I’m sure you already know that without promoting your blog, you’ll feel as if you are stranded on a dessert island with no one to be found.
You may have written an article about a breakthrough vaccine that can heal disease, or revealed a product that will help electrify the economy, but it doesn’t really matter if no one knows your information exists.
After writing an article you’re only half way through your sprint… you must inform people about the remarkable information you’ve spent countless hours writing by promoting your blog for all to be found.
So, how is this done? How do you promote your blog to drive loads of traffic to your website where a person can be Wowed by the extensive information that you so diligently put together?
Below are 10 dynamic and trustworthy ways to make an impact on your blog’s traffic.
Table of Contents
10 Time-Tested Methods to Promote Your Blog for Increased Traffic
1. Share On The Social Media Networks
The chances are pretty good that you’re already doing this, but I thought I’d mention it anyway. Be sure to cover the Big 4, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn.
NOTE: Be sure to choose an image for your blog article that is of proper size to display in the column of Facebook and Pinterest at its maximum size.
I made this mistake a while back by having images too small for my articles.
Having photos included with your article attracts attention and increases click-through rates.
Popular Social Bookmarking Sites
There are many other social media and social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit and FlipBoard, just to name a few… these sites will also help spread the word about your blog post far and wide, giving you multiple streams of traffic.
These social bookmarking sites will allow the user to post their favorite posts along with images and videos. Users can then take these ‘Bookmarks‘ and add them to their collection or share them with their friends.
Many of these sites will use a voting system that will allow the user to upvote their favorite articles, which pull push the post to the top for additional exposure.
2. Comment on Other Blogs that Are Within Your Niche
Creating social participation through commenting on other blogs is two-fold. Commenting on others people’s blogs will help you gain exposure for your site, plus it’ll create a backlink strategy for SEO.
Building links through blog participation works well to achieve rankings in Yahoo, Bing and other search engines, but it’s not as effective for Google. This is due to most blog platforms having the default, ‘nofollow‘ attribute attached to the links in blog comments.
Visiting other blogs and spreading the love will also help put you in the spotlight of other well-known writers within your niche. Be sure to leave quality comments and contribute to on-going discussions.
3. Guest Posting With-In Your Niche
Guest posting is one of the most overlooked methods for creating traffic back to your site. For those not familiar… guest posting is where you write content for another blogger and in return you’ll gain exposure from the Author Bio area.
You’ve worked hard to create a great article for the guest readers on another person’s site, so the owner of the website should help promote you, plain and simple.
You should have the opportunity to write a byline with information about yourself that will be at the end of your written article. This byline should consist of 1 or 2 sentences explaining who you are and what you do, which should also include up to 2 links.
Having these links will improve your search engine optimization, to increase your site’s authority and page rank.
4. Republish Your Posts on Other Platforms
Republishing your content on other platforms like LinkedIn and Medium is a great way to reach a wider audience and increase your traffic back to your blog.
This is a well known method used by many influencer bloggers to increase their traffic back to their site. After all, if readers on those platforms enjoy your article, they’re likely to visit your site in search of more genius content.
A good practice is to publish your blog content first, then wait a few days before publishing on the platforms. This way, the search engines will realize that your content was first created on your site.
5. Repurposing Your Blog Posts
While you can’t simply copy and paste your blog posts on every single platform on the Internet, you can use the original content as your guide to repurpose your old content.
Repurposing is transforming your content into another format such as an infographic, a SlideShare presentation, or a video.
Example: Once you’ve written and edited your blog post, you can turn your article into a video.
Your blog post will serve as a script to guide your video.
You can:
- Publish spin-offs of your original content
- Repurpose Blogs Into Guest Posts
- Create a Video & Post to YouTube
- Create Infographics (visual representation of your blog post)
- Create SlideShare presentations
- Use your content as a Facebook post
- Add posts to email newsletters or an email series
- Create a Free course or Lead magnet
Ana Hoffman from Traffic Generation Cafe repurposes many of her blog posts into SlideShare presentations.
