So you’ve been busy working on a blog post and you’re finally ready to hit the publish button. Fantastic!

One problem: just because you publish a post, doesn’t mean anyone will know about it or read it.

You need to make sure you share your work with people who want to read it or might be interested in discovering your writing. 

There are two great ways to do this. The first is by having an email list. Not long ago, we wrote about how to set up an automatic RSS or manual email newsletter for your blog.

Along with using email, we recommend you share your blog posts on social media. 

There are many places you can do this. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn are popular platforms and no doubt you have your favorites. 

This post zooms in on how to share your blog posts on Twitter which remains to be a popular platform for educators worldwide. 

Once upon a time, you could create a tweet by simply copying and pasting the link to your blog post. This is still the go-to approach for some, but is it the best strategy to make your tweet stand out?

Does this example make you excited to click through to the post?

We’re here to help you power up your tweets and invite a whole new community of readers to your blog or website. 

If you’re using a different social media platform, some of these tips will certainly still apply. Just modify them to suit the platform. 

Before we dive into the eight tips, let’s start with the basics of sharing a link…

Get Your Link Right

While there are much better approaches than simply copying and pasting the link to your latest blog post, the link is still going to be the most important part of your tweet.

You need to get it right!

Tip One: Share the link to the actual blog post. Not the blog itself

For example, https://www.theedublogger.com is this link or URL of this blog.

https://www.theedublogger.com/tweet-tips is the link to this blog post.

If you send readers to your blog and not a specific post, they won’t know what they’re supposed to be reading. They’ll have to click around to find the post they want to read… or leave!

The best way to get the link to your blog post correct is to open it up in your browser and copy/paste it.

Keyboard shortcuts make this easy! For example, if you’re using Windows:

• Place your cursor in your address bar. It should highlight automatically or press Control A (select all)
• Control C is the shortcut for copy
• Control V is the shortcut for paste

Tip Two: Shorten your permalink

Did you know you can edit the permalink or URL of your post before you publish it?

This can make your URL neater and easier to share. And it uses up fewer characters if you’re sharing on Twitter.

This graphic we shared with students during the Student Blogging Challenge explains:

You edit your permalink before you publish a post. Don’t edit the permalink after you’ve published a post, otherwise, the original permalink that you might have shared will be invalid.

This quick video explains how to edit your permalink if you’re using Edublogs or CampusPress.

Bonus Tip: Teach students these tips about links

The tips above can also be very handy to share with student bloggers.

Using the wrong link is a common issue participants of our Student Blogging Challenge face when wanting to share a blog post. They tend to share a link to their blog, dashboard, or even a preview post when they’re starting out.

We made this graphic to help Student Blogging Challenge participants understand how to find and share the link to their specific blog post.

This video demonstrates to students how to find and copy their blog post URL.

8 Tips For Better Tweets

So you know one thing you want to include in your tweet — the link to the post — but what else will you write to use up your 280 characters?

And should you use all 280 characters? Not always. Good communicators know not to use redundant words, repeat themselves, or generally write in a “wordy” way. 

Here are eight tips to consider the next time you share your latest blog post on Twitter. We’d love to hear your own ideas or suggestions in a comment!

1) Break Down Your Blog Post

Just because you write a blog post, doesn’t mean anyone will see it. And just because you tweet out your blog post, doesn’t mean others will see it either. You’ll probably need to tweet multiple times.

In 2018, Twitter cracked down on tweeting duplicate content. That means you can’t repeat the same tweet over and over. But why would you want to? That probably wouldn’t provide value to your professional learning network (PLN).

Consider repurposing the content from your blog post into bite-sized content for your followers.

What might this look like?

• Choose some quotes from your blog post to share in the tweet. Or, better yet, turn quotes into images using a tool like Canva.
• Tweet any other images you have in your post separately. Especially if you’ve created charts, diagrams, infographics or anything educational, inspiring, or entertaining.
• Break down the main tips from the post into separate tweets. For example, we could do a separate tweet about each of the eight tips in this blog post.
• Create a short video about your blog post. A great tool to do this “automagically” is Lumen5.
• If you’re game, you could tweet a short video of yourself talking about your blog post. That would create a lot of interest.

Here’s a video from Monica Burns where she talks about an upcoming blog post before she has published it. That’s a fun way to build excitement on Twitter too!

A quick Saturday update!

— Monica Burns, Ed.D. (@ClassTechTips) January 4, 2020

2) Build Interest

Many people now like consuming content on the social media platform itself, without clicking away down a rabbit hole of content.

However, you do want to entice people to actually get off Twitter and go to your blog.

To do this, try to build interest and intrigue; give your followers a reason to click and read your blog post.

This obviously doesn’t mean clickbait; you don’t want to over promise and under deliver.

Building interest might look like:

• Addressing common concerns
• Hinting at the conclusion or advice your post offers
• Explaining why you wrote a post

No doubt the tweet would spark interest and encourage readers to click through to his post.

This #EduGIF may make you say “Whoa. Too complicated. Too time consuming.” but students could whip 1 of these up in a few minutes, then it over to show content in a way that is much more *sticky* than traditional activities. #GoogleEI #GoogleDrive https://t.co/S8xErbA6Cr pic.twitter.com/6fk2mIhwdg

— Jake Miller (@JakeMillerTech) January 4, 2020

In this example, Chris Young explains why he wrote his blog post. No doubt, his followers’ interest would be piqued at the emotive tweet. 

This was what my 6 year old daughter asked Santa for Christmas. The fact that #STEAM is advertised on the same canvas as the amount of likes a girl (6 years and up) receives infuriates me. It’s 2020, right?!? I wrote a blog post to get my feelings out. https://t.co/7km7Z7veRb pic.twitter.com/0ALsfbrNuz

— Chris Young (@ChrisYoungEDU) January 2, 2020

3) Create A Custom Image

Want your tweet to catch your followers’ eyes? An effective image will help!

Whenever we write a blog post on The Edublogger, we create a custom image. Canva is a great place to do this as is Google Drawings (we have guides to Canva and Google Drawings that will help you get started).

Here is an example:

You might not want to put this exact image in every tweet about your blog post. As we mentioned in tip one, it’s also a good idea to share any other images from your blog posts in separate tweets.

Silvia Tolisano is excellent at creating graphics to accompany her tweets. Sometimes they just describe her blog posts, sometimes they’re quotes, sketchnotes, or tease the post in a different way.

4) Try Emojis And White Space

You want your tweets to stand out in a busy stream and two effective strategies to try are emojis and white space. 

The white space part should be obvious: hit your Enter key and break up your text. It may just make the tweet easier to read and more impactful. 

The role emojis play in writing has evolved over recent years. They’ve gone from being a bit of fun to add expression to really changing the way we communicate. 

Using emojis as bullet points is a particularly effective strategy.

Tony Vincent is masterful at this approach. Yes, it takes a couple of minutes to select the most appropriate emojis but it will definitely make your tweet stand out!

6⃣ Thinking scaffolds for deeper understanding from @MindShiftKQED

Prompt to include context
Ask open-ended questions
Help transfer knowledge and experience
Leave room for ownership
Invite and manage risk
Encourage reflection
https://t.co/PYwVa580dE

— Tony Vincent (@tonyvincent) January 3, 2020

5) Use Hashtags … But Don’t Overdo It

Hashtags are an important part of Twitter. They help to categorize tweets and make it easier for people to find tweets they’re interested in.

There are a lot of opinions out there about using hashtags in your tweets. While they are a good idea, we believe you want to use them sparingly. 

Even Twitter itself concurs:

Although it may be tempting to fill your Tweet with trending hashtags, studies show that less actually is more. Internal Twitter research shows that Tweets with 1-2 hashtags gain 100% more engagement — so try to limit your usage.

Want to learn more about hashtags? Check out our top ten hashtag tips from our Ultimate Guide to Twitter. 

