Which Blog Posts Should You Publish And Not Promote?

Chris Garrett recently outlined the different types of blog content, but which ones are worth promoting?

Chris orders blog content in a value ladder (worst content first):

1. Filler content
2. Good, original content
3. Authority building content
4. Pillar content
5. Flagship content

I would add news content to that list and possibly linkbait, although linkbait spans across the best 3 content types. Other than filler content, these types of content all add value in some way and so are worthy of links but does that mean that you should push every post you write?

What Is Pushing A Post?

Pushing is essentially the same as promotion, but without any money changing hands. For example emailing bloggers in your niche about your latest post is ‘pushing the post’. So is using all your social networking power to push a post to the front page of a social voting site.

The Problems With Pushing Every Post

I am often contacted by bloggers asking me to push their post in some way. I am happy to do this, but only if the content really is great and if I’m not especially busy at that time. Some contact methods are easier to use than others and I find that this means people use them to push posts that are not special. For example using the “send to” feature on Stumbleupon is very easy and it is tempting to send every post to all your Stumbleupon friends. This is much the same as sending a mass-message to your MyBlogLog community members.

Reasons To Not Push

• Bloggers you know may be friendly but everyone has a limited number of favours they cant grant each week. Some idealistic bloggers may not like the way I talk about exchanging favours, but that is the way it is. The more you give the more you get.
• Your friends votes become worth less and less each time. If you are pushing a post on a social media site pushing posts too often with the same people classes you as a spammer, which you do not want. If you are pushing a post every day you need to have contributed a lot to that site every day to justify it.
• Your post isn’t good enough. Perhaps every post you write is “Good, original content”. This does not mean it is good enough for someone else to alter their post and link to. Compare it to the big players, is it really as good as that?
• Its a news post. Breaking a big story in a news post is a great way to gain exposure, but not by asking smaller bloggers to write about it. If you have a small blog and have never hit it big on a social voting site and are the first to break news; rather than ‘using up a favour’ from friends, it is better to contact the large news sites and tip them off while reminding them to reference you. The post from that news site has a much better chance of hitting it big on digg and sending traffic and link juice your way
• Often you don’t have to. One of the benefits of having a Web savvy readership is that if you write a post that truly is worthy of the attention of others, a reader will submit it to a site like Stumbleupon. It is good for them to submit posts that go on to receive more votes because it increases their ‘karma’ so that their votes have more weight in the future. This is also algorithmically true on Reddit, but on any social site having lots of submits that have become popular naturally results in your authority increasing on that site

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Click here for an example of a post that was worth me pushing. The response it received is evidence that pushing it was the right move.

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