We’ve all seen them as we scroll through our Facebook newsfeeds: Posts promising to shock and amaze us. You know the posts we’re talking about, the ones that are clearly designed to entice you to click, but rarely deliver on the amazement they promise.

Undoubtedly, blogger outreach is a key part of your content marketing strategy — and potentially a very frustrating exercise. Bloggers are often some of the most important influencers in your industry, and strong relationships can help extend the reach of your content and improve your visibility among your audience.

“The key to successful social media marketing is maintaining an active presence on social channels.”

How many times have you heard statements like that? It seems you’ve been told time and time again that you have to stay active on your social media accounts, but what does that really mean? Does it mean updating Facebook every few hours? Tweeting constantly? Blogging every day? Posting Instagram shots every few days?

The truth is, there is no universal definition of what it means to be active on social media, other than it requires more than simply setting up an account and then letting it languish between infrequent updates.

Many content marketers take the “build it and they will come” approach to content promotion. Does this sound familiar: You create some killer content, optimize it with all of your most important keywords, meta tags, and the like, then post it. After the content is posted and shared on your website and across various social media platforms you wait for people flock to this content in droves and share it.

Bloggers have long known that Pinterest is an effective tool to grow your blog. Pinning content from your own blog, as well as from other sources, can help build your brand, drive traffic to your site, and grow your audience.

Yet in many cases, bloggers aren’t doing everything they can to increase their followers via Pinterest.