6) Tag Others Wisely

It’s a great idea to tag other people in your blog posts. They might be able to share your work with their own PLN. Or they might simply read and enjoy your work which will strengthen your connection.

However, you want to tag wisely.

Don’t just tag any individuals in your field simply because they have a large following or are well-known. 

Tag individuals who you mention in your blog post. Perhaps you’ve linked to their resources or built on their ideas. Or maybe you’d like to ask their opinion of your post. If so, ask them. 

If you have the characters, it can be a good idea to make it clear why you’re tagging someone in your tweet. 

Here is an example:

Blogging prompts can be a great way to get ideas for your next post!

This post shares some blog post prompts for teachers and students including some very creative prompts from @spencerideas!

Take a look https://t.co/JTyH08HH6O#EdChat #ELAChat pic.twitter.com/GEhWNXDvgH

— edublogs (@edublogs) January 2, 2020

Some bloggers who are active on Twitter have a reciprocal relationship with other bloggers — even if it’s informal. You might have some members of your PLN whose work you share out to your network regularly and you know they will do the same. This approach can be effective.

7) Replicate What Works

Everyone has their own unique community on Twitter. Over time you should start to notice what sort of tweets get the most engagement.

Take a few moments every now and then to think about this. You can even analyze your tweets through your activity dashboard. 

Perhaps your tweets where you use images or emojis are better received? Or maybe there is a certain time of day where your tweets receive more engagement?

Basically, you want to figure out what is working and keep doing that!

Also, don’t forget to tweet about your popular blog posts more than once but mix it up with different text and images. 

8) Be Part Of Your Community

Give and take is the key to success in all relationships whether online or offline.

It’s certainly a mistake to only promote your own work on Twitter. Invest in your PLN and share some of the great things that others are doing. Retweet their tweets and add your thoughts and encouragement. 

Joy Kirr is great at supporting her community on Twitter. Here is an example retweet from Joy:

Yikes and Wowsers!
Got some time on your hands?
Want to learn something new?@jmattmiller has the past #DitchSummit videos all in one place!#edtech #edchat #tlap https://t.co/4alZDtYAPa

— Joy Kirr (@JoyKirr) January 1, 2020

Not sure what a PLN is all about? We’ve got a free self-paced course to help you learn more. Check it out here.

Conclusion

Twitter is a great place to promote your blog posts. With a few easy tweaks you might be able to make your tweets much more effective!

Let’s recap the eight tips:

1. Break down your blog post (create bite-sized content from quotes, tips, images etc.).
2. Build interest (give your followers a reason to click and read your blog post).
3. Create a custom image to catch your followers’ eyes. 
4. Try emojis (perhaps as bullet points) and white space to make your tweets stand out. 
5. Use hashtags in your tweets but don’t overdo it. One or two is plenty. 
6. Tag others wisely especially if you mentioned them in your blog post. 
7. Replicate what works and make the most of the provided analytics. 
8. Be part of your community — give and take is the key to success.

If you want to learn more about Twitter, be sure to check out our Ultimate Guide. It’s useful for beginner to intermediate users. 

Thoughts? Questions?

How do you share your blog posts on Twitter? What can you teach your students about sharing their work with a network online?

Leave a comment below and we’ll get back to you. 

Learn More

These useful posts were mentioned in this article:

The Ultimate Guide To Twitter

Set Up An Email Newsletter To Share Your Blog Posts Using Mailchimp

Share Your Blog Posts With Automated Mailchimp Emails (RSS)

A Guide To Google Drawings For Teachers, Students, And Bloggers

Canva In The Classroom: Getting Started, Example Designs, And Tips!

This is the next post in our “blog makeover” series that provides an excellent opportunity to respond to a reader’s suggestion to include an image using HTML in a page or sidebar.

It is recommended you read the previous post on Getting more out of Widgets prior to reading this post.

Basic knowledge of HTML provides greater ability for customizing text widgets. It means you can embed photos in your sidebar, link to pages on your blog or other websites, write text using bold and italics, for example.

What is HTML?

HTML is a bit like RSS, for bloggers there is no need to fully understand it but helpful if we learn the basics of how to use.

HTML is short for “Hyper Text Markup Language” and a language used to tell a browser how to organise the layout of a web page it has downloaded from the net – e.g. it influences if text is bold, italics, a heading, bullet points, etc.

When you write a post or page inside your blog dashboard you don’t worry about HTML because the Visual Editor does it for you. If you switch to the Code Editor from the editor options menu, it shows the HTML code instead.

Basic knowledge of HTML is really helpful for tasks like customizing widgets and writing comments on blogs.

Examples of HTML used to highlight text include:

• <strong> tag makes text strong e.g. I <strong>really like</strong> this idea produces: I really like this idea.
• <em> emphasizes text e.g. I <em>really like</em> this idea produces: I really like this idea.

Notice you must use the < and > symbols around the HTML Tags and the tag is closed using a ‘/’ (slash) in front of the tag keyword e.g. </strong>

Here’s how you can use HTML to add an image to your blog sidebar

Uisng the Code Editor to add an image to a page or sidebar is a simple matter of enclosing the image URL in an img tag, much like the examples above. The only difference is that you do not need a closing tag for the image HTML.

For example, <img src=”https://www.theedublogger.com/files/2008/01/question.jpg” alt=”question mark” />
produces

Final Thought

As Kevin pointed out:

if you doing a blog makover, make sure you write a post to invite your readers to comment on your changes. Readers who read your post via RSS won’t be aware of the change because everything will look the same in their feed reader.

Remember to pop past Larry Ferlazzo’s Website of The Day blog and give him feedback on his makeover!

It does take time to get used to using HTML; the key with technologies is willingness to experiment. As you become experienced with using HTML you will recognise opportunities that can be enhanced with it’s use.

Other posts in our “blog makeover” series include:

• Tips For Doing A Blog Makeover
• Creating Hyperlinks Using HTML
• What To Consider When Choosing Your Blog Theme

If you are enjoying reading this blog, please consider Subscribing For Free!

So we’ve tried our best to explain what is RSS and why it’s important to learn how to use. And as we said it’s hard to explain probably because the power of RSS is really something you need to experience first hand.

We’re really into RSS — RSS power users may be an appropriate title since we grab every RSS opportunity to make our lives easier and maximise our ability to interact effectively with others.

Remember that using RSS is a simple and effective way of keeping in touch when new information is added to a website without having to visit the site; instead information is brought to one location, a feed reader, to read whenever convenient.

Let us show you some of ways to use RSS with an RSS Reader.

Subscribing To Blogs

Read a lot of blogs by subscribing to their RSS feeds because blogging isn’t about working in a vacuum; it’s about the conversations.

Conversations aren’t about you just writing a reflective post that invites / encourages / evokes readers to express their opinion by writing comments on your post. It’s also about you engaging in conversations on others’ blogs by linking to their posts and writing comments on their posts.

To engage effectively in blogging conversations, you need to subscribe to blogs that interest you.

Effectively Managing Comments

One of the most important tips for keeping up the conversations on blogs is being very effective at managing your comments on other people’s blogs. Getting good at this is when you use tools that track comments posted on other people’s blogs plus subscribe to the RSS feed from these tools.

Whenever a person comments on a post that you have commented on, their comment is transferred from the post into your RSS Reader, so you can choose to immediately respond back if you want.

Managing Interactions on Flickr

Flickr is really cool Web 2.0 tool that didn’t initially grab us back when it started because we didn’t get the whole idea of sharing photos online and it’s whole social networking aspect.

Make Flickr friends and comment on their photos; your friends’ newest photos and any comments you make are automatically fed from Flickr to your RSS Reader (here are instructions of how to do it).

This interaction has shown a different glimpse of their life compared to what can be seen from reading their blogs or following them on twitter.

