Learn how to promote your blog and how to increase blog traffic fast by creating a blog marketing plan with these blog content promotion and blog promotion tips.
Building your blog and creating content is just the first step to becoming a professional blogger. But as Derek Halpern of Social Triggers wrote:
“Create content 20% of the time. Spend the other 80% of the time promoting what you created.”
If you apply the 80-20 Rule to content marketing and spend 80% of your time distributing your content, your next question is probably, “How to promote my blog?” or “How to promote content?
There are a lot of blog marketing and blog promotion ideas, but few of them offer a blog marketing strategy on how to promote your blog for free and how to increase blog traffic fast.
In this post, I’ll take you step-by-step through the process of learning how to increase organic search traffic by optimizing your blog. I’ll also list over 45 blog promotion tips for blog content promotion and the best ways to promote your blog to boost blog traffic and shares.
Contents
Preparing Your WordPress Blog For Traffic
Before you start learning how to promote WordPress blogs, you need to prepare your blog for visitors and content. The steps below will show you how to increase blog traffic on WordPress blogs by optimizing them for search engines.
#1. Optimize Your Blog
If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog (which I highly recommend), you need to learn how to increase organic search traffic by optimizing your blog. Complete all the tasks below to learn how to promote blogs on Google and have a well-optimized blog ready to be spidered and found on search engines.
If you’re new to SEO, the SEO Checklist by SEO Buddy is your roadmap to every important SEO action you need to take to optimize your website and learn how to boost traffic to your blog.
Optimize your permalinks
Your permalinks are the URLs that are displayed in the browser when a visitor goes to your blog domain or post. In WordPress, you need to optimize your permalinks by going to Settings > Permalinks and choosing the Post Name settings as shown in the image below.
This will ensure that WordPress includes the keywords from your headline in your blog permalink once it is published. This is important because keywords in the permalink are an important Google ranking factor.
Install an SEO plugin
Rank Math is the most comprehensive SEO plugin for a WordPress blog with everything you need to optimize your blog
It will help you optimize your WordPress blog, write optimized SEO content, create a sitemap, implement social media metadata, and Rich Snippets.
Once you have installed these plugins, you need to ensure that your Facebook Open Graph settings are switched on and the Twitter Card settings are set to show a ‘summary with large image’. Also, do this for Pinterest. This will ensure that your images are optimally displayed on all social media channels.
Learn how to optimize your WordPress blog in this WordPress tutorial for beginners. Get recommendations for the best WordPress SEO plugins, WordPress SEO checklist, and WordPress SEO tips for boosting site speed and improving site security.
Internal Link Optimization
This tip is courtesy of David Trounce. People often forget (or are not aware) that your internal links count as backlinks in Google’s search algorithm. What this means is that Google is reading your internal links, and noticing the content on your site that those links point to.
Like all backlinks, it’s a popularity contest. The pages with a greater number of links pointing to them are going to get a better boost in Google’s search results.
One of the ways to take advantage of this – and something over which you have full control – is to optimize your internal links to point to your most important pages. The best way to do this is by creating content hubs around similar keywords or themes.
#2. Conduct Keyword Research
Research long-tail keywords to base your blog’s content around. Use Brian Dean’s methods for finding unique keywords. Check out his Definitive Guide to Keyword Research for some of the best methods to find keywords that you should target when creating content.
Neil Patel outlines 3 steps to dominating Google’s top 10 with long-tail keywords. Use the techniques taught by these two experts to identify the long-tail keywords that you are most likely to get ranked for and create content around them.
#3. Create a Blog Content Plan
Ever since Rand Fishkin of Moz coined the term ‘10X content’, the world of SEO has been buzzing with it. Today, it’s not enough to create “fluffy” content of 500 to 700 words and expect to get ranked for them.
These blog content creation tips will help you create a blog content plan to ensure that your blog post is 10 times better than the best content in its category.
Write long-form content
So, how long should your blog content be? Optimal blog content is now over 2000 to 3000 words long and studies have found that 3,000 to 10,000-word content gets the most shares.
The average web page that ranks on the first page of Google has over 2,000 words of content, according to Quicksprout, so, you should be creating long-form content, meaning 2000+ words of high-quality blog posts.
According to Neil Patel’s content writing advice:
“Word count is only important when coupled with super high quality. You can produce a 10,000-word article, but if the content and quality suck, then the article doesn’t deserve to get ranked.”
The graph above (courtesy of QuickSprout) shows that the average content length for the top ten listings in Google is over 2000 words.
If you want to create viral content, aim to publish posts that are longer than 1,500 words, says Brian Dean.
If a post is greater than 1,500 words, on average it receives 68.1% more tweets and 22.6% more Facebook likes than a post that is under 1,500 words. Read more about the kind of content you should be creating.
Write epic content
If you want to create content that attracts both links and shares, think like a journalist and create content that is well-researched and opinion-forming.
Write more listicles
List posts or ‘listicles’ are a very popular content format. Brian Dean recommends creating expanded list posts (ELPs) that are longer, more thorough and well-researched than the best posts in their category.
The same study by BuzzSumo and Moz also found that list posts and videos achieve much higher shares on average than other content formats.
Write for specific, identifiable niches
This tip comes from David Leonhardt. He recommends that when you write for specific, identifiable niches, you have an audience to promote it to. He also gives an example of what this would entail.
