Blogging is fun, but it's not for everyone. It takes a lot of effort to maintain a good blog. A good blog not only requires high-quality content , but also needs to be promoted and marketed in a way that consistently achieves maximum exposure.
In order to make money from blogging , you need to know how to increase traffic to your blog. With traffic, money will follow.
Blog promotion is a key factor in gaining traffic (and the revenue that comes with it). I followed these tips and got over 1 million page views last year alone:
There are many ways to promote your blog. Effective blog promotion can be done in the following ways:
- Cutting-Edge SEO
- Social Media Marketing
- Guest Post
- Blog Comments
- Forum Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Push Notification Marketing
- Content Syndication
- E-book
- …and much more.
In today’s article, I’m going to cover several blog promotion techniques that are easy to implement and can bring great exposure to your blog in a short period of time.
Remember, success requires hard work and smart work, and successful blog outreach is no exception.
How to Properly Promote Your Blog:
Honestly, there are a lot of ways to get your blog noticed.
My general strategy is to pick one or two methods at a time and stick with them for a while, investing time, energy, and effort in them. This ensures that each technique has an equal chance to work.
Let’s take a look at the various techniques you can choose from to successfully promote your blog.
But first things first.
Before you start blogging promotion, lay the foundation:
Before you start blogging, you should have some basic knowledge.
host:
Make sure your host is free enough to handle the increased traffic. Typically, most shared hosts can handle a maximum of 10-15k page views per day. Depending on the traffic you expect post blog promotion, your host should match that.
Some of the good ones are:
We have some excellent guides on hosting that you should start with:
WordPress Themes:
Make sure your blog has an excellent design to attract users to stay on your blog for a longer time. At the same time, from a technical point of view, it should be well-coded for better performance and SEO-friendly.
These two things go hand in hand, and if you’re still using an outdated theme or design, you should upgrade it.
Getting a new theme doesn’t have to cost a lot of money, there are some free and premium themes you can check out:
- Genesis theme (this is what we use at SidelinePlay)
- Newspaper Theme : A very fast WP theme.
- Astra theme (available in free and paid versions)
- GeneratePress (Free + Paid)
Set up the analysis:
You should measure your existing traffic to see how effective these blog outreach techniques are. The best analytics tool you can get is Google Analytics, as it is free and allows you to measure traffic at every level.
You can even see which post is getting the most traffic and where that traffic is coming from. If you haven’t done this yet, you can read our previous guide:
Having done that, it’s time to look at various ways to promote your blog
11+ Ways to Promote Your Blog:
1. Content Syndication
One of the smartest ways to promote your blog is to use content syndication. Did you know that you can re-share your existing blog posts on platforms like LinkedIn and Medium.com to drive tons of traffic to them?
The quality of the audience on these platforms is very high and you can expect a better ROI by doing this. If you are worried about creating duplicate content, then you can take advantage of canonical tags.
This is an SEO technique that reuses your content on multiple websites without devaluing the existing ones.
Read my guide “ How to Republish Content on Medium ” to learn more about this technique.
There are two platforms I highly recommend for content syndication in 2022:
Your task:
- Create a Google Sheet and create a few columns called “Article Title”, “URL” and then select only those articles that generate higher engagement.
- Choose a team member or hire a VA who can co-publish 2-3 pieces per week.
- If you have a long post, you can split it into smaller posts.
2. Search Engine Optimization
This is one of the areas where you have direct control over how quickly your blog can be found in Google searches. There are two areas you should pay attention to:
- On-site SEO (Technical SEO)
- On-page SEO (keyword optimization)
You need to do the following:
On-site SEO:
This part helps search engines discover your blog. This also involves submitting your blog to Google.
If you’re using WordPress as your blogging platform, you’ll need to do the following:
This tells the Google search engine what's on your blog so you can be found in Google searches.
Configure Yoast SEO plugin:
This is the most popular WordPress SEO plugin on the market . Follow my previous guide to know the steps to set up the Yoast SEO plugin:
On-Page SEO:
Many bloggers and content marketers make mistakes in this part and thus miss out on a great opportunity to get their blog seen by their target audience.
Here’s how it works:
- Do keyword research before writing
- Optimize content for specific keywords
- Make the content better
I have a detailed guide on how to write SEO friendly content and on-page SEO that covers everything you need to know.
While you’re at it, read our guide to SEO image optimization to make sure your blog is visible in image searches, too.
3. Facebook
Facebook is the largest social networking site. Many online businesses rely solely on referral traffic from Facebook, and we cannot ignore the importance of Facebook for our blog promotion.
The first step to using Facebook for blog promotion is to create a Facebook fan page and Facebook group for your blog.