RSS is More Than Blog Posts

As Rafa Ribas said about a previous post on RSS:

There is more to RSS than just blog posts. You can RSS news, comments to your posts or others, audio and video, comic strips (I am an absolute fan of xkcd.com), other people’s bookmarks (del.icio.us), and so on and so forth. In summary, RSS is a bit daunting at first, but absolutely amazing in its potential.

We’ve only given a small glimpse into the ways to harness the power of RSS. Remember to look out for the RSS icon whenever you visit a web site and consider if subscribing to it’s feed will make your life easier and/or more fun.

FINAL THOUGHT

So have you set up a feed reader yet? If you’re just getting going – please let us know what’s working for you and what’s not.

If you are experienced with using RSS how about telling us about the different RSS feeds besides blog posts that you subscribe to, and why you like subscribing to them.

If you are enjoying reading this blog, please consider Subscribing For Free!

Whether your blog is for other teachers, families, or members of the wider education community, there are people out there who want to read what you’re writing.

Remember: just because you publish something online, doesn’t mean it will be seen.

Social media is a great place to share your blog posts, but there are problems. Algorithms and the “pay to play” model are changing the landscape of social media. Your loyal followers may not end up seeing all your updates.

Having an email newsletter is an excellent way to build and serve your community.

Our last post explained how to send out emails automatically to your readers using RSS and Mailchimp.

This post takes things a step further. You’ll learn about the benefits of creating a handcrafted newsletter using Mailchimp. We’ll help you plan for success and get started.

The Benefit Of Creating Emails Manually

We know it’s definitely a good idea to have some sort of option available for readers who would like to receive an email when you publish new blog posts.

Most people check their email every day and it’s more of a sure bet than sharing your posts on social media and hoping for the best.

Our last post explained the two choices for sending out emails when you publish new blog posts.

1. You can create an automated service using RSS. This is a good option if you’re time-poor and need a quick “set-and-forget” method.
2. You can create a handcrafted newsletter that really helps you build relationships with your readers. This can take a little longer but the emails might be better received by your audience. You also have more flexibility with design and content.

Here’s a summary graphic of your two choices:

Remember to check out our previous post if you want to learn how to set up RSS.

How To Set Up Your Email Newsletter

This guide takes you through 4 steps to getting your email newsletter set up:

1. Planning
2. Register And Set Up Your Mailchimp Account
3. Create An Email Campaign
4. Design Your Email

Part One: Planning

Before you begin, it pays to take a bit of time to consider your plan.

Here are 5 key questions to consider. Scroll down for a printable planning worksheet.

#1 What is your goal?

Creating an ongoing email newsletter can take a little work but there are rewards. Consider why you want to build your following and community through a regular newsletter.

This isn’t information you need to make public but it’s good to keep in mind.

• Perhaps you want to network and enjoy future career opportunities (a new job, promotion, or speaking engagement?).
• Maybe you want to form a strong relationship with the parents of the students you teach. We know how powerful that is.
• Perhaps you want to build your PLN so you can learn from and with other educators across the globe.

This goal is probably related to the reason you set up a blog in the first place.

#2 Which email marketing platform will you use?

This tutorial uses Mailchimp. We have no affiliations with Mailchimp but have used it for 10+ years and it’s one of the most popular platforms out there.

Importantly, Mailchimp is free if you have under 2000 subscribers. It’s fairly intuitive to use (drag and drop) and their help documents are excellent.

If you’re interested in comparing different email platforms, check out this guide from ProBlogger or comparison chart from PC Mag. We encourage you to find the provider that works best for your needs.

#3 How will you collect email addresses?

Obviously, you have to do this legally. You can’t just start emailing people without their permission.

When you set up an account with a platform like Mailchimp, you’ll have access to a URL with your sign-up form.

For example, this is what our sign-up form looks like for the Student Blogging Challenge:

https://studentchallenge.edublogs.org/stay-in-the-loop-with-student-blogging-challenge-news/

You want to make it as easy as possible for people to know about your newsletter and how they can opt in.

Here are some key places to consider sharing your sign-up form:

• On your blog (on the sidebar, on your About page, and/or at the bottom of your blog posts). Some people also like to have pop-up notifications.
• In social media posts or in your bio
• As a link under your email signature
• Email the link to your sign-up form to your contacts who might be interested

#4 What will you include in your emails?

The main thing you probably want to include is your latest blog post(s).

Some people copy and paste the whole blog post into an email but a more popular approach is to summarise it and include a link for subscribers to keep reading.

Some people also like to include other information in their newsletters such as:

• Other great posts you’ve read
• Online tools you’ve come across
• Podcasts or videos you’ve enjoyed
• Classroom or personal anecdotes
• Pep talks or inspirational quotes

Your content could basically be anything you think might be of value to your readers. Are you aiming to educate, entertain, inspire? Perhaps a mix of all three?

It pays to consider the needs of your audience and stick to the topic(s) you’re known for e.g. edtech, social studies, English teaching etc.

Also, consider whether you want an image-heavy email or a simple plain text newsletter? There are pros and cons but simple does work for some people.

Here’s an example from well-known SEO blogger Brian Dean who has hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Brian uses a very simple image-free design with text that’s friendly yet to the point.

#5 How frequently will your emails be sent out?

You don’t have to tell people how often you’ll be sending out emails but it can be a good way to stay committed to your blogging goals.

For example, if you say you’ll be sharing a new blog post every two weeks or every month, you’ll have the incentive to do it! Your readers will be waiting to hear from you.

This printable planning PDF will help if you want to jot down your ideas before moving on.

>>Click here to download a PDF copy.

Part Two: Register And Set Up Your Mailchimp Account

This part is fairly straightforward although we recommend Mailchimp’s getting started guide if you’re unsure.

The three most important steps to explore are:

1. Set up your account: You need to enter your name and email address to register. This only takes a couple of minutes.
2. Set up your audience: These are the email addresses you’ll be sending to. Your audience could be very small to begin with but don’t worry. It will grow! The free version of Mailchimp only allows you to have one audience group.
3. Customize your sign-up form: Setting up a sign-up form is essential so you can start collecting email addresses that will be part of your audience. You can customize the look and feel of this form and your form will have a URL that you can share with others.

Registration tips:

• You don’t need to submit any payment. Mailchimp is free until you have over 2000 subscribers. When you do hit the 2000 mark you can decide about payment options although the best first step would be to “clean up your list”. This means you archive subscribers who aren’t opening your emails or no longer want updates.
• You’re legally obliged to provide a physical address. This address will show up automatically in the footer of your emails. You probably do not want to use your home address! We recommend using a work address or PO Box.
• Which email address do you want to use? Even though you’re sending your emails out through Mailchimp they still come “from” your email address. So, if you have both personal and work email addresses, consider what would be the best to use for this project.

Part Three: Create An Email Campaign

1) Login to your Mailchimp account

Click on “Campaigns”.

2) From here click “Create Campaign”

3) You’ll be presented with a range of campaign options

Click “Email”.

4) Click on “Regular”

Type a Campaign Name (subscribers won’t see this) and then press “Begin”.

5) Fill out your campaign information

You are now presented with four important steps to create your campaign.

• To: This is the audience you’re sending the email out to.
• From: Enter your email address. Make sure this isn’t an email address you need to keep private.
• Subject: Subscribers will see this when your email lands in their inbox. Make your subject line specific and interesting to encourage them to open it!
• Content: This is where you design your actual email. We’ll explain this more below.

As each of these four tasks are completed, a green checkmark will appear.

If you scroll down further you’ll see an option to personalize your campaign link. This is the URL for the email that you’ll be able to share online once you send your email (perhaps on social media). All users can edit their campaign link but you have to be a paid user to include your website domain. Click here to read Mailchimp’s help guide on campaign links.

If you need more assistance filling out the to, from, or subject field, check out this help guide from Mailchimp. 