“An example would be when I wrote for a mortgage broker client of mine, I wrote a post on how difficult it is for self employed people to get a mortgage, and some tips to overcome those difficulties. I had a very specific audience in mind – the blogging community. This is an identifiable group that is active on social media. They have nothing to do with mortgages, but this angle has everything to do with them.”
If you don’t have the resources to write such content, you can always outsource your blog content creation services. In this video, Neil Patel breaks down the seven simple steps for writing content that works well in the future Google.
#4. Optimize Your User Experience
On-page SEO factors are some of the most important ranking factors for Google. Learn the craft of writing for the web and improve not just your content, but also the user experience that you provide your visitors with.
When publishing your blog posts, ensure that your fonts are large and easily readable on all devices. Use lots of white space and break up long paragraphs so that they are not more than 2 to 3 lines in length.
Use H1, H2, and H3 header tags with your keywords in your headings and sub-headings. Add bullet points where applicable.
In this infographic on Hubspot, Brian Dean recommends that you invest in your blog’s design. The better your content looks, the better the response you’ll get.
Give your readers a good user experience when reading your blog posts and they’ll appreciate you more for it.
#5. Optimize for Mobile
It’s now essential to have a mobile-friendly version of your blog. Mobile users are 5 times more likely to abandon a site that isn’t optimized for mobile devices.
Thanks to responsive themes and plugins, optimizing your blog so that it is easily accessible on mobile devices is free and easy. Great mobile user experience is a crucial part of preparing your blog for promotion.
Page Speed is now one of Google’s ranking factors, so your WordPress blog needs a fast-loading and light theme to load quickly.
Learn about the best WordPress SEO plugins and WordPress themes for site speed.
#6. Optimize Your Headlines
According to Canopy Media,
“Keyword prominence is defined as the location (or placement) of a particular word in the HTML source code of a web page. The rule is: the higher up a given word is on the web page, the more weight is assigned to it by a search engine when a user is searching for that word.”
What this means is that when writing your headlines and page copy, you need to ensure that your keywords are at the beginning of the headline or page title, so that you get the search ranking benefits of keyword prominence.
“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy.” ~ David Ogilvy
So, if you want search engine users to read your blog posts, when they find them in the search engine results pages, you need to ensure that your headlines are relevant, grab their attention, and make them want to read more.
Watch this video from Neil Patel that lists 10 title tag tweaks that will boost your SEO traffic.
If you want to learn how to write catchy headlines, study the ones written by sites like Buzzfeed. These “clickbait” headlines are proven to work in getting people to click on them.
If you need some help writing better headlines, check out Fresh Title, the world’s most powerful title creator and title analyzing software for content marketers. It will help you instantly create hundreds of highly responsive titles and headlines for any content.
#7. Optimize Your Images
When optimizing your blog images, not only should you make sure that your images are compressed and optimized for mobile display, but they also need to be optimized for Google Image search and social sharing.
To decrease image size, you can use an image optimization tool that will compress your images by almost 50% or more without loss of quality.
To optimize your images for Google Image search, give your images relevant titles and make use of the Alt tag for images when you upload them to your blog.
Your image’s alt text should be used to describe what the image is, not to add a description for Pinterest. Tasty Pins is a Pinterest WordPress plugin that allows you to optimize your blog’s images for Pinterest, SEO, and screen readers.
To optimize your images for social sharing, create your images in Canva, which offers templates with the optimal sizes for Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter, the most important social sharing networks.
Design Wizard is an excellent alternative that gives you a resize feature for free, ideal for social media marketing.
#8. Install Facebook Comments
Facebook comments offer your blog readers the option of sharing their comments and enable your blog post promotion on Facebook every time they post a comment on it. It adds a viral component to your comments that few other commenting services can offer.
#9. Create Multiple Pinterest Pins for Each Post
Pinterest is a huge source of traffic for bloggers and, as of the fourth quarter of 2020, it had 459 million monthly active users worldwide.
If you want to capitalize on the potentially viral traffic that Pinterest can bring you, your blog needs to be optimized for Pinterest shares.
Learn Pinterest best practices and get expert tips on how to promote your content on Pinterest in these Pinterest courses and tutorials.
Blog Marketing & Blog Promotion Tips
Wondering how to promote your WordPress blog and where to promote your blog? The blog marketing and blog promotion tips below include a list of places to promote your blog and ways to promote your blog that increase your blog traffic, shares, and views.
#10. Build an Email Subscriber List
Technically, you don’t even need a blog to build an email subscriber list. All you need is a landing page and subscription form. You can also use lead-capture forms in popups, sidebars, and welcome pages, to collect emails.
The best way to start email marketing for bloggers is to offer an incentive or lead magnet to subscribers (free webinar, content upgrades, free email course), and then send them updates whenever you publish a new post on your bloggers.
One of my favorite blog marketing examples is how Sumitha Bhandarkar used guest blogging to build a list of 1,357 email subscribers even before she launched her blog, so she didn’t have to blog for zero on day one.
You can install the Jetpack plugin and set it up to send out updates to your blog subscribers whenever you post a new update.
If you use professional email marketing services, like GetResponse, Convertkit, SendX, or MailChimp, you can choose to send out automated updates immediately after you post a new blog or send a weekly or monthly newsletter instead.
