free, self-paced course.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n The word marketing has got a bad rap in recent decades. Perhaps it makes you think of cheesy, spammy scams, used car salesmen, or endless infomercials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is definitely not the sort of marketing we’re talking about here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Seth Godin<\/a> explains, modern marketing is really using the culture to reach people who want to be reached and offering them something they\u2019re glad to find.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n There’s probably many<\/em> members of the education community out there who would love<\/em> to find you. So, do them a favor and start marketing your wonderful work!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before we look at building an audience through sharing and marketing your blog, let’s go over the many benefits of blogging just<\/em> for yourself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What’s the point of blogging even if no one is reading? Is there a point?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course!<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Clive Thompson stated in Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better,<\/p>\n\n\n\n Professional writers have long described the way that the act of writing forces them to distill their vague notions into clear ideas. By putting half-formed thoughts on the page, we externalize them and are able to evaluate them much more objectively. This is why writers often find that it\u2019s only when they start writing that they figure out what they want to say.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Take a topic you know a little about or have some interest in, do some research and present it in an easy-to-digest way for others. You might be surprised at how transformative this learning process is!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some professionals also enjoy having a blog or website that serves as a digital portfolio. This home base for all your work and credentials can be an advantage for furthering your career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Teacher-bloggers can be role models for students as digital citizens and writers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Furthermore, trying out blogging before introducing it to your students can be a comfortable progression for many educators.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite all of the personal benefits of blogging, you can really amplify things by building an audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Clive Thompson explains,<\/p>\n\n\n\n …studies have found that particularly when it comes to analytic or critical thought, the effort of communicating to someone else forces you to think more precisely, make deeper connections, and learn more.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Building an audience also means expanding your professional learning network (PLN); there are countless benefits to building a strong network as we explore in our free self-paced PLN course for educators<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So we know there are benefits to having an audience for your blog, but building an audience does take work and it requires you to share and market your posts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How exactly can you share and market your blog? Let’s take a look…<\/p>\n\n\n\n With the rise of the ‘edupreneur’ some teachers are using blogging for financial benefit, however, we’ll be focusing on sharing and marketing for the teacher blogger who’s interesting in connecting and learning with others. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/a>You might have put together a fantastic blog post and felt satisfied as you hit the publish button, but your job is not done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just because you publish something online, doesn’t mean it will be seen. People won’t know about your post if you don’t share it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Standing out in a blogosphere populated by millions of people can take work. Fortunately, there are some simple strategies to help ensure your blog post gets an audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Blogging is not like writing a high school essay. A long chunk of text on a page is just not going to appeal to your potential audience. They’ll move on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first thing you need to do is look at your styling and post layout because let’s face it; people aren’t going to share your post if the content was too difficult to even read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our post 10 Tips For Making Your Blog Posts Easier To Read<\/a> will help guide you through the process of creating easy to read posts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We know how powerful visuals are! A Hubspot article<\/a> tells us,<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eye-tracking studies show internet readers pay close attention to information-carrying images. In fact, when the images are relevant, readers spend more time looking at the images than they do reading text on the page.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Studies <\/a>have shown that visitors to your blog will probably only read about 20% of your post. People generally scroll through and skim posts. Images give people a reason to stop scrolling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Through an image, people may be more likely to take in your content and<\/em> share it with others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are all sorts of visuals you can include in your posts. Let’s explore three popular additions to blog posts — social media graphics, infographics, and quotes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bloggers often create a graphic to accompany their blog post which makes a social media post stand out. It’s generally just the title of the blog post with an image and the blog URL — perhaps with blogger’s name or social media handle too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whenever we create a new post on The Edublogger, we create a simple graphic to go with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For example:<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are certain size dimensions that are ideal for different social media platforms as outlined here by Louise M. <\/a>(Tip: If you’re using Canva which we will explain below, it will generate the correct size automatically).<\/p>\n\n\n\n An infographic can be a great way to summarize information or data and make posts more shareable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The 10 Ways To Make You Blog Posts Easier To Read visual above is an example of an infographic that acts like a ‘cheat sheet’.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here is another example we prepared for International Dot Day.<\/a> This sort of thing can really help the time-poor reader.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Quotes can be powerful additions to blog posts. They can offer a burst of insightful learning and back up your own thoughts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In our post about quotes<\/a>, we outlined different ways you can use quotes and turn them into shareable graphics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You wouldn’t want to make every quote into a graphic but it can certainly give your readers something else to focus on and share.