Let’s take a closer look at designing the content of your email…

Part Four: Design Your Email

The final step involves putting the content of your email together.

1) From the campaign builder page, click “Design Email”

2) Select your template

The free version on Mailchimp only includes the basic templates. This is fine.

If you’re not sure what template to choose, stick with the basic “1 column” template. You can always change it over time.

4) Design Your Email

It’s now time to design the look of your emails. If you’re new to Mailchimp, you can definitely keep this simple!

Here are the most important steps:

a) Add an image to the top of the email

Hover over the word “Logo” and click on the pencil icon. Follow the prompts to upload an image that represents you and your website.

(If you don’t want an image just click on the trash can icon in the Logo box).

b) Edit the text

Hover over the block of text and click on the pencil icon. You’ll write the text of your newsletter on the right-hand side using the familiar editing tools to format (bold, italics, link etc.).

You might start by introducing your new blog post and then add the link to your blog so subscribers can read the full post.

If you have any other interesting information to share such as other useful links or tips, add this underneath.

Tips for writing your newsletter:

• Make your newsletter easy to read with bullet points, lists, short sentences/paragraphs, bold words, and headings.
• Use lots of white space and keep your text short.
• Write like you’re talking to an individual person, not a group of people (e.g. use the word “you”).
• After you send out a few email newsletters, take note of which ones received the most opens and clicks. What was different about these? Interesting subject line? Unique layout? Perhaps the time of day you sent the email worked well?

c) Add an image to the body of the email (optional)

There are different schools of thought about whether you should use images throughout your newsletter.

Some people like images to break up the text and illustrate the content. Plain text emails are also very popular and some people find a very simple email is better received.

If you do want to add images to your email, drag over an image block from the right-hand side to the work area on the left-hand side. You’ll then be prompted to upload your image.

There are different choices available. You can drag over a simple “Image” block or “Image Group”, “Image Card”, or “Image + Caption”.

Learn more about designing your email in this help guide from Mailchimp.

d) Test your email

A final helpful tip is to preview what your email will look like and/or send a test email to yourself or someone else who can offer you feedback.

You’ll find these options at the top of the page under “Preview and Test”.

“Open Link Checker” is another very helpful tool if you use multiple links in your email. It helps you double-check they’re all correct!

Select “Save and Close” in the bottom right-hand corner of the page when you’re ready to move on.

5) Confirm and send

Once your email is all set up, you should see a green checkmark next to the To, From, Subject, and Content sections of the Campaign Builder.

You can check your details and then use one of three options:

• Finish later: This will save your draft which you’ll be able to access under Campaigns in the future.
• Schedule: You can choose a time you want your email to be sent out (you can experiment with sending times as you get going).
• Send: Your email will go out straight away.

Save Time In Future: Replicate Your Email

We’ve mentioned that creating a handcrafted email does take a little bit of extra time than the RSS option, however, you don’t have to start from scratch every time.

You can replicate a campaign to create a copy of any campaign in your account.

All you need to do is:

1. Log in to Mailchimp and go to Campaigns
2. Click the drop-down menu for the campaign you want to copy and select Replicate.

Follow the prompts to edit your campaign details. Check out Mailchimp’s guide to replicating campaigns for more information.

Another option is to create your own template which you can use when writing new emails. Mailchimp’s help guide walks you through this process.

Bonus Tip: Create An Opt-In Offer!

If you want to get really serious about building your email list, do what the pros do: offer an opt-in or freebie for subscribers!

Offering your readers an opt-in offer or “content upgrade” is a proven way to grow your email list. An opt-in freebie is simply a free downloadable file.

Your readers might be on the fence about signing up for your newsletter or they might not even realize you have a newsletter.

An incentive might be all they need to hand over their email address and join your community. Then surely they’ll like what you offer and stick around!

What can you create as an opt-in offer? Here are some ideas:

• A printable PDF version of a popular post
• A cheat sheet or summary of something you’ve written about
• A checklist
• A list of resources
• A printable that can be used in the classroom (worksheets, planners, displays)
• An eBook covering a topic in more depth

Where would you design your freebie? Two popular free design tools are Google Drawings and Canva. We have guides to both of these tools:

• Check out our guide to Canva
• Learn how to use Google Drawings

If you’re using Mailchimp, this guide explains how to send a file (freebie) to new subscribers.

You’re putting the effort into writing your email newsletter, so you want as many people as possible to enjoy it, right? An opt-in offer could be the solution you need to grow your list.

The only thing to remember is if you grow your list too rapidly, you’ll have to pay to use your email platform. For example, Mailchimp is free until you have 2000 subscribers. Remember to clean up your list before paying!

Conclusion

It’s an excellent idea for all bloggers to offer readers a chance to be notified of new blog posts via email.

If you’re short on time, you can set up RSS emails using a platform like Mailchimp.

However, you might find your emails are better received if they’re more personalised. You’ll need to invest a little time into the process but the rewards might be greater!

Remember, some bloggers also like to use a combination of RSS and personal emails. For example, you could set up RSS so emails are sent out every time you write a new post. You could also write a monthly summary email.

Find out what works for you and enjoy the benefits of building a community around your blog.

Any tips or questions? Leave a comment below. We’d love to hear from you!

Related Reading

You might also enjoy:

• A Plan For Writing A Weekly Blog Post In 10 Minutes A Day
• Resources To Introduce Edublogs To Others
• 5 Ways To Share And Market Your Teacher Blog
• 12 Tips For Maintaining Momentum With Blogging

You might have put together a fantastic blog post and felt satisfied as you hit the publish button, but your job is not done.

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.

One of the most effective ways to share your blog posts is to email it directly to people who are interested in reading it.

This post explains how to send out emails automatically to your readers. Our tutorial shows you how to use RSS using a free program called Mailchimp.

(We also have a tutorial showing you how to create a handcrafted email newsletter. Find that tutorial here).

What is an email list?

Whether you’re a serious blogger, or just dabble with publishing occasionally, it’s an excellent idea to build an email list.

This is simply a list of people who have opted in to get an email notification when you publish a new post on your blog.

It’s not a good idea to send out emails from your own personal email account. You’ll need to use a (free) email marketing platform (such as Mailchimp).

This software will help you collect email addresses, organize them, and send out emails. You’ll also be able to do more advanced things if you wish, like segment your list or analyze statistics to see who’s opening your emails and what they’re clicking on.

How can people join your email list?

Many bloggers have a box on the sidebar of their site where people can enter their email address. There are other places to put these opt-in or sign-up forms too.

You might:

• Put the form at the bottom of all your blog posts
• Add a form to your About page
• Share the link to your sign-up form “landing page” on social media
• You can also write a blog post to tell readers about your email lists. Here’s an example from Larry Ferlazzo. He includes a link to read his latest newsletter online.

Why Set Up An Email Subscription?

Many bloggers like to share their latest post on social media after they hit publish.

Great idea!

Sharing your work with your community can be a nice way to build your audience and start generating conversation.

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:

• Having an email subscription option is going to allow your most loyal and valuable members of your community to stay in touch with you.
• There are no guarantees that people in your network will see your posts on social media. You can’t control that. Offer your readers a channel to make sure they don’t miss your content.
• Email is much more personal than social media. Your readers can hear directly from you and it can help with relationship building.

As well known marketer Michael Hyatt says, a website/blog and an email list are more valuable home bases than social media:

Should You Send Emails Automatically Or Manually?

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.

Now you have two choices:

1. Do you want to use an automated service?
2. Or do you want to create a handcrafted newsletter that you email out on a regular basis?

This post explains how to set up an automated email subscription via RSS using Mailchimp. This is a good option if you’re time-poor and need a quick “set-and-forget” method.

Our next post goes through creating handcrafted emails. This is a good option if you want to step up your relationship building and really create a community around your email list.