Having tried a number of email marketing services, I recently decided to use Podia’s free email features to offer my personal branding eBooks as a lead magnet to build a list.
You can start building an email list for free with a free Podia account and sell courses, webinars, and downloads, and build a community in one place.
Learn how to do email marketing and how to promote your blog posts to your email subscribers with these free email list-building courses and tools.
#11. Guest Blogging
Quality link building can result in a steady increase in search engine traffic and brand awareness. Guest blogging is a great way to build quality backlinks to your blog and boost blog traffic.
Ever since Matt Cutts announced that guest blogging on low-quality blogs can get you penalized, bloggers have been scrambling for ways to get the best out of their guest blogging strategy.
The best way to publish a guest blog is to choose authoritative blogs that target your audience’s personas and write your best content for them.
Insert links to your blogs in the body of your guest post and in your author bio also. If you want to learn more about guest blogging, read Brian Dean’s Definitive Guide to Guest Blogging.
Check out these blogger outreach hacks and download a massive list of 1000+ guest post websites that accept guest posts and articles, complete with SEO metrics, emails, or contact form URLs.
Accepting guest posts from others is also a good way to promote your blog because your guest bloggers will promote their posts on your blog to their own networks.
It works even better if you manage to get an influential or well-known blogger to write a guest post for you because they’ll promote your blog to their massive network.
#12. Influencer Outreach
Few people or businesses can pay influencers to promote their blogs. But getting even one influencer to share your article can have a multiplier effect.
Before you ask them to promote your content, you start building relationships with influencers by linking to them in your post and sending them a heads-up on Twitter or email.
Use influencer marketing platforms like Intellifluence or Ninja Outreach to reach out to influencers even before you post your blog.
Send them your article before you publish it, and ask them for feedback. Incorporate their suggestions and send them a link to the published post. Influencers are more likely to promote it if they feel they’ve contributed to it.
Another influencer marketing tip from Acuity Training is to help them out with a problem on their site, for example by running a broken link check before sending an outreach email.
If you do find a broken link and tell the influencer, they’ll be much more likely to respond to your email.
A must-read post is Brian Dean’s Skyscraper Technique, which shows you how to reach out to influencers to get them to promote your content.
Here are some more influencer marketing tips:
- Free Influencer Marketing Courses, Ideas & Tips
- 4 Essential Influencer Marketing Tips To Boost Your Social Reach
- Influencer Marketing Best Practices To Build Solid Relationships
- How to Get Influencers to Promote Your Content for Free
- 6 Clever Ways to Get Influencers to Link to You
#13. Interview Influencers
Another way to promote your blog is to interview influencers, who will then send out the interview to their own networks. You can do a video, audio, or text interview.
The idea is that you’re promoting the influential blogger on your own blog, which gives them an incentive to link to you and share the interview with their networks.
Alternatively, you can learn how to use Instagram to promote your blog by using Instagram growth hacking to become a top influencer in your niche.
You can promote your blogs on Instagram by creating content tailored for Instagram and promote reels on Instagram showcasing your blog content in video format.
#14. Collaborate With Other Bloggers
MyBlogU is a community of bloggers that collaborate to brainstorm ideas for content and create unique crowdsourced content, which they then promote to their own networks.
If you want to get cited by other bloggers, and maybe get a link back to your own blog, join MyBlogU and respond to offers to be interviewed.
Another way to collaborate is to join several Facebook Groups for bloggers specifically for collaboration and building community.
#15. Boost Your Social Media Shares
Social media networks are the best free blog promotion sites. But if you want to learn how to promote a blog on social media, you must make it easy for your visitors to share your blog content.
Some bloggers make it too hard to share content on their blogs. Your readers should not have to search all over the page for your social sharing buttons. They should be in their sight all the time.
Use social sharing plugins
Social sharing buttons are the best blog marketing tools because they’re the easiest ones to implement. You can easily incorporate social media sharing buttons on your blog using some WordPress plugins.
My favorite social sharing plugin is AddToAny. It’s free and creates an elegant floating share bar that follows your readers as they scroll down. It also provides a cumulative total of the Facebook and Pinterest shares to your blog post, creating social proof of your shares that encourages other readers to share your post too.
You can also use a WordPress plugin like Blog2Social to help you customize, schedule, and publish blog posts automatically and individually to all your social networks.
It allows you to customize your posts and comments for every network to add #hashtags, tags, keywords, or handles, where applicable.
Optimize your posts for each channel
Optimize your content length and formatting to get maximum engagement on each channel.
Researchers, Chenhao Tan et al, found that, if you want to get retweeted more, write tweets that include more information clearly, use language that aligns with previous messages and with the community at which it is aimed, and mimic news headlines.
Requesting followers to retweet also helps. Hubspot found that tweets including either “Please ReTweet” or “Please RT” are more likely to get retweeted than tweets without those phrases.
Post multiple times
Share and reshare your blog posts on your own social media channels multiple times. Chris Well recommends that you post to social media multiple times – with different headlines or captions.
To keep from repeating the same caption over and over, create multiple captions for your content. Each version can ask a different question, highlight a different angle on your blog post, or include different “power” words. (CoSchedule has a list of power words here.)