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A quote graphic might display the words over an image, pattern, or a block color.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are many different ways you can make the sorts of visuals we described above.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are a number of offline tools available, such as Adobe Photoshop or Indesign, however, online tools are more popular than ever. A lot of these tools are based on templates, so you don’t even need design skills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just some online tools for making visuals include:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Canva <\/a>is certainly one of the most popular tools for bloggers and it’s one I personally love to use!<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n Check out this post I wrote about Canva<\/a> for more information and ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A lot of people who might be interested in your blog posts are hanging out on social media. You want to strategically share your content on social media and make it easy for others to share as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are a few things to keep in mind when sharing your own blog posts on social media<\/p>\n\n\n\n Teachers are active on different platforms — X (formerly Twitter) has traditionally been very popular with teachers (if you’re new to X you can find out more information here<\/a>). There are also a large number of teachers active on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You don’t have to be sharing on every<\/em> platform. Using one or two social media platforms well can be a more successful approach than spreading yourself thin across different networks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you are going to share your posts across various social media platforms, tailor your message to cater to the different audiences and the different ways the platforms are used.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For example, Instagram and X use hashtags more than Facebook. Pinterest tends to center around larger ‘shareable’ images. X has a 280 character limit whereas Facebook allows you to write lengthier posts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Keep these sorts of details in mind if you’re going to cross-promote your posts. Copying and pasting may not be the best approach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just because you post something on social media, doesn’t mean it will be widely seen. You might need to post a variation of the message a number of times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Repeating the same message without variation is not a good idea and is against the rules with some social media channels. On X posting ‘duplicative or substantially similar content’ is not allowed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To make posting on social media easier, some people use a social media scheduler like Buffer <\/a>or Hootsuite <\/a>although use this approach with care. You don’t want to look like a robot!<\/p>\n\n\n\n We know that each social media platform has its own best practices for formatting updates. Let’s focus on X for a moment and take a look at the sorts of tweets that are more likely to stand out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can just share the title of your post and the link but is this really going to be noticed in a busy stream of tweets?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Compare these two tweets about the same post and consider which one would stand out more…<\/p>\n\n\n\n Images, emojis, quotes, summaries of information, GIFs, videos etc. can all help to make a tweet stand out and encourage others to read it, share it, and\/or click on the link to the post.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Traditionally, people would subscribe to get email notifications of new posts on blogs they enjoy reading. Or they’d use an RSS Feeder (a popular one is Feedly. You can read more about how this works here<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Email and RSS are still being used, however, things have changed a little.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These days, many readers keep up with blogs through social media rather than email or RSS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Social media is a great way to share but here are a few thoughts to keep in mind about the power of offering an email subscription:<\/p>\n\n\n\n So we’ve established that it’s definitely a good idea to have some sort of option available for readers who would like to subscribe to your blog via email.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now you have two choices. Do you want to use an automated service? Or do you want to create a handcrafted newsletter style email that you send out on a regular basis?<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you’re using Edublogs Pro, did you know you can add a simple email subscription widget<\/strong> on the sidebar of your blog?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Subscribers will receive an email automatically to alert them to new posts. You can choose to send a full post, complete with all images, or a post excerpt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Find out how to activate the email subscription widget here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s becoming increasingly common for bloggers to create their own newsletter using an email service provider. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n There are many email service providers out there and many are free to use until you reach a certain number of subscribers. If you’re interested in comparing different email service providers, check out this guide from ProBlogger. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n When you use an email service provider, you can either:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the most popular email service providers is MailChimp<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Check out the Getting Started With MailChimp<\/a> guide for more information.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s ideal if people who are reading your posts share it with others. This can be a great way to find new audience members.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Everyone has their own tribe or network. If someone from your network introduces your work to others in their own network, the results can be exponential!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Consider putting a call to action in every blog post asking your readers to share it on social media or share it with colleagues if it resonated with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can also use a variety of plugins to encourage your readers to share your posts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let’s take a look at Scriptless Social Sharing and Jetpack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Scriptless Social Sharing<\/a> is a lightweight plugin that adds social sharing buttons to your posts and pages, making it easy for readers to share your content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can display the sharing buttons above and\/or below your posts, and choose which social networks you\u2019d like to include.