Which Email Software Should You Use?

There are many email marketing platforms out there and many are free to use until you reach a certain number of subscribers.

If you’re interested in comparing different email platforms, check out this guide from ProBlogger or comparison chart from PC Mag. 

I’m writing this guide about Mailchimp because it’s the provider I’ve used myself for almost a decade.

Note: We have no affiliations with Mailchimp and encourage you to find the service provider that works best for your needs.

Mailchimp Tips And Information

Mailchimp is one of the most popular email service providers.

• It is free to use if you have up to 2000 subscribers.
• Mailchimp uses a simple drag and drop editor and offers a range of different templates for the design of your newsletter.
• There are also different options for creating sign-up forms (e.g. widgets, embedded forms, and landing pages with their own URL).

Check out the Getting Started With Mailchimp guide for more information.

What Is RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s a way to have information that you’re interested in delivered to you.

Instead of you having to check a blog regularly to see if there is a new post, RSS can do that for you.

You can access the new content using a news aggregator (like Feedly). Or it can be delivered straight to your inbox!

When an RSS feed is updated with new blog posts, Mailchimp can pull that content into an email and send it to your subscribers. It will be sent according to the schedule you choose (e.g. daily at 9am or every Sunday at 6pm).

It’s now time to learn how to set up your emails in Mailchimp using RSS.

Let’s get started!

How To Set Up Your Automatic Emails

We’re going to go through four steps to getting your RSS emails set up:

1. Register for Mailchimp and set up your account
2. Create an RSS campaign
3. Choose your feed and timing
4. Finish designing your email

Part One: Register For Mailchimp And Set Up Your Account

This part is fairly straightforward although we recommend Mailchimp’s getting started guide if you’re unsure.

The three most important steps to explore are:

• Set up your account
• Set up your audience
• Customize your signup form

Registration tips:

• You don’t need to submit any payment. Mailchimp is free until you have over 2000 subscribers. When you do hit the 2000 mark you can decide about payment options although the best first step would be to “clean up your list”. This means you remove subscribers who aren’t opening your emails or no longer want updates.
• You’re legally obliged to provide a physical address. This address will show up automatically in the footer of your emails. You probably do not want to use your home address! We recommend using a work address or PO Box.
• Which email address do you want to use? Even though you’re sending your emails out through Mailchimp they still come “from” your email address. So, if you have both personal and work email addresses, consider what would be the best to use for this project.

Part Two: Create An RSS Campaign

1) Login to your Mailchimp account

Click on “Campaigns”.

2) From here click “Create Campaign”

3) You’ll be presented with a range of campaign options

Click “Email”.

4) Click on “Automated”

5) Select “Share blog updates”

6) Enter a campaign name and select your audience

You would have started setting up your audience when you set up your Mailchimp account. Don’t worry if there’s only one or two people on your audience list! It will continue to grow over time.

Click “Begin”.

Part Three: Choose Your Feed And Timing

You’ll now be asked to enter the feed of your blog and select when you want emails to go out automatically.

1) Type in your feed:

• If your blog is through Edublogs, the RSS feed will be yourblog.edublogs.org/feed
• If your blog is hosted through CampusPress, the feed will be your blog URL with /feed on the end.

2) Select your email frequency and times

You can choose the time you want your emails to go out (daily, weekly, monthly) by using the drop-down menus and checkboxes. Note that an email will only be sent if there’s new content on your blog.

• If you choose the daily option, an email will only go out if you’ve published something in the last day.
• If you choose the weekly option, an email will only be sent if you’ve published a post (or posts) in the last week.

3) Choose whether you want images to be resized

There is also a box to select if you want Mailchimp to resize the images in your feed to fit your template. This will help prevent stretching.

Part Four: Finish Setting Up And Designing Your Email

The final step involves clicking through the menu bar at the bottom of the page to complete the RSS campaign.

1) Select your audience that you’d like the emails to be sent to

You will have chosen your audience when you started setting up your campaign. You can change it here if you need to (free accounts can only have one audience).

You can also segment your audience so it only goes out to certain people on the list (e.g. parents or colleagues) but this is more of an advanced feature.

2) Fill out your campaign information

Type in campaign details:

• Campaign name: Recipients won’t see this so make it something that makes sense to you.
• Email subject: This will automatically pull in the title and date of your blog post but you can test an email to make sure it’s working correctly.
• Preview text: You might want to write something like, “The latest news from x…”
• From name: This should be your name or a name the recipients will recognize.
• From email address: Make sure this isn’t an email address you need to keep private.
• Checkboxes: These are more advanced features such as using conversations to manage replies, personalizing the “to” field (you would need to have collected correct first names to do this), or track opens and clicks.

3) Select your template

If you’re not sure what template to choose, stick with the basic “1 column” template. You can always change it later.

4) Design Your Email

It’s now time to design the look of your emails. If you’re new to Mailchimp, you can definitely keep this simple!

Here are the most important steps:

a) Add an image to the top of the email

Hover over the word “Logo” and click on the pencil icon. Follow the prompts to upload an image that represents you and your website.

b) Edit the text

Hover over the block of text and click on the pencil icon. Write a short generic introduction that people will see before the contents of your latest post.

For example,

“Thanks for subscribing to my email updates. Here’s what I’ve been writing about this week…”

c) Drag in the RSS blocks

You’ll now need to drag in the RSS components from the right-hand side. This will ensure your latest posts appear in the email.

Hover over “RSS items”, click on it and drag it to your email underneath the text.

Using the drop-down menu on the right-hand side, you can select whether you want the full post or just an excerpt to be shown in the email.

There are two schools of thoughts here:

• Some people want traffic to their website so would rather show an excerpt and have people click through to read the full post on the blog.
• Some people want to present their readers with the most convenient option for reading the post, hence they like to display the full post in the email. Readers don’t need to visit the blog to consume the information.

Select “Save and Close” when you’ve made this choice.

d) Test your email

A final helpful tip is to preview what your email will look like and/or send a test email to yourself or someone else who can offer you feedback.

You’ll find these options at the top of the page under “Preview and Test”.

Select “Next” in the bottom right-hand corner of the page when you’re ready to move on.

5) Confirm and send

Once your email is all set up, you can check your details and then press “Start RSS” in the bottom right-hand corner of the page. Your first email will go out automatically at the time you selected (as long as you have published something new on your blog).

If you don’t want to start immediately, press “Save and Exit” in the top right-hand corner of the page and you can come back to it later. You’ll find the draft when you go to Campaigns.

Conclusion

Whether you write a blog for teachers, students, colleagues, or members of the wider public, there is a group of people out there who’d love to keep up to date with your new posts.

If you’re short on time, one of the easiest ways to send out your new blog posts to your loyal readers is through RSS using a platform like Mailchimp.

In our next post, I’ll explain how to set up a hand-curated email newsletter using Mailchimp. It takes a little bit more time as you’ll be sending emails manually, however, you might find there are greater rewards to enjoy! Click here to read the next post.

Some people also like to use a combination of RSS and personal emails.

Any tips or questions? Leave a comment below. We’d love to hear from you!

Related Reading

You might also enjoy:

• A Plan For Writing A Weekly Blog Post In 10 Minutes A Day
• Resources To Introduce Edublogs To Others
• 5 Ways To Share And Market Your Teacher Blog
• 12 Tips For Maintaining Momentum With Blogging

Are you an educator with a blog?

Would you like a bigger audience and a stronger professional network?

This practical post goes through five things you can do to share and market your blog:

1. Make posts ‘shareable’
2. Use social media
3. Set up an email subscription
4. Encourage others to share your posts
5. Be an audience

If you don’t yet have a blog, that’s no problem. You can get one for free by heading over to the Edublogs homepage.

And if you want to be walked through the process of setting up your blog, check out our free, self-paced course.

Marketing? Really?

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.