Links to evergreen content can be re-scheduled over and over for as long as the content is still valid. If you want to re-promote evergreen content on an endless cycle, SocialOomph allows you to create queues that rotate links to evergreen content.
It also allows you to plug in multiple captions for each link, and will randomly choose a different caption each time the item comes back to the top of the queue.
Post at optimal times
If you want to learn how to increase blog views and get maximum exposure for your blog posts on social media, you have to know when to share your posts.
Of course, it depends on where your audience is. If you want a local audience to see your posts, you need to share them at the times when they’re most active on social media.
If your audience is global, you should share it multiple times so social media users in different time zones can see it. It’s best if you test at different times to see what works best for your own audience.
Use content gating
Content gating is a great way to encourage your readers to share your content. It involves requiring them to tweet, share, or +1 your blog post to read it completely.
Doyan Wilfred notes that if you want people to share, you should give them a reason to do so. She recommends using a WordPress plugin like OnePress Social Locker to boost your Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ shares.
Use a drip-marketing campaign
Missinglettr is a drip-marketing tool that analyzes your blog post, looking for quotes, content and imagery it thinks will work well on your social platforms. It even knows how to find hashtags that will help your content really stand out.
Now, whenever I publish a blog post, I get sent an email (within minutes of me hitting ‘publish’) inviting me to review a full 12-month social marketing campaign for the blog post I just published.
All I need to do is review their suggestions (making edits if I need to) and that’s it. My blog post is then marketed across my social channels for the next year – driving traffic back to my site.
Track everything
Track all your clicks and conversions on social media and other channels by using a click-tracking tool like Voluum’s cloud-based ad-tracking software that helps you optimize all your campaigns by finding the most profitable combinations of traffic, ads, landing pages, and offers.
Voluum collects detailed data about your visitors and conversions and integrates with multiple ad platforms to connect all the elements of your campaigns together.
#16. Social Bookmarking Sites
Social bookmarking sites are also free blog promotion websites that are different from social networks. They involve submitting your post to sites like subreddits, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, and other bookmarking sites.
Many of these sites are built around a community and you have to be an active member of the community if you want your posts to get some traction, or you can work as a group with other bloggers so that all of you have better access to more social platforms, as David Leonhardt advises.
#17. Submit to Blog Directories
Submitting your blog and RSS feed to blog directories is a good way to get quality links back to your blog. You can hire a virtual assistant to submit your blog to this massive list of directories.
#18. Join a Blog Community
Joining a blog community is a good start to your blogger outreach program. You’ll find that users just like you have created communities for people with common interests.
Some of these communities offer sharing threads that help you boost traffic and shares to your blog. Each of these communities has its own rules, so remember to read and play by their rules on how to promote blog posts.
Here’s a blog promotion sites list:
- Blog Engage
- Blokube
- BizSugar (Business related articles)
- Inbound.org(Inbound marketing)
- Klinkk
- Manage WP (WordPress community)
- Indiblogger
- Kingged.com (This is a very engaged community!)*
- DoSplash.com*
*Suggested by David Leonhardt.
#19. How to Promote Your Blog on Facebook
Today, Facebook Page reach is extremely low as Facebook has become a Pay to Play network. But if you’re serious about learning social media marketing for bloggers, Facebook is an important part of your blog marketing plan.
Besides promoting your blog posts on your Facebook page, you should start a Facebook Group for your blog readers. Facebook Groups actually give you better reach on Facebook.
To boost your blog growth use a Facebook Group:
- Require followers to subscribe to your blog or download your free lead magnet to join the group.
- Pin your latest post to the top of the Facebook group.
- Posts ending with a question get 162% more interactions than the average post.
If you’ve joined several Facebook groups that cater to your target audience, you can share your blog post with them, in a staggered and non-spammy way.
Don’t overdo this sort of sharing as Facebook will suspend your sharing privileges and put you in Facebook jail. Think of it as one more way to get your content in front of your target audience on Facebook and use it sparingly.
#20. Implement Facebook Authorship
The BuzzSumo and Moz study also found that people tend to share content that looks trustworthy. They recommend having a byline at the beginning of every post, and a bio at the end to make your content look trustworthy.
On Facebook, you can include your byline in posts by implementing the Facebook authorship feature on your blog.
This will display your author byline, link it to your Facebook profile, and help you grow your audience by helping people follow you on Facebook. It’s a small action that can help create trust in your blog readers.
#21. How To Promote Your Blog On Twitter
Twitter is still a good network to promote your blog content, whether you have a B2B or B2C business. Learning how to use Twitter to promote your blog is important for building relationships with influential bloggers and journalists.
If you want to learn how to promote your blog on Twitter, you need to spend some time and effort building a targeted and engaged following on this social network.
Start by retweeting the content of influencers so they notice you, and then go on to build relationships with them by engaging with them and their content on Twitter.
David Leonhardt recommends pinning a post to the top of your profiles, on both Twitter and Google Plus. This can either be a post of your most recent blog post, or a post inviting people to join you elsewhere to build up your following.
For example, if you want to use Twitter to grow your following on Pinterest, you can pin a Join-me-on-Pinterest tweet to the top of your Twitter profile.
Christopher Benitez recommends creating multiple Twitter accounts to amplify reach. Aside from your business Twitter handle, create multiple Twitter accounts using different emails.