In 2022, Facebook Groups are more effective than Facebook Pages.
You should also invest some time and effort into increasing user engagement and creating a niche community around your page. This is extremely important. In fact, your Facebook Group can be one of the best ways to interact with your audience in real time.
Here are a few articles to help you make the most of Facebook to promote your blog:
4. Twitter
Most bloggers today understand the importance of Twitter. If you are still using Twitter for personal use and not for marketing, you are missing out on a ton of potential to drive traffic to your blog. Twitter traffic is great, especially when your posts are retweeted and feature some trending hashtags.
If you already use a personal Twitter account, I recommend creating a separate profile specifically for your blog domain. This will help with branding and will serve as another way for readers to subscribe to your blog.
- Read: How to Tweet Old Posts to Automatically Drive Traffic to Twitter
5. Social Bookmarking Sites
Social bookmarking sites can bring amazing traffic to your blog if you know how to use them.
If your post becomes popular on social bookmarking sites like Flipboard , Pinterest , and Reddit, you can drive thousands of visits in a short period of time.
Still, you do need to carefully monitor and understand these social bookmarking sites, as well as what works best for such forums. (For example, list posts perform well in any search engine.)
6. Guest Blogging
Getting your blog featured on similar niche blogs will not only bring you traffic but it will also help you attract targeted traffic and build SEO backlinks.
Especially since the Google update, guest blogging has become one of the best ways to generate backlinks for your blog.
7. Interview
Once your blog starts getting decent traffic, many other bloggers or people inspired by you will ask for interviews.
Personally, I feel like I shouldn’t disappoint my fans with interview requests because they are my greatest asset as a blogger.
So if you ever get the chance to be interviewed, I recommend you do it and talk a little bit about yourself and your blog so that a whole new audience can get to know you and know that your blog exists.
8. Blog Comments
Just like guest posting, commenting on blogs on similar topics is one of the best ways to promote your blog.
When you do this, be sure to add value through your comments, otherwise, you will only dilute your brand. Never, ever, ever spam someone else's blog.
You should also sign up for a free account at Gravatar.com to get a commenting profile picture.
9. Niche Forums
Forums and discussion boards are some other excellent ways to get traffic and a targeted audience. I have personally tried a few webmaster forums and I have found that they do bring in decent traffic. The volume of traffic is not huge, but these forums bring in targeted traffic, which is much better than any random visitor.
For general traffic, quality is more important than quantity.
There are many factors you need to consider when using forums to promote your blog.
Here are a few articles that can point you in the right direction:
Promote your blog offline:
10. Business Cards
Business cards are a small marketing tool that doesn’t cost much to make. You can make and order business cards online to help you market and promote your brand at a very low cost. Whenever you attend any blogging related events or conferences, you can simply pass your business card to the people you meet.
They are really a great promotional tool, when I give out 100 business cards I usually get 100 new and loyal visitors. Business cards are not expensive, I get 100 for about $5.
You can use Fiverr to find someone to design your business cards. Alternatively, you can use services like Moo.com or Inkmonk to order business cards for you.
11. Media: newspapers, magazines, TV channels
Frankly speaking, one of my journalist friends told me that they are always short of news. It is not easy to fill newspapers or magazines with news, and sometimes they even need to find some news on the Internet. So the key is, if you can provide them with some shocking news for free, they will publish it.
It's definitely easy to get a newspaper article about you, especially a local one, and it's definitely more tempting to write about some teenager who made $10,000 in three months than some grandpa who lost his cat. Since I've been on Indian TV and in newspapers, my blog and list have gotten bigger, and therefore my income has increased.
The key is to spread your message and make people familiar with your brand. In the long run, this will increase your brand reputation and people will tend to recognize it.
12. Wear a branded t-shirt or hoodie
People love gifts, and giving away free gifts like your blog t-shirts is sure to make their day. A beautifully designed t-shirt with your blog address on it is like free publicity.
If they wear them, you get free views to your blog URL without you even having to pay a penny.
Personally, it sounds really great and won’t cost you anything.
By printing your blog URL and logo on a t-shirt, you have a free mobile billboard that people use whenever they go to the cinema, buy groceries or food.
You can order branded T-shirts for your brand using a service called Teespring .
As you can see, there are countless ways to promote your website, business, or blog both online and offline, and more are sure to emerge as time goes by.
If you want to try some unique ways to market your brand, think outside the box! You could even buy billboard ads or advertise on national television. You never know how much buzz you could create!
I will continue to update this article with new information and ideas. In the meantime, be sure to share your blog promotion tips and techniques in the comments section below.
If you found the information in this article useful, please share it with your friends and colleagues on Facebook and Twitter.
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