This is definitely not the sort of marketing we’re talking about here.

As Seth Godin explains, modern marketing is really using the culture to reach people who want to be reached and offering them something they’re glad to find.

There’s probably many members of the education community out there who would love to find you. So, do them a favor and start marketing your wonderful work!

The Benefits Of Blogging For Yourself

Before we look at building an audience through sharing and marketing your blog, let’s go over the many benefits of blogging just for yourself.

What’s the point of blogging even if no one is reading? Is there a point?

Of course!

Blogging is a fantastic way to reflect and develop your thinking

As Clive Thompson stated in Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better,

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’s only when they start writing that they figure out what they want to say.

The research process of blogging is also an excellent way to learn

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!

Having your own online space can present you with career opportunities

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.

Becoming a blogger will help you help your students

Teacher-bloggers can be role models for students as digital citizens and writers.

Furthermore, trying out blogging before introducing it to your students can be a comfortable progression for many educators.

Why Sharing And Marketing Your Blog Applies To Everyone

Despite all of the personal benefits of blogging, you can really amplify things by building an audience.

Clive Thompson explains,

…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.

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.

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.

How exactly can you share and market your blog? Let’s take a look…

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. 

Strategies To Share And Market Your Posts

You might have put together a fantastic blog post and felt satisfied as you hit the publish button, but your job is not done.

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.

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.

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1) Make Posts ‘Shareable’

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.

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.

Our post 10 Tips For Making Your Blog Posts Easier To Read will help guide you through the process of creating easy to read posts.

The Power Of Visuals

We know how powerful visuals are! A Hubspot article tells us,

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.

Studies 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.

Through an image, people may be more likely to take in your content and share it with others.

What Sort Of Visuals Can You Make For Blog Posts?

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.

Graphics to share on social media

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.

Whenever we create a new post on The Edublogger, we create a simple graphic to go with it.

For example:

There are certain size dimensions that are ideal for different social media platforms as outlined here by Louise M. (Tip: If you’re using Canva which we will explain below, it will generate the correct size automatically).

Infographics

An infographic can be a great way to summarize information or data and make posts more shareable.

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’.

Here is another example we prepared for International Dot Day. This sort of thing can really help the time-poor reader.

Quotes

Quotes can be powerful additions to blog posts. They can offer a burst of insightful learning and back up your own thoughts.

In our post about quotes, we outlined different ways you can use quotes and turn them into shareable graphics.

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.

A quote graphic might display the words over an image, pattern, or a block color.

How To Make Visuals For Blog Posts

There are many different ways you can make the sorts of visuals we described above.

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.

Just some online tools for making visuals include:

• Canva (solid free plan with paid options — see below)
• Adobe Spark (free for teachers and students)
• Stencil (free plan allows for 10 creations per month)
• Snappa (free plan allows for 5 downloads per month)
• Pablo (free tool from Buffer)
• Piktochart (free for basic plan with watermark)

If you have any suggestions for web tools, apps, or offline tools be sure to let us know in a comment.

Canva tips and information

Canva is certainly one of the most popular tools for bloggers and it’s one I personally love to use!

• Canva has millions of users worldwide and is popular in many industries, including education.
• Students under 13 can use Canva if they’re ‘appropriately supervised’. (Read Richard Byrne’s post about this topic for further clarification).
• Canva is a web-based tool but there are also apps for Android and iOS.
• The free plan allows you to make unlimited creations and download them in high quality without watermarks. This sets Canva apart from some similar tools.
• The paid ‘Canva for Work‘ plan gives you access to more templates, images, and icons etc. It also allows you to resize your design without starting again (e.g. you might make something in A4 size then want a smaller version to share on social media). Additionally, you can download your designs with a transparent background (handy for logos, badges, buttons etc.).
• Canva uses a drag and drop interface which is very simple to use but like all tools, does require a little bit of playing around to develop fluency. It’s worth the investment in time!

Check out this post I wrote about Canva for more information and ideas.
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2) Use Social Media

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.

Share Your Own Content

There are a few things to keep in mind when sharing your own blog posts on social media

Consider your platform(s)

Teachers are active on different platforms — Twitter has traditionally been very popular with teachers (if you’re new to Twitter you can find out more information here). There are also a large number of teachers active on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn etc.

You don’t have to be sharing on every platform. Using one or two social media platforms well can be a more successful approach than spreading yourself thin across different networks.

Tailor your message

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.

For example, Instagram and Twitter use hashtags more than Facebook. Pinterest tends to center around larger ‘shareable’ images. Twitter has a 280 character limit whereas Facebook allows you to write lengthier posts.

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.

Repeat, but don’t overdo it

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.

Repeating the same message without variation is not a good idea and is against the rules with some social media channels. On Twitter posting ‘duplicative or substantially similar content’ is not allowed.

To make posting on social media easier, some people use a social media scheduler like Buffer or Hootsuite although use this approach with care. You don’t want to look like a robot!

Make your posts stand out!

We know that each social media platform has its own best practices for formatting updates. Let’s focus on Twitter for a moment and take a look at the sorts of tweets that are more likely to stand out.

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?

Compare these two tweets about the same post and consider which one would stand out more…

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.

Want more advice about using Twitter and creating shareable content? Check out our Ultimate Guide to Twitter. You might be particularly interested in the examples of tweets that stand out. 

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3) Set Up An Email Subscription

How are people keeping up to date with blogs?

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).

Email and RSS are still being used, however, things have changed a little.

When we did a quick poll of our Edublogs community in July 2018, 61% of respondents indicated that their favorite way to keep up to date with the blogs they like to read is via social media.

Why is social media a popular way to follow blogs?

Perhaps:

• People are getting more emails than ever before so are becoming more selective with what subscriptions they sign up for. They might only subscribe to a handful of their favorite blogs.
• Some individuals are becoming more satisfied with consuming information serendipitously.

Should I bother with an email subscription?

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:

• Having an email subscription option is going to allow your most loyal and valuable members of your community to stay in touch with you.
• There are no guarantees that people in your network will see your posts on social media. You can’t control that. Offer your readers a channel to make sure they don’t miss your content.
• Email is much more personal than social media. Your readers can hear directly from you and it can help to build a relationship.

How To Make An Email Subscription

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.

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?

Automated Email Subscription Widget

If you’re using Edublogs Pro, did you know you can add a simple email subscription widget on the sidebar of your blog?

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.

Find out how to activate the email subscription widget here.

Create An Email Newsletter

It’s becoming increasingly common for bloggers to create their own newsletter using an email service provider. 

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. 

When you use an email service provider, you can either:

• Automatically send out emails to people on your list when a new post is published.
• Create a personal email to your email list telling them about your new post(s). Generally, you might give an introduction to the post and ask them to click to visit your blog and read your post. You might send this out every time you publish a new post or at regular intervals (weekly, monthly etc.).

MailChimp Tips And Information

One of the most popular email service providers is MailChimp.

• It is free to use up to 2000 subscribers.
• MailChimp uses a simple drag and drop editor and offers a range of different templates for the design of your newsletter.
• There are also different options for creating sign-up forms. You’ll probably want a sign-up form on the sidebar of your blog but you might also include it at the bottom of your blog posts, in a page on your blog, or as a ‘landing page’ that you can share on social media.

Check out the Getting Started With MailChimp guide for more information.

Getting Started with MailChimp | MailChimp

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4) Encourage Others To Share Your Content

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.

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!

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.

You can also use a variety of plugins to encourage your readers to share your posts.

Let’s take a look at AddThis and Jetpack.

AddThis Plugin

AddThis is a handy plugin for your blog that adds a social share button to every post and page.

You can add a range of buttons above and/or below your posts that readers can click on to share in a variety of ways.

You can choose to display these buttons in different ways.

You can also add the Social Share widget to your blog sidebar so visitors can share your blog with others.

Check out our help guide for more instructions on setting up AddThis.