Build a following on those Twitter accounts by sharing relevant high-quality posts related to your niche, retweeting other users, and interacting with them.
Once you have built a substantial following, you can promote your blog posts there. This way, you create more opportunities for your post to be seen by other Twitter users.
To make managing and sharing posts on your multiple Twitter accounts much easier, he suggests you use Buffer to manage all your accounts there.
When sharing posts, use Buffer’s Power Scheduler feature so you can automatically queue the tweets at different times within the week. Of course, you would probably need a virtual assistant to build and manage so many Twitter accounts.
If you can overlook the fact that this is a slightly black-hat technique, you will benefit from the amplification you get from this method.
#22. Promote Your Blog on Pinterest
Pinterest is one of the best places to promote your blog online, so bloggers need to learn how to increase Pinterest traffic and how to use Pinterest to promote blog content.
Pinterest users are super-engaged folk and love repining and sharing great visuals. If you post any type of visual content on your blog or create specially designed images and infographics, you should use Pinterest to promote your blog.
Use the Tasty Pins plugin to optimize your blog’s images for Pinterest, SEO, and screen readers, and ensure that your images can be pinned on Pinterest by adding a Pin It button or an on-hover Pin It button in your blog posts.
Grow your followers on Pinterest by repinning other users’ Pins and sharing your own blog posts to the site. Learn how to promote your blog on Pinterest with Tailwind, Pinterest’s approved scheduler which also gives you access to Tailwind Tribes, a feature that can really take your content viral.
Create Pinterest boards to categorize your Pins and allow other users to add pins to your boards. Invite followers on your other social networks to follow you on Pinterest.
If you want to learn how to use Pinterest to promote your blog, these Pinterest courses and tutorials will help you learn all about Pinterest’s best practices and content promotion tools.
#23. Post Repurposed Content on LinkedIn
You can post repurposed content from your blog on LinkedIn. Republishing your blog content to LinkedIn allows you to reach out to a whole new audience that might otherwise never read your content.
You can learn how to promote an article on LinkedIn so that your blog post gets featured on LinkedIn Pulse and your content gets the kind of visibility that you could never get on your own blog.
You can also build a significant following on LinkedIn, independent of your blog subscribers. These followers will be notified every time you publish a post on LinkedIn.
If you’re worried about duplicate content, know that this is not an issue, because Google will rank your blog URL as the canonical link and ignore the new link (See this video from Matt Cutts for more clarification).
#24. Participate in LinkedIn Groups
Participating as a valued member of LinkedIn groups means that you might be able to share your blog content with those groups, as long as it is relevant and useful to their members.
You can join up to 50 groups on LinkedIn, so make sure you join relevant groups that you know you will participate in and contribute to.
Are you hesitant to share your blog posts in LinkedIn Groups for fear of coming across as spammy? According to Socially Stephanie, that’s not as much of a problem as you fear. She says:
“Don’t worry about posting too much at the same time to different groups. You want your content to get seen, and groups are the perfect way to do that. As long as you are providing valuable content and a 2 to 3 sentence summary and conversation starter, you’ll be good to go.”
Laura Sheptoski recommends keeping track of how active a group is before posting.
“If a group is more active and sees multiple new discussions started each day, you may want to start your own discussion once a week. If another group is less noisy and only sees a few new discussions each week, you may want to start your own discussion every two or three weeks instead.”
Sharing on LinkedIn groups is especially useful if you have a B2B business and want to prove your credibility and expertise to other businesses.
#25. Participate in Forums
Forums or message boards are still an excellent way to network, build relationships and share your content where it is relevant.
Just make sure you don’t spam the forums with your content and that you participate as an active member before sharing any content from your blog posts.
The best way to share your blog posts on a forum is in response to a question that a user has asked and that is partly or wholly answered in your blog post. In that way, forums are also an excellent source of ideas for new blog posts.
#26. Automated Content Curation
A bunch of automated content curation and aggregation sites have sprouted up in the last few years. Sites like Rebel Mouse, Flipboard, Paper.li, and Scoop It, allow you to create your own web page of curated content.
They are a quick and easy way of aggregating content from various sources, including your blog, and publishing it to your Twitter feed. For a list of content curation sites that you can use, go here.
Personally, I don’t put much stock in content curation, because I believe that if a tactic is too easy, it will quickly get overused and lose its value. But it might help increase the visibility of your blog on social media.
27. Content Licensing & Syndication
Content syndication to sites like Business2Community is another way to boost the reach of your content beyond your blog’s readership.
By syndicating my content on sites like Business2Community, I was able to get published on Yahoo Small Business (Now Verizon) and reach a much wider network of readers. If you repurpose your blog content on WordPress.com, you can get a lot of traffic from WordPress app users.
Want to know how to use Medium to promote your blog? You can repurpose your content on Medium, ThriveGlobal, and other blog networks to build quality links back to your blog.
#28. Comment on Other Blogs
Commenting on blogs is still a good way of getting referral traffic. Choose blogs that write to an audience similar to your own and post insightful and useful comments if you want to get noticed.
Join Facebook groups that have blog comment threads so you can get blog comments on your own blog in exchange for commenting on other people’s blogs.
#29. Answer Queries on Quora
Just like forums, Q&A sites like Quora are a great place to promote your blog content and also get ideas for new blog posts.