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since it uses simple sharing links (no JavaScript), it\u2019s a great option if you want fast, no-fuss sharing buttons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can also display the social sharing buttons using a shortcode, so you can place them anywhere on your site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jetpack is a powerful plugin that adds several different features and tools to your blog, some of these make it easier for others to share your posts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once you’ve activated Jetpack<\/a>, you might like to activate:<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Check out our help guide<\/a> for more instructions on setting up Jetpack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The final tip is a simple one that’s often overlooked: If you want to have<\/em> an audience you need to be<\/em> an audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This might involve:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rather than being a passive reader, try to find a way to be active in your approach to really support others in your community (e.g. sharing, commenting, connecting).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Follow this approach in an authentic way and show genuine interest in others. Apart from learning a lot and building your PLN, you might find your audience begins to build naturally as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As you get to know other bloggers, you might also consider guest posting. <\/strong>It could introduce you to a new network of readers and you could be helping a fellow blogger too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How does guest posting work?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n If you ask any blogger who has a reasonable sized audience, they will no doubt tell you they started with a very small number of readers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building your audience takes time, patience, and a commitment to stick with it. Need help building momentum with your blog? Check out this post. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Remember, the rewards will be worth it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n As George Couros<\/a> said as he reflected on his 8 years of blogging,<\/p>\n\n\n\n Blogging has helped my learning grow significantly because I have done it consistently for myself, not necessarily for an audience. Knowing an audience is there though, has made me think a lot deeper about what I share though, and it helps me create a \u201c360 Degree View\u201d of my learning; I do my best to focus on all angles of what I am sharing before I share it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\nMarketing? Really?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The Benefits Of Blogging For Yourself<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Blogging is a fantastic way to reflect and develop your thinking<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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The research process of blogging is also an excellent way to learn<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Having your own online space can present you with career opportunities<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Becoming a blogger will help you help your students<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Why Sharing And Marketing Your Blog Applies To Everyone<\/em><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Strategies To Share And Market Your Posts<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
1) Make Posts ‘Shareable’<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"0](\"https:\/\/teacherchallenge.edublogs.org\/files\/2018\/09\/10-Ways-to-Make-Your-Blog-Posts-Easier-to-Read-Infographic-Edublogs-FACEBOOK-1xtw7wd-1ns3glr.png\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nThe Power Of Visuals<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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What Sort Of Visuals Can You Make For Blog Posts?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Graphics to share on social media<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
![\"5](\"https:\/\/www.theedublogger.com\/files\/2019\/03\/5-Ways-To-Share-And-Market-Your-Teacher-Blog-The-Edublogger-Twitter-1i2x11f-24yieki.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nInfographics<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
![\"7](\"https:\/\/teacherchallenge.edublogs.org\/files\/2018\/09\/7-Steps-To-Participating-in-Dot-Day-29k12qd-21iaqnw.png\")
<\/a><\/figure><\/h5>\n\n\n\nQuotes<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
![\"\u201cIf](\"https:\/\/teacherchallenge.edublogs.org\/files\/2018\/07\/African-proverb-quote-PLN-Challenge-19uywx7-2iaxdyk.png\")
<\/a><\/figure>How To Make Visuals For Blog Posts<\/h4>\n\n\n\n\n
Canva tips and information<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
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![\"There's](\"https:\/\/www.theedublogger.com\/files\/2018\/09\/Canva-in-the-Classroom-TWITTER-2crouic-1bipedh.png\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n2) Use Social Media<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Share Your Own Content<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Consider your platform(s)<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
Tailor your message<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
Repeat, but don’t overdo it<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
Make your posts stand out!<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
![\"Example](\"https:\/\/teacherchallenge.edublogs.org\/files\/2018\/09\/Teacher-Challenge-tweet-2-1hns5ug-2jhya8s.png\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"Tweet](\"https:\/\/teacherchallenge.edublogs.org\/files\/2018\/09\/Teacher-Challenge-tweet-1-yysthg-2b367bn.png\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n3) Set Up An Email Subscription<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
How are people keeping up to date with blogs?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Why is social media a popular way to follow blogs?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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Should I bother with an email subscription?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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How To Make An Email Subscription<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Automated Email Subscription Widget<\/h5>\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theedublogger.com\/files\/2019\/03\/subscribe-by-email-widget-qq8wp2-1045gyd.png\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nCreate An Email Newsletter<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
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MailChimp Tips And Information<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
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4) Encourage Others To Share Your Content<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Scriptless Social Sharing<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theedublogger.com\/files\/2019\/03\/scriptless-social-sharing.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nJetpack Plugin<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
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5) Be An Audience<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Conclusion: Stick With It!<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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![\"5](\"https:\/\/www.theedublogger.com\/files\/2019\/03\/5-Ways-To-Share-And-Market-Your-Teacher-Blog-The-Edublogger-Pinterest-1oia1jj-1qu3w3s.png\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"