Jetpack Plugin

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.

Once you’ve activated Jetpack, you might like to activate:

• Publicize: Makes it easy to share your posts on social networks automatically when you publish a new post. Learn more.
• Sharing: Enables you to add sharing buttons to your posts so that your readers can easily share your content on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks. Learn more.

Check out our help guide for more instructions on setting up Jetpack.

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5) Be An Audience

The final tip is a simple one that’s often overlooked: If you want to have an audience you need to be an audience.

This might involve:

• Subscribing to some blogs you like via email or RSS (e.g. Feedly). Or, following bloggers on social media.
• Sharing blog posts that resonate with you on social media; support other bloggers.
• Leave comments on posts that you enjoyed, leave you curious, or challenge your thinking.

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).

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.

As you get to know other bloggers, you might also consider guest posting. It could introduce you to a new network of readers and you could be helping a fellow blogger too.

How does guest posting work?

• You might connect with someone who has a small but engaged network of readers.
• Arrange to write a relevant guest post on each other’s blogs.
• The guest post could include a short introduction with a link to your blog, and/or a bio at the bottom of the post.
• Perhaps some of those readers will start following you and vice versa. Win-win!

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Conclusion: Stick With It!

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.

Building your audience takes time, patience, and a commitment to stick with it. Need help building momentum with your blog? Check out this post. 

Remember, the rewards will be worth it!

As George Couros said as he reflected on his 8 years of blogging,

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 “360 Degree View” of my learning; I do my best to focus on all angles of what I am sharing before I share it.

Dean Shareski has also boldly stated, 

I’ve yet to hear anyone who has stuck with blogging suggest it’s been anything less than essential to their growth and improvement. I’ve no “data” to prove this but I’m willing to bet my golf clubs that teachers who blog are our best teachers.

We think so too.

Any questions or tips about sharing and marketing your blog? Be sure to let us know in the comments below!

Do you have a professional educator blog?

Many teachers start blogs with good intentions but keeping them active long term can be a struggle.

Sometimes the hardest part of maintaining momentum with your blog is knowing what to write about.

We’re here to help!

Throughout the year, we’ve been including blogging prompts for teachers and students in our email newsletter.

Not signed up to our email newsletter? You can add your details here and make sure you add news@edublogs.org to your contacts to prevent the emails from going to your spam folder!

We’ve compiled these prompts into a resource for you. With 50 new blogging prompts, you should be set for many months to come!

Scroll down to find a printable PDF.

We also published 50 new prompts for students on The Edublogger last week.

Wait! I Don’t Have A Blog!

If creating your own blog is something that’s been on your to-do list for too long, we can help.

Earlier in the year, we updated our free, self-paced course for educators looking to get started with blogging.

There are ten steps which you can work through in a sequential order. Or you can pick and choose as you wish.

Read more about the Personal Blogging Teacher Challenge here or go straight to the course. 

The 50 Prompts For Educators

1. Write a book review — it could be a book you’ve read for fun or learning.
2. Make a list of 10/50/100 things you’re grateful for. Maybe you could even create a sketchnote or graphic like Dani Dipirro.
3. Compare your first year of teaching to today. How have things changed?
4. Share some of your favorite ways to relax and recharge outside of school hours.
5. Embed an inspiring TED Talk and write your reflections.
6. Share 5 myths about teaching or a topic you’re passionate about.
7. Write about an app or web tool you use regularly or find useful.
8. Publish a photo of when you were a student and describe this time of your life.
9. Try Hubspot’s Blog Ideas Generator. Just enter three words and you’ll be given five ideas that you can tweak.
10. Blog roundup. Create a list of 5 or 10 of your favorite blogs and share the reasons why you recommend them.
11. Interview someone for a blog post. This could be a colleague, a former student, or someone from your professional learning network. Or, you could invite someone to prepare a guest post for your blog.
12. Create an A-Z of yourself, your career, or one of your passions.
13. Where do you connect with other teachers online? Twitter? Facebook groups? Instagram? Share your favorite ways to learn from others in the education community.
14. Explore the website Will Robots Take My Job? Share your findings in a post.
15. Write about the old technology you used to use at work or home that’s now obsolete. Perhaps it’s the VCR, floppy disk, or typewriter.
16. Make a new anchor chart for your classroom and photograph it for your blog. Check out this We Are Teachers post for inspiration.
17. When was the last time you wrote a poem? Why not give it a try in a blog post? For inspiration, Kevin Hodgson has written 3 poems about writing.
18. Consider the popular quote doing the rounds on social media: “Do more things that make you forget to check your phone”. What does this mean to you?
19. What do you do when you have a few minutes left at the end of a class? Share your ideas with other teachers.
20. Flexible seating is a hot topic! Share your thoughts in a blog post or weigh up the pros and cons. Pernille Ripp’s post might provide some inspiration.
21. Suggest some ideas for worthwhile activities at the start or end of the school year. Ten Creative Alternatives to Showing Movies Before the Break by John Spencer might provide some inspiration.
22. Try making a meme that you could share with readers, colleagues, or perhaps your students. Check out ISTE’s post about using memes with students.
23. There has been some online debate about having a “Pinterest perfect” classroom. What are your thoughts on this topic? Maybe you could add a touch of humor to your post like this post on Bored Teachers. 
24. Offer some tips for new teachers. This might be general advice or specific to a certain subject or age group.
25. Write about how you keep your passion for teaching alive. This post on Edutopia might provide some inspiration.
26. Share a tweet, Facebook post, or Instagram post that made you reflect, laugh, or change your way of thinking.
27. Check out the self-care calendar from Action for Happiness. Use one or more of these challenges as inspiration for a blog post.
28. Richard Byrne has explained how to find old newspapers through Google’s Newspaper Archive. Reflect on an interesting article in a blog post.
29. Lumen5 is a cool tool to make a video out of an article or blog post. Give it a try and share your video in a post.
30. If you could choose any book as mandatory reading for all high school students, what would it be and why?
31. What role do you think technology should play in the classroom? You may find inspiration from “Technology Is NOT The Focus” by Karen Arrington.
32. What makes you happy at work? Your colleagues? Your leaders? The students? Write a post about happiness in the workplace.
33. Larry Ferlazzo has written about the impact of making positive phone calls home. Blog about your favorite approach to parent communication.
34. Check out these 10 productivity tips for teachers and students. Publish a post sharing your own favorite tips to get more out of your day.
35. Read Kevin Hodgson’s post, “How Can We Tell If We Are Biased If We Already Are Biased?” Write your own reflections on this topic.
36. Sue Waters has shared her top 100+ crime and mystery novels of all time. Choose a category of books that you enjoy and share your own top reads.
37. How do you build relationships with students? Reflect on your approaches in a blog post. For inspiration, look at “It’s Worth The Time” by Bridget Gengler.
38. Rich at 4 O’Clock Faculty has blogged about “do it yourself professional development“. Read the post and write about your own favorite forms of PD.
39. Tell your readers something about your colleagues. “We All Need To Be/Have Kind Colleagues” from The Idealistic Teacher might provide some inspiration.
40. Teachers are also students and students are also teachers. Education isn’t just one way. Write about lessons you have learned from students.
41. Larry Ferlazzo has shared an article about using “cash” as a behavior management strategy. Share your own approaches to behavior management.
42. David Geurin asks 5 Questions For Deeper Reflection. Use one or more of these as inspiration for a blog post.
43. Write about your morning routine at home, work, or in the classroom.
44. How do you find balance in your life? “Rethinking Balance” by George Couros might provide some inspiration for your own post.
45. What do you think of grouping students by age? Check out Abe Moore’s post, “Making Sense Of Multi-Age Learning” and write your own reflections.
46. Have you tried sketchnoting? Why not give Sylvia Duckworth’s #SketchnoteFever mini lessons a try and blog about it?
47. Explain why you blog. What do you get out of it? Does it help refine your thinking or do you just enjoy helping others?
48. Write about your life before teaching. What other jobs did you have? How did these experiences shape you?
49. Try Impact Inbound’s Blog Title Generator to spark ideas for blog post titles.
50. Check out last year’s publication with 50 more blogging prompts for teachers and see what you’ve missed!

