Experts say that you have to spend 40% of your time writing content, and then spend the rest of your time marketing that content. This makes sense. But how exactly do you promote your blog?
The 7 simple ways to promote your blog are:
- Email Marketing
- Forums
- Guest Posting
- Social Media
- Paid Ads
- In-App or Browser Notifications
- Search Engine Optimization
Let us discuss them one by one. By the end of this tutorial, you have to make a choice about which methods fit your marketing strategy and skills to promote your blog.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a direct method to promote a blog post. The thing is, you need to have an email list before this can work.
In email marketing, you ask people to subscribe to your blog. To subscribe, they need to provide you with an email address. This email goes to a list in your autoresponder, like MailChimp.
Here is how it goes:
- You first need to prepare a lead magnet like a free eBook
- You sign up for an auto-responder account like MailChimp
- You set-up an auto-response from MailChimp, which includes the lead magnet
- You integrate MailChimp with you blog
Once the set-up is complete, any person who subscribes to your blog will receive your eBook. Then, you can program your autoresponder to send any new blog post to this list.
This promotional method requires that you have an offer that people cannot refuse. Make sure your lead magnet is important enough to encourage a site visitor to subscribe.
Forums
A website forum is a place where a person asks a question and the community answers. Here, you take the role of a coach or a mentor. In website forums like Reddit and Quora, you look for questions that you can answer.
Here is how it works:
- You choose a forum site
- You create a profile, and that profile must have your credentials
- You look for questions related to your niche
- You provide answers to these questions
You can leave links to your answers, but you need to approach this with caution. Many forums sites do not like marketers, especially those that only use the forum to get traffic.
Your answers must be helpful, and you must establish yourself as a credible person. Once you have built your authority, people will start looking at your profile and click on your website URL. While you can use links in anchor texts in your answers, you have to use this sparingly.
Guest Posting
Guest posting is a process where you write an article and then you submit it to another blog. Better yet, you submit it to an authority website that is related to your niche.
In a guest post, you are taking advantage of the audience of the authority site. In your article, you have to sprinkle some links that go back to your website. If people read your article, chances are they will click on this link and then read your blog post.
Here are some tips for guest posting:
- Choose only websites related to your niche
- Make sure that the links in your articles are do-follow
- Look for websites that have high authority
- Guest post in many sites
Guest posting is the white hat SEO equivalent of private blog networks. With guest posting, you can choose the quality of the website that backlinks to you. As such, you are in control of the kind of people who read your article.
Social Media
Perhaps one of the best tools to promote your blog out there, this is often the most ignored. Social media is free, and all you have to do is to post your blogs regularly on your social media channels.
Here are some tips on how to use this:
- Choose at least three social media channels
- Automate your posting
- Engage with your audience
- Always share your new content
- Re-share your old content
To automate your posts, you can use apps like HootSuite—you can integrate them with your blog CMS like WordPress. Every time you update your blog or post a new one, the apps are going to post your article on your social media channel. You no longer have to post them one by one.
Paid Ads
Paid advertising is one of the most effective ways to promote your blog. This, however, is costly. What you want to do here is to be smart about your money.
You can use Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media channels to promote your blog post. In Google, each impression and click is paid. The problem with this model is that once this impression is made or once a click is made, that money is gone—you basically paid people to read your blog.
What I suggest is that you create social media pages for your blog. What you need to advertise for is to get followers and likes. If people like your page, they will receive notification each time you post a new blog. This way, you do not have to pay for ads again and again once you have amassed a following.
In-App or Browser Notifications
You can download plug-ins or apps on your blog that asks site visitors if they want to be notified if you post anything new. This kind of notification is not obtrusive. The person who subscribes to the notification does not have to provide you with his email address.
An example of this is One Signal Push. This is a plug-in for WordPress. After installing this, your site visitors will see a small notification box. This is going to ask them if they want to get notified of new blog posts.
If they subscribe, a notice will pop up on their desktop or their mobile device every time you launch a new blog. You can modify the content of how the notification is presented, and this can help you promote your blog to people who have already been there.
Search Engine Optimization
The most effective of all promotion methods is search engine optimization. You need to convince search engines that your blog is an authority site in your chosen niche.
If you do your SEO correctly, it is the search engines that will promote your site, not you. All you need to do is to keep producing blog posts that search engines love, and you will find yourself ranking at the top of search engine result pages—if this happens more, then you are more likely to get new readers and better traffic.
Summary
So, what do you think is the best way to promote your blog?
Blog promotion is critical to your success. Writing a blog post without any conscious effort to make it known is not going to work. There are at least 2 million blog posts published every day, and you need to be on top of your game to compete against these other posts.
Choose one or two methods out of the seven. You can even choose more once you have automated some of the promotion methods. Make sure also that you measure your promotion method, and then see how it works. Scale-up if the method works, and tweak the process if the promotion does not bring traffic to your site.
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