Do some research on Quora, see what sort of questions your target audience is asking, and write a blog post that answers those questions.
Then post your answer to that question, with a relevant excerpt and link to your blog post. If your answer is really useful and gets upvoted, you could get a lot of referral traffic from Quora.
#30. Create a Mobile App
Creating a mobile app for your blog and getting your readers to download it is a great way to get repeat traffic from mobile devices. Every time your blog is updated, your app users will get a notification so they can read your posts within the app itself.
An app also gives your mobile users a better user experience than a responsive website because it is optimized for the mobile environment.
If you have a WordPress blog, you can use AppPresser, the best way to create iOS and Android mobile apps that integrate with WordPress.
AppPresser is a no-code app builder that specializes in WordPress integration and requires no mobile app development skills.
#31. Email Signature
A much-underestimated method of promoting your blog is in your email signature. You can either post a link to your blog in your automatic Gmail signature or use a service that will pull your latest post from your RSS feed and display it in your email signature.
Now, every time you send an email, you’re promoting your blog too.
#32. Promote Offline
Do you give speeches or conduct workshops at local networking events?
Offer a lead magnet using Podia’s free email marketing tools, and make it easy to promote your lead magnet by buying a short and easy-to-remember domain.
Then include a link to your blog and your lead-generation offer in your presentation slides and business cards and ask participants to visit your blog and subscribe to get your lead magnet.
Alternatively, you can get a free mTap digital business card, which can also be your business card, social media reference landing page, identification tag, sign-up form, or file-sharing tool.
#33. Attend and Host Events
This tip comes from Rand Fishkin at Moz. He notes,
“The people you meet and connect with in real-world settings are far more likely to naturally lead to discussions about your blog and ways you can help each other. This yields guest posts, links, tweets, shares, blogroll inclusion and general business development like nothing else.”
Every time you attend an event, it’s an occasion to promote your blog and your business. You can put links to your blog or lead magnet on your business cards and give them out at workshops or conferences you organize or attend.
You can also start a Meetup group around the topic of your blog. For instance, if your blog is based on small businesses, you can start a Meetup group for Small Businesses in your city or town and get a chance to establish relationships with potential readers.
But the most important part of the event is the Follow-Up email in Meetup where you can re-introduce yourself and what you do, send out a link to a page where you can offer a lead magnet, and get them to subscribe to your blog.
#34. Check Your Google Analytics
This is another tip from Rand Fishkin. He recommends gleaning insights from your Google Analytics (or Google Search Console) to see which posts are getting more traffic and where your traffic comes from so you know what works and what doesn’t for your readers.
You can also keep track of which blog communities and syndication sites are sending you the most referral traffic, so you know whether to continue promoting your posts there.
#35. Start a Tweetchat
Want to interact with your blog readers and understand them better? Start a Tweetchat on a topic related to your blog.
Create a unique hashtag for your chat. For instance, if I had to start a Tweetchat, I would probably use the hashtag #blogbrandz to promote branding around my business and blog.
A Twitter chat, where you can ask questions and get answers immediately, is a great opportunity to listen to your community, says this post on Social Media Examiner on hosting and running a Tweetchat.
#36. Use Snip.ly
Want to piggyback your blog on a great piece of content from someone else? Use Snip.ly. This service allows you to attach a Call-To-Action to every link you share on social media.
#37. Repurpose Your Content
A great way to promote your blog to different audiences who prefer different ways of consuming content is to repurpose your blog posts from text into audio, PPT, video, and infographics.
This gives you more avenues to promote your blog as each of these content formats can be promoted on sites like SlideShare, YouTube, Visual.ly, and various podcast sites. It also attracts a different kind of reader, one who might prefer video over text, for instance.
You can see how I repurposed my blog post, Why Do I Need A Blog? I Have Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn in the video here, allowing me to post it on YouTube as well.
#38. Revive Old Posts
Have you ever asked yourself how you can get more visits for old, evergreen content posted on your blog?
I use a plugin called Revive Old Post to share old posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin, get more hits for them, and keep them alive.
As you can see in the image above, this plugin does help me get traffic from social networks.
#39. Send Your Post To Journalists
If you want to get quoted in the press and let journalists know that you’re an authoritative source of information on a specific topic, cultivate relationships with them and send them a link to your blog posts every time you publish.
You can also, join HARO (Help A Reporter Out) – a resource that connects journalists seeking expertise to include in their content with sources who have that expertise – and offer quotes on topics that you’re an expert in.
You could even get an offer to syndicate your blog posts to their website or be asked to write a column for their publication. Twitter is a great place to build relationships with journalists so make sure you have a significant presence there.
#40. Pay for Promotion
If you’re willing to pay to promote your posts, you can learn how to advertise your blog using options like Outbrain, Facebook Promoted Posts, and Google Adwords.
You could also consider purchasing text link ads on high-traffic blogs or paying a blog marketing company, like the ones below.
FAT JOE’s link-building and media placements service is designed to get you mentioned by highly trusted media sites.
You can also pay for blog promotion services that will help you promote your blog content on social media.
#41. Use Your Video Feed
If you publish a vlog or video blog, you can create YouTube cards and Call-To-Action Overlays to get your viewers to visit your blog and subscribe to your mailing list.
When your viewers click on the More Info link in your video, it will open out into the YouTube cards as shown below.