Get Your PDF

For your convenience, we’ve assembled these prompts into a PDF that you can save to your computer, print, or share with colleagues.

Over To You

Where do you find inspiration for your blog posts? How do you decide what to write about on your blog? Scroll down to find the comment box and let us know!

I’ve been wanting to do something like this for years – and today, we’re finally making it happen. I’m nervous and stoked.

I know that I should be blogging more, but I often find it hard to find the time or even work up the courage. And I’m going to bet that many of you are the same.

So, starting the first week of 2017, we will be publishing weekly blog prompts, related to education, and we want you to take part in this new blogging club!

Geared towards educators, but open to everyone – on any blog platform – we’ve put together topics, tasks, and short projects that should interest all.

We’ll try and model best practices in hopes that this may inspire how blogging can be encouraged with students too.

Topics like classroom management, edtech tools, and student voice. Tasks like create a short video or embed. If you participate, this should be your best year of professional development yet.

If this sounds interesting to you, we’ll publish the first prompt on Tuesday, January 3rd and then each Tuesday after that. For the entire year.

We hope to build a community around the hashtag #EdublogsClub. You’ll be able to leave links to your posts here on this blog as well to help others find posts on topics that interests them.

Ready To Join The Club?

Getting started is easy – just complete this short Google form here.

P.S.

While we wait for the New Year to roll around, you can work through our free blogging challenge series to make sure your blog is ready to go.

Here’s to blogging in 2017!

Hello Edubloggers!

We recently began a weekly email campaign to share the week’s top Edublogs posts.

We’ve found some great posts to share over the last few weeks, but would like to feature even more of the insightful content that educators and students are producing.

If you have a post that you’d like us to share with the entire Edublogs community, we’d love it if you would tweet it using the #edublogs hashtag.

That way we can share it with all of our twitter friends, and compile a list of the best posts to highlight in our emails.

Through working with you on your blogs, our team gets to see some of the amazing sites you have created using Edublogs. We’d be so grateful if you’d share your best work with us so we can see even more of the sites you have created, and so  we can share them with the rest of the Edublogs community.

How to share your posts:

• Take a look at your blog and find a recent post you’re really proud of.
• Share your post on Twitter using the hashtag #edublogs.
• While you’re there, search Twitter for other posts using the #edublogs hashtag. If you find one that’s really great, leave a comment for the author. Everyone loves getting comments on their blogs!
• Each week, we’ll re-share as many of the tweets sent our way as we can, and we’ll select a few special posts to feature in our weekly Top Posts email that goes out to everyone on the Edublogs mailing list.
• If you’re not on our mailing list, be sure to sign up!

We hope that through sharing the best Edublogs posts we can create open channels of communication and collaboration between educators and students. And, we really just enjoy sharing the great work you are producing.

So, if you have an awesome post that you’d like to share with the world, send us a tweet using the #edublogs hashtag. And then keep your eye out to see if your post is featured in this week’s Top Posts email.

We’re often asked “How do you get more people to read and respond to blog posts?”

Good question!  We all gain more out of blogging when we comment.

Comments motivate, provide feedback and advice, challenge our thoughts and views, make us reflect on what we’re learning.

The challenge is how do we attract more comments?

Below’s my tips for attracting more comments for personal educational blogging.  Check out Kathleen Morris’s tips for ‘Attracting blog comments’ on class and student blogs.

What are yours?  Would love to read your tips in the comments below!  Or your thoughts on reasons why people don’t leave comments!

1.  Become a better blog citizen

Blogging is as much about reading other blogger’s posts and commenting on posts as it is writing your own posts.

Besides being a valuable source of ideas for writing your own posts it helps develops relationships with others.   Interaction with other bloggers and their readers, in comments, often leads to new readers of your blog.

You can’t expect people to read and comment on your posts if you aren’t doing the same on other people’s blogs!

Here’s how you do in 3 simple steps:

1. Start reading other people’s blogs – make it time efficient by setting up Google Reader or using FlipBoard
2. Make an effort to write comments on other people’s blog posts – Don’t comment for comment sake.  Comment to share thoughts, expand on post comment and use subscribe to be notified of new comments if the option is included.
3. Reply to comments on your own posts – replying to comments demonstrates you read and value their comments. It also builds relationships with your readers.

2.  Build your Personal Learning Network (PLN)

Personal Learning networks are important for educational bloggers because:

1. Educators are more social than ever and more likely to use links shared by friends on social network sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ as their main source of blog posts worth reading.
2. Educators who are already connect online are more likely to read and respond in comments to your posts than work colleagues, friends and family who aren’t as connected.

Here is how you do it in 2 simple steps:

1. Enable social sharing on your posts – make it easier for readers to share your content on their social networks (we use AddThis Social Share plugin)
2. Build your PLN – learn how to here, look at how you might use social networks like Facebook to interact and make sure you include building relationships with educators on Twitter.  Most educational bloggers tweet the link for their latest post (here’s an example) and tweet other people’s post they’ve enjoyed reading.

3.  Write better blog posts

Not every one who visits your blog post reads it.  Even if they do read –they often don’t read it all.  Did you even read what I just wrote then?  

To keep your readers attention……

• Every post title
• Every paragaph
• Every heading
• Every word
• Every image

……has to count!

It’s even more important to be attention grabbing for readers like me who use magazine style apps, like FlipBoard, Zite or Pulse, for all our blog post reading on our mobile devices.

Here’s why:

Here is how you do it in 2 simple steps:

1. Learn how to write better blog posts – here’s our tips to help
2. View your posts how readers are reading them – visitors to your blog only make up a small portion of your total readers.  Set up Google Reader (to see what it looks like via RSS) and use FlipBoard (if you have an iPad or Android tablet).

4.  Write posts that encourage readers to comment

Most readers are relucant commenters, not because of lack of time, but because they feel uncomfortable leaving comments.

However, some posts are more likely to make you want to comment than others.

Here’s 2 simple steps that help:

1. Don’t cover everything – incomplete posts are more likely encourage readers to comment than a comprehensive post that make readers feel that have nothing to contribute.
2. Invite readers to share their thoughts – ask readers to comment by finishing your post with some simple open-ended questions on information you would like to know.

5.  You First, Readers Second!

One of the biggest reasons why new bloggers fail is they focus entirely on writing posts to please readers.  Every post becomes a chore because they aren’t writing about what interest them but what they think interests others!

Stop worrying about others –  just blog, enjoy, have fun and learn!

Focus on:

• Writing about what you feel strongly or passionate about 
• What you’ve learnt — if you didn’t know than it’s likely others didn’t either
• Don’t stress about it being perfect -blogging is a work in progress!

Accept not all posts will be commented on.  This doesn’t mean readers don’t value them or the posts aren’t being read.  The posts I write to encourage reader comments are very different from the posts that readers like to share, bookmark and refer back to.

6. Practice makes…….

Hopefully I’ve still got your attention?

None of my tips help if you don’t put them into practice!  Here’s your chance to practice!

Choose one of the following tasks and make it your goal to do it:

1. Write a comment here to share your tips on either ‘ Reasons why readers don’t leave comments on blog posts’; ‘What makes a good comment?’ OR ‘Your tips for encouraging readers to comment?”
2. Leave a comment on another person’s blog post then come back and leave a comment with a link so I check out the post(s) that made you want to comment.
3. Write a blog post on your thoughts on anything covered in this post, your thoughts or what you’ve learnt then come to leave a comment with a link to your post so I can read your post!