As you may have read in some of my colleagues’ posts on this blog already, there has been a slight shift in the way we do things here. Instead of monthly posts, we’re moving to a quarterly schedule instead.
For this quarter, I’m going to chat about how to you can get more traffic to your blog post with a modest budget of $20. You might think that the best idea would be to sink that all of that money into promoting your post on Facebook and call it a day – simple, right?
Well, sort of.
I’m not going to deny that boosting a Facebook post is super necessary these days if you’re wanting your friends or followers to see your content. It also allows you to segment the audience you’d like to promote your content to, either by location, interests, age, or gender.
I’m going to use this blog post written by my colleague Jan Cavan Boulas as an example. Titled My Favorite Illustrator Tips for a Faster Workflow, I feel that this post would obviously be of interest to fellow designers. It would also appeal to both new users of Adobe Illustrator, as well as more experienced users who are keen to step up their vector-tweaking game even more.
1. Create a Facebook post linking to the blog article and boost that post
As mentioned above, this is usually the first port of call. When boosting your Facebook post, I would target people with interests in Design, Graphic Design, Illustrator, Adobe Illustrator, Vector graphics, and Vector Graphics editor. With a mere $20 to spend, I’d go in for $10 here and set the period for 7 days.
2. Post your link in a Facebook group
The next few suggestions each have a very, very important caveat attached to them: DON’T SPAM PEOPLE. It might be tempting to go bezerk pasting your link in as many places you can find, but it will have the complete opposite effect and annoy/antagonize folks.I would head to a couple of Facebook design groups and make a post similar to this:
Illustrator has always been my tool of choice when it comes to doing print work. Here are a few of my favorite Illustrator tips in no particular order:
https://a8cdesignvoice.wordpress.com/2017/08/01/my-favorite-illustrator-tips-for-a-faster-workflow/
A quick ‘n dirty search found a few groups and pages that you could potentially join/like and share your blog post to, either as a group post or as a comment on another (related) post. If you’re commenting on an existing post, don’t just cram your link in there – read their post first and then comment something like:
Great post, [poster’s name] – your tutorial really made it so much simpler for me to understand. Thanks!
Incidentally, I wrote a post sharing some of my favorite Illustrator tips recently – hopefully it can help you or someone else like your post helped me!
https://a8cdesignvoice.wordpress.com/2017/08/01/my-favorite-illustrator-tips-for-a-faster-workflow/
3. Post the link to your blog post as a comment on a similar post or design page
Pretty much the same tactic as above, but on a Facebook page instead of a group. Perhaps pages such as Adobe Illustrator, Creative Bloq, and many, many others.
4. Google AdWords
Here’s where you spend the remaining $10 in your budget: the nice thing about using AdWords (apart from them being shown on results pages on the world’s biggest search engine) is that you only pay when someone clicks your ad to visit your website – or blog post in this case. You can also set your budget, which prevents you from overspending.This means that your blog post will show up on results pages when a user searches for info around Illustrator, design, or tutorials – whichever terms you choose.
5. Comment on design forums
“Forums still exist?!” I hear you say. Heck yes, they do, and they can still be super helpful. Adobe themselves have a pretty active forum, with several others scattered around the web.You could post a link to your blog post in a forum, sure, but I feel it would be more effective to:a) Comment on other user’s posts first, and actually engage with the community. That way, you won’t be seen as a spam artist, and you’ll probably learn even more (or be able to assist with problems) from other users. You might even get a natural opportunities to offer your blog post as a potential solution or learning resource.b) Add the blog post link as your profile’s associated link or in your profile signature that crops up next to each comment or post that you make in the forum.
6. Tweet your blog post link to design accounts or notable designers or make clever use of hashtags on Twitter
Hashtags are important here, as users will use them to aggregate content on that subject.
Illustrator has always been my tool of choice when it comes to doing print work. Here are a few of my favorite Illustrator tips in no particular order:
https://a8cdesignvoice.wordpress.com/2017/08/01/my-favorite-illustrator-tips-for-a-faster-workflow/#adobe #illustrator #vector #tutorial
If you’re unsure about which hashtags to tag your tweet with, there’s a free tool called Hashtagify that can show you the most common hashtags associated with a certain hashtag. Try it out.
There you go – that’s my brain dump on how to get more views on a blog post that you’ve written. Pretty minimal spend, I’d say – try it out on your next blog post, and let me know how it went in the comments below.
Thanks for reading.
Automattic Design 