You could offer an exclusive, unlisted video free to your subscribers, as bait to subscribe since they already love your videos and would probably love to see more of you.
Also, include the URL to your blog in the Description of every one of your YouTube videos so you can get more referral traffic.
#42. Create a Slideshare Presentation
“SlideShare is really the YouTube for PowerPoint presentations, allowing you to embed and share presentations anywhere on the web,” says Gregory Ciotti.
SlideShare can send a good deal of referral traffic to your blog if you learn to use it well. Ciotti recommends it to people who aren’t comfortable with video because it “offers a far simpler way to create new forms of content on a small budget and with minimal time.”
SlideShare also has a high authority presence in Google search results, so creating presentations that rank for keywords can be much easier than ranking a post on your blog.
To get more referral traffic from SlideShare, you can do the following:
- Include a link to your blog at the beginning of your SlideShare presentation
- Include a link to your blog in your SlideShare presentation description.
- Optimize your SlideShare presentation using relevant long-tail keywords.
To learn how to market your blog using SlideShare for blog traffic, read Pat Flynn’s blog post below.
#43. Join a Social Sharing Tribe
This tip for marketing your blog is from David Leonhardt. He recommends joining a social sharing tribe on Facebook or Skype that will share your content with their own networks. Some tribes can get over 50 tweets to your post.
The idea is that you all pool your followers, and everybody shares one post from each participant to their followers any day you choose to participate.
There are blogger-sharing threads for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, as well as some specific ones for commenting. All you have to do is look for them on these sites and participate in them.
#44. Use Hashtags
For most social networks, except Facebook, hashtags boost the discoverability of your content. That is, they make it easier for people to find your content. But as Kevan Lee writes on Buffer, there’s a science to using hashtags.
- Tweets with one or more hashtags are 55% more likely to be retweeted. Tweets with hashtags get twice the engagement of tweets without. When you use more than two hashtags on Twitter, engagement drops.
- Interactions are highest on Instagram posts with 11+ hashtags.
- On Facebook, posts without a hashtag fare better than those with a hashtag.
Brent Csutoras reports, in this post on the Search Engine Journal, that hashtags on Twitter resulted in under a 2% increase in Retweets and Favorites.
#45. Use Click To Tweet Plugins
Minuca Elena recommends including click-to-tweet quotes, as she does in her expert roundups.
“Some readers may not want to share your post but if they see an interesting quote that makes them feel inspired, and they can easily tweet it, chances are they will. It will include your Twitter handle and the link to your post, so it’s a great way to get your readers to share your content.”
You can use the Better Click To Tweet plugin from Ben Meredith for this purpose.
#46. Build A Personal Brand
Today, personal branding is more important than ever before! Your personal brand and positioning help your employers or clients understand what you do better and create trust and credibility, which will give you an edge over your competitors.
Branded searches also provide a strong signal to Google’s search algorithm. The more traffic a website gets from branded searches, the more it will be recognized by the algorithm.
“With a brand name that is unique, memorable, and keyword-focused, you might just rank among the giants of SEO with far less work,” says Neil Patel, who also recommends that, “If you want to succeed on Google in the long run, you have to build a brand. As your brand grows, your search traffic will as well.”
Download my free personal branding eBooks and learn a 21-step road map to build a powerful personal brand.
You’ll also get a personal branding worksheet to help you write a personal brand statement and create a brand identity that reflects your authentic brand values.
This list will be constantly updated with new blog marketing tips, so if you have any unique blog promotion tips on how to boost blog traffic, post them in the comments below.
Blog writing tips & tools
- Blog promotion checklist (Downloadable PDF)
- How to outsource SEO services to an SEO specialist
- How to learn blogging guide and blogging tutorial
- How to increase website traffic without creating new content
- How to generate backlinks in SEO link-building campaigns
- Website content writers, learn these 7 tips for writing for the web
- 7 tips for overcoming and dealing with writer’s block
- Get 10 tips to find the best blog topics & 50 blog writing topics
- How to outsource SEO-optimized content & blog writing services
© 2015 – 2024, Priya Florence Shah. All rights reserved.
Priya Florence Shah is a bestselling author and an award-winning blogger. Check out her book on emotional self-care for women. Priya writes short stories and poetry and chills with her two-legged and four-legged kids in her spare time.
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Thanks a ton for the mention. 🙂
You’re welcome. Mahesh. Your post was very useful.
Very very thanks for sharing this great post……this is very important for me…….
Glad you found it useful, Amul.
Hi Priya and David,
What an awesome post you have given us to read. You covered all the bases. Not only for seasoned bloggers but for all bloggers.
I tried to get my download but it took me to a site called Blog Brandz and I couldn’t find the download. Please send it to me via email.
I have bookmarked this post as it is full of massive value.
Thank you for sharing, Priya and David,
You both have a wonderful night and weekend ahead!
Linda
So glad you found it useful, Linda. Unfortunately the download is no longer available.
Hey Priya,
thanks for mention Blog2Social in your article. We are very glad to hear, that you are satisfied with our plugin 🙂
Have a great weekend and thank you very much.
Dennis
You’re very welcome, Dennis.
Hi Priya,
This is not just a list but a guide. It is rich and practical! The details are clear and could readily spur one to take action!
