Even the best content in the world is not of any use if no one visits your blog to read it. Learning how to promote your blog online is an art and no blogger can succeed if he doesn’t know how to properly share and promote a blog post.
Bloggers invest a significant amount of time and hard work in creating the best possible content. But the majority doesn’t give much thought to the promotion of blog posts written by them.
Most bloggers wrongly assume that once they’ve written a blog post, readers will automatically find it and there is nothing left to be done by pushing the publish button.
Today, a blog post can be promoted in a variety of ways and as expected each promotion method has its own pros and cons. Here we will discuss some of the most productive ways to promote your blog post online.
How To Promote Your Blog Without SEO
Using High Profile Influencers
Influencer as the word suggests refers to people who have a large following over internet and these influencers can be crucial for promoting your blog post.
Often an influencer can send thousands of visitors to your blog just by sharing your blog post on his social media platforms. Off course, you’ll need to build trust with these influencers beforehand as influencers rarely share content written by people who are unknown to them.
Trust can be built easily by commenting and sharing content written by these influencers and you must build a relationship with them by visiting their website or blog on a regular basis before asking for any favour from them.
Even if you can gather support from few top influencers in your niche, this will be enough to put your blog post in front of thousands of interested readers.
See: How To Use Instagram To Build A Blog
Start (Slowly) Building Your Email List
Email marketing despite falling open and click through rates is still very important when it comes to promoting content such as blog posts.
Email marketing is still one of the primary drivers of traffic to blogs and as such almost all successful bloggers use email marketing along with their email lists for promoting new blog posts.
The first step for anyone who is looking to promote his blog posts via email is to have his own email list. You can easily build a list by adding sign up forms or giving some freebie such as a short eBook through your blog.
As almost all blogs use one of other form for signing up visitors, so for the sake of this article we assume that you already have an email list. As discussing how to build an email list is out of the scope of this article.
You must know what are the best times for sending an email to your subscribers and share your new blog posts to them via email marketing software.
Email click thru and opening rates can be affected by multiple factors and timing of email is just one of these factors. Many bloggers follow the practice of sending the headline of their blog posts to arouse curiosity in their readers.
This is a time-tested tactic but works only if your headline is magnetic.
Nonetheless, email marketing is still a potent force and can be easily harnessed for promoting your blog posts.
Social Bookmarking Sites Can Still Be Useful
Social bookmarking sites are an easy way to build a regular stream of visitors who are interested in a certain topic.
Social bookmarking sites such as Stumbleupon, Digg and Alltop follow ranking system where users vote each piece of content shared through these sites.
As such articles, blog posts etc. are constantly moving up and down and if an article is ranked among the top ones even for a limited period, this can result in thousands of visitors to the said article.
You must add your blog to the relevant categories in each popular social bookmarking site and make sure that each new piece of content which you publish is shared on these sites.
Social Media Reigns Supreme
Social media is one of the most widely used platforms for sharing and promoting blog posts by bloggers and readers alike.
If you are interested in harnessing the power of social media for promoting your blog posts then you’ll need a detailed social media strategy and a plan to execute this strategy.
Many bloggers wrongly assume that they need to share a blog post once and this will result in a flood stream of visitor traffic to their blogs.
As most experienced bloggers can tell from their experience, single shares rarely result in huge amount of traffic or promotion. You must share your new or recent blog posts frequently on social media.
Another important factor is the type of content you are promoting and relevant platform. Facebook, Twitter etc. are good for sharing B2C content but these platforms have traditionally performed poorly when it comes to B2B content.
LinkedIn is the go to platform if B2B is your primary target audience. With the help of social media tools such as Hootsuite and Buffer you can easily manage multiple social media accounts on various social sites easily for free.
But as mentioned earlier you must have a detailed strategy and plan for promoting your content via social media if you want to see significant returns in terms of traffic generated.
Online Community Forums
Today there are millions of online community forums for almost everything you can imagine. These are niche communities focused on discussing every aspect about a service or product.
As such these are often considered as untapped goldmines for generating targeted traffic.
You must join several of such online communities and forums related to your niche and make it a habit to share your new blog posts in various forum discussions.
Although, these forums have strict rules for spamming and you must in no way share unrelated content which can be considered as spam by forum moderators.
Try to participate in various discussions taking place over these forums and communities and share your blog posts in relevant threads. You can also add a link to your blog in your profile signature as most forums allow a user to have a website or blog URL in their signatures.
Also, don’t forget Facebook Group – you can join my secret “for bloggers” group here.
Conclusion
We have tried to compile a list of most powerful tools and ways for promoting a blog post online. Although, the scope of the question is so vast that discussing all the possible ways for promoting blog posts requires a lengthy book.
Nonetheless, even if you can master the few methods mentioned in this article, this will be more than enough to beat your competitors.
Most studies have shown that even a small amount of targeted traffic is much better than higher amounts of untargeted traffic and as such at all stages, you must ensure that you are only targeting visitors have an interest in your services/products.
Thank you very much for reading, please leave me a comment down below if you have any (more) questions on how to promote your blog in 2017 and beyond.
Talk soon.
