Blogging can be an excellent business tool, but how can you increase sharing of your blog to get the most out of it?

You might be writing great content. You might be seeing your audience grow organically online. You might even see some backlinks popping up around the web to your blog. But how can you increase sharing of your blog to a wider audience?

There are a few tested and proven ways of going about increasing the sharing of your content, and these tips should help you increase sharing of your blog in no time.

Integrate Sharing Plugins on Your Blog

It may seem like a given, but you would be surprised at how many blogs do not make it easy to share. There should be a number of options all over your blog that allow users to share you content.

Put yourself in the position of your readers: you read an article, you like it, you want to post it to a social network. Would you be more motivated to do so if you had to copy the link, open a new window, log into your social account, paste the link and share it, or simply click a button and share it to every one?

Yeah, we picked the second one, too.

Promote Yourself

The best way to get your content out there is to get the sharing started yourself. Waiting for the numbers to increase organically is a slow, sometimes frustrating process. Give yourself an extra boost and get it started yourself by sharing all of your content on every network for each post.

Short and Original

Making it an easy read and something completely original stands a much greater chance of increasing shares when compared to a long, repetitive, unoriginal post.

People like reading content they have never seen before. Even if it is a subject that has been discussed a hundred times, a personal view is always going to captivate an audience. That, coupled with the short, to-the-point style of writing is going to encourage readers to share the great piece.

(Hint: Lists are among the most shared content on social networks, so try and organize your content into an easily navigable list for your readers to sift through.)

Ask!

According to Dan Zarrella at HubSpot, asking for a re-tweet generates four times the number of re-tweets. There is no shame in asking your readers to share your content. After all, you want people to see what you wrote – that’s no secret.

When sharing your own content, add that little request into your post and see how the response is significantly higher (assuming, of course, it is still great content) than it was before.

We all want to see our content get shared, and these tips are a great way to get you started when it comes to increasing the number of shares your blog posts are getting.

How do you increase sharing of your blog? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!