Yes, most people want more share, traffic and readers but are not doing what it takes to achieve these. With the right content creation and promotion strategies, all would be smiles!
Although I have been applying a lot of the strategies listed here, some of them are pretty new to me!
I have bookmarked for future reference and would be waiting for update!
I left the above comment in kingged.com where this list was share on kingged.com as well.
Thanks so much for your comment and for sharing the post, Sunday. I really appreciate it. I will keep adding to it and let my subscribers know.
There are multiple tips about blog promotions. All are effective, smart, there are not so easy and easy, but all are worth the try IF it is used in the right strategy, right people and right purpose.
Of course preparation for your blog is important. All ought to be well prepared. While in my point of view, one of the ideas I have in blog promoting is building your subscribers list or mailing list. The power is in the list, and that is what most successful web marketers and business owners will tell you. Rich Brooks, a blogger once tell that you need to time your email delivery. Doing so is smart and effective. Just like publishing your blog and sharing posts on multiple social media accounts, timing is EVERYTHING.
If the timing is right, you can magnetize the right people at the right time. Logically, if the posts are high quality, you’ll be successful in your blog promotion.
These are good points, Metz. Timing – when you publish your post, share it on social media – is important for maximizing traffic and engagement.
Hii Priya!
Wow! … what an EPIC Blog Post on Promotion!
You really did an amazing job here!
There is no way someone new to blogging, cannot get free traffic after reading this. You really covered a lot of powerful promotion methods here. So many – it’s a bit hard to pick a favorite one! haha
But, one of my personal favorite promotion strategies is one that you did not mention here – and that is Forum Marketing 🙂
It is almost like the Quora Strategy. But Forums are a great way to get free traffic to your blog, especially in the Home Based Business/Internet Marketing Niche.
That would me my contribution to this awesome list for blog promotion methods – Forum Marketing works!! 😉
Thank you for putting this together!
Keep up the great work!
Have a great week!
Thanks, Freddy. Glad you found it useful. Just FYI, I do mention Forum Marketing – in tip #25. 🙂
Check it out here. http://www.blogbrandz.com/tips/blog-promotion-tips/#25_Participate_in_Forums
Superb list Priya!
You pretty much covered everything there. I love it!
Definitely worth a share. Sharing it out now!
Thank you, Dennis. I appreciate the share 🙂
Indeed a great post about blog promotion.
To run a blog properly, We should must have some regular readers and to get regular readers, We must have to promote our blogs regularly.
Blog promotion is very much important nowadays. We should have the ability to attract readers eyes.
I really like the way of blog pormotion you explained here and I am completely agree with you. By following these techniques, We can drive regular readers on our blog.
As I think, to get regular loyal readers, We must have to write high quality and engaging content because content is the only thing which can attract readers from different different sources whether It is a social media or email outreach. Content should have the power to attract readers.
Along with these places, Facebook groups has also a great potential. We can drive huge traffic and readers from these groups If we have written the awesome content.
I am glad that you have covered such a nice article. Thanks for sharing is with us. 😀
Thank you for your feedback, Brenda. Yes, Facebook groups is a good place to promote one’s blog.
Great List. Thanks Priya for sharing the extended list with us. Really It’s a helpful post. I am going to implement it for my blog. I am going to start with the slideshare.
I have a question. At number 15, you discussed about Social Bookmarking. I heard that social bookmarking is not useful now a days. What’s your opinion about this?
Thanks again for the Nice post.
It depends on which sites you bookmark your blog post to. Sites like Reddit, Inbound, Growth Hackers etc. are still very relevant and can bring a lot of traffic. Choose your bookmarking sites carefully and stick to high-value sites.
This is absolutely epic @Priya Florence Shah –
This is totally the Blog 101 Course everybody on the internet should be taking – seriously.
I just started doing the wordpress/blog/social-forum/etc. and it is a bit overwhelming. This knocks the blogging part down to sizeable chunks 🙂 thank you
Thank you for that feedback, Greg. Am glad you found it useful 🙂
Hi Priya,
This is not just a list but a guide. It is rich and practical! The details are clear and could readily spur one to take action!
Yes, most people want more share, traffic and readers but are not doing what it takes to achieve these. With the right content creation and promotion strategies, all would be smiles!
Although I have been applying a lot of the strategies listed here, some of them are pretty new to me!
I have bookmarked for future reference and would be waiting for update!
I left the above comment in kingged.com where this list was share on kingged.com as well.
Thank you, Tony. Much appreciated.
Thanks Priya. This is a great sharing. It was very helpful for me.
Excellent job priya. This article very helpful for me and everyone very very good job.
Very very thanks for sharing this great post……this is very important for me…
thanks for sharing …
Hi Priya, That is an amazingly informative article.
I’m bookmarking your site.
Thank You
Chris
Thank you, Chris 🙂
That’s a great post We are linking to this great article on our site.
Very comprehensive and descriptive post. Thanks for composing the article so niely
Hello Priya,
Fantastic and in depth post. Blog promotion is a tricky jo and needs patience and proper strategies. Diversify your blog traffic sources can definitely help you to get more visitors. SEO plays an important role to rank your site well in search engine and bring targeted traffic. Thanks for sharing this helpful post.
Regards,
Vishwajeet Kumar
Thanks, Vishwajeet. Glad you found it useful.