We’ve long been a fan of incorporating visuals into blogging and marketing efforts. Images not only improve the appearance of your blog post, adding color and grabbing attention — they have been shown to drive engagement and social sharing among your readers.

But recently we’ve noticed some creative thinkers in our community using Haiku Deck in some cool ways to promote their blog content. Here are a few of our favorites.

Method 1: Create Custom Visuals to Drive Traffic

Links alone are boring, but links with beautiful images get noticed. The content managers at Bruce Clay, Inc. use Haiku Deck to create one-slide custom visuals to promote blog content on their social media channels. Here’s an example from Google+, where gorgeous visuals really shine.

The Haiku Deck slide crisply captures the blog content in a way that’s easy to read and understand, and definitely stands out in the stream. To this, we say +1!

Tips: Showcasing a beautiful image with minimal text is your goal here. You can import your own image, or use our Creative Commons image search to pick out an image that perfectly captures the topic of your post to use as the background. You’ll then want to include the title of your post  with a minimal amount of text — think of it like a headline.

Method 2: Create a Slideshow Summary to Share with a Larger Audience

The team at PGi uses Haiku Deck to create awesome slideshow summaries that they embed right in their blog post and upload to SlideShare to gain more traction. Uploading to SlideShare makes it easy to share widely — they’ll tweet it and post it on Google+, LinkedIn, and other social media channels to really cast a wide net.

Below is their slideshow summary based on their original blog post here.

Tips: Here, you’re basically creating a preview of your post that summarizes your ideas and piques interest. You can include intriguing pull quotes and interesting data points. Blog content focused on a list of tips or how-to steps lends itself beautifully to this format. Be sure to include a link back to your blog — you can either highlight it on a slide (using a link shortener here helps) or include it in the Notes field.

Method 3: Create a Video to Cross-Promote on Your Social Media Platforms

Videos allow you to expand your cross-promotion efforts of your content onto YouTube, and provides you with another content piece to promote on your other social media platforms. Here’s another great example from Bruce Clay Inc. — check out how they’ve turned their Haiku Deck recap summarizing a blog post on 6 ways to repurpose blog content into a video.

how to promote your blog

Tips: One of the great things about YouTube videos is that they can sync with your Google+ page, making it super easy for your followers to share and comment. Also try adding music for an extra element of fun or add narration to include more supporting details, and make sure to include a link back to the blog post in the info box. Converting a Haiku Deck into a video is quite simple, and we’ve written a helpful article on how to do that here.

How to Promote Your Blog – Additional Resources

And of course, if there’s ever anything we can help you out with, drop us a line!