How To Get Tons of Social Shares for Your Blog

So… You’re ready to do the work, right? We’re just making sure, because increasing shares on your blog might not happen overnight, and we don’t advocate resorting to click bait headlines. It’s not an exact science, but there are some trusty ways to get more people to share your content.

Create Really, Really Good Blog Content (Really)

You write a blog post. A really, really, good one that you spend hours researching and fact-checking. Then, you’re surprised and a little disappointed that no one shared it. Sorry to break it to you, but your blog posts have a lot of competition for readers’ attention. According to a recent Nielson study, adults in America spend 11 hours consuming electronic media. Yes, that’s for one adult and one day. Your content has to be good enough and unique enough to cut through all that noise. How, you ask? Well, some blog post types are more shareable, including:

• List posts
• “How-to” Posts
• Why posts

Also, positive blog content is more likely to be shared than content with a negative tone, so stay away from posts that insult a competitor or exploit tragic events.

Design Your Way to a More Shareable Post

The easier you make it for people to share your posts, the more likely they’ll do it. Position social share buttons in a prominent place on your blog and give more than one opportunity to share the post. But when selecting which social share buttons to include, less is more. A well-known study on choices (it involves jam) showed that when people are faced with too many choices, it can make it harder for them to make a decision. Mashable does a good job of striking the perfect balance. The main options they offer are Facebook and Twitter, but an unobtrusive plus button hides other choices. CoSchedule offers an awesome WordPress plugin called Click To Tweet that lets people effortlessly share links to pages.

Make it Beautiful and Interactive

There are lots of bad stock images out there. Just do a quick Google search for “bad stock photos” and be prepared to waste an entire evening. But if you use bad stock images in your blog posts and get tons of shares, they probably aren’t the kind of shares you want. Use attractive images in your posts to bump up quality shares. Need a good source for images? Here are a few free or reasonably priced sources:

• Life of Pix
• Pixabay
• PicJumbo
• PhotoDune

Unless you want your share counter to be stuck in the 0 to 10 range forever, you’ll need to take some steps to optimize your content and your blogging approach. In addition to these tips, don’t forget to share your content on the platforms that your audience uses during the times they’re most likely to be online. Lastly, try asking for shares! You might be surprised what happens.

Have you tried any of these tips for getting social shares? Did they work? What else have you tried? Let us know all about it in the comments below.