She reports that she has received 200,000+ views from 9 of her presentations, over a 30 day period. This gained her, somewhere in the ballpark of 1400 visits to her site, plus several first-page rankings on Google.
6. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is the building of relationships with popular bloggers, podcasters, social media experts along with entrepreneurial gurus, within your own niche.
These influencers can assist you in helping your blog become popular. If you get in their good graces, they will help you get traffic to your blog.
Here are a couple of ways you can use influencers to promote your content:
- Mention influencers in your posts – when you do this, and I recommend you do, reach out to that blogger, and let them know you mentioned them in your article.
In your email to them, state what you said about them and if they feel it’s worthy, to please share it. Thank the influencer for their time and let them know that you’ll continue to share information about their site/posts or them in your future articles.
There’s no better way of letting an influencer know how much you value their work than by including a relevant link to them in your blog post. And as long as it’s high-quality content, they’ll be more than happy to share it with their audience.
- Ask for feedback from an influential blogger – taking networking with influencers one step further, why not ask an influential blogger for a quote or two for your new blog post.
This is a great way to add some unique content to your post that differentiates it from others. If you ask politely, most bloggers will be happy to oblige. And, they’ll most likely share it with their own group of followers.
7. Participate in Forums With-in Your Niche
Web forums are another source to gain traffic to your blog. These online communities will allow you to share useful content & feedback, which will help establish your authority.
Keep in mind that many of these forums will not allow you to link back directly to your blog posts, so you’ll need to have an author bio that includes your link back to your site.
Quora and Warrior Forum are popular question and answer forums that can bring loads of traffic to your blog. If you are a digital marketer offering a product or service, participating in forums within your niche will help build those relationships you desire.
Just make sure to you join forums for the right reason. You’re there to educate, help others and share ideas that might help solve problems that people may be facing.
Give value and people will naturally flock to you and want to find out more about you.
8. Optimize Your Posts for Search Engines
My background is search engine optimization, and I’m here to tell you that SEO is NOT dead!
Optimizing your article posts for the search engines is actually an easy process with the right information and education.
Be sure to include your chosen keyword phrase within the title of your article, plus include the keyword phrase and its variations within your content and header tags.
Target the Long Tail Keyword Phrases
A long tailed keyword phrase is an expansion of a core, generic word to be made into a more specific targeted term.
Strategically place your keyword phrase within your Title tag (arguably the most important SEO tag for any site), HTML Header Tags (to help structure your content and boost your rankings), along with in the beginning and end of your article.
Avoid keyword stuffing and make sure to sprinkle a few variations of your long tail keyword phrases throughout your site where it looks natural and makes sense.
9. Have Share Buttons on Your Site
Make it easy for your blog readers to share your content with their friends and followers.
Make sure to have your social share buttons in an obvious location. As you can see, you will find share buttons at the bottom of this article as a convenience to help spread the word before you leave.
Be sure to include all the major social media network site buttons like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest at the very least.
10. Promote Your Blog Article to Your Email List
When setting up your email list script, be sure to include a culmination of the finest, most attention-grabbing, interest-arousing statements you can muster from your article.
Be sure to include a ‘Read More‘ link that leads back to your full article.
To give you some ideas on how to come up with catch-phrases that will capture the attention of your reader and keep them interested enough to follow through with the clicking of your link, read one of my recent articles, ‘How to Generate Powerful Headlines Guaranteed to Arrest Attention and Arouse Curiosity.’
Although this article is more targeted towards writing brilliant, attention-grabbing headlines, there are many takeaways that will help with the preparation of your email.
Conclusion – Promoting Your Blog to Gain More Traffic
Make sure to allow enough time to implement a few of the tactics and strategies from the list above.
You will impress yourself with the amount of traffic you can gain in a short period of time when you follow a promoting regimen.
