Okay.
Don’t expect fluffy things that everyone knows.
Do a little survey.
I mean, a 13-year old blogger knows the importance of sharing a blog post on Facebook.
He does that all the time.
So, clear, I’m not telling you to:
- Share on Facebook
- Tweet it
- Share on LinkedIn
You should do all that but here we’re talking about promoting your blog.
Now you have the liberty to expect some psychologically interesting ways to promote your blog.
Before I share those methods, I want to quickly reveal three basic things that will guarantee the success of following methods. Here are they:
- Don’t be Salesy: That’s a big NO. You don’t have to do that. Salesy refers to the approach that is circling around getting sales. When it comes to blog promotion, you rather try to be beneficial for others than trying to impose your material. Jon Morrow talked about his strategy of no advertising in a recent article because he also believes that being salesy annoys readership.
- Don’t push too much: There is a thin divider in between promotion and pushing too hard. And that divider is just an understanding. You must take care of whatever method of promotion you’re choosing to promote your blog that you’re not imposing content on the audience. Andre told in a video of YouTube Creator Academy that too much annotations on this video caused low CTR and when he removed the annotations, the conversion got better. It’s a fact people come to consume your content not ads. Make your delivery of value a priority.
- Solve Problems: Before sharing your blog post on social media or sending the link in an email, ask yourself once, whether it’s going to help them or not. Once you’re pretty sure that it’s a problem solving material for the certain user, then go on with it.
Learning how to efficiently promote your content through your blog is the only way you can build a profitable online business. Without marketing yourself and your company, you can’t really establish yourself as an authority.
On top of that, if you can’t bring targeted traffic to your website, you are basically stuck. No readers, no subscribers, no sales. That is why it’s truly important to learn how to promote your content and reach out to a lot of audiences.
In today’s article we’ll take a look at 17 blog promotion techniques for promoting your content efficiently:
1. Write Awesome Content
No matter what promotion technique you use, trust me; you won’t succeed unless your content is high quality and provides enough value to the reader. That’s the first rule of content marketing, and it should never be neglected.
That’s the first rule of content marketing, and it should never be neglected. Good content means attention, attention means subscribers, and subscribers eventually mean sales.
Do complete research before writing your content.
Read different blogs, check question answer websites, related forums and watch videos to get in-depth knowledge about your topic.
Being a blogger, our main duty is to deliver the valuable content. So don’t deliver half-cooked content.
2. Reach Out to Similar Niche Blogs
A good way to promote your content is to get in touch with blogs within your niche. They shouldn’t be your direct competition, but more like “close neighbors” that can help each other.
Well, you can copy paste the article link and end the Google search query with site:twitter.com/facebook.com, or just put the link in quotes.
Ask them to share your content and promise to share back.
3. Purchase Influencer’s Voice
An influencer is usually a popular person, a public person, a company maybe, or someone who’s an expert in a specific field. These influences have the power to promote things to their big amounts of followers.
A big majority of influencers have social media accounts and can be approached. Depending on their “fame” or number of followers, negotiate a price and ask them to promote your links.
4. Study Influencers & Create Personalized Content
Let’s say that you have a marijuana blog.
Cannabis fans are all over the place, so it could be profitable to sell a book, t-shirts, tools, all cannabis related.
The most influential influencer for this niche would be Snoop Dogg. If you can create an amazing piece of content directed towards him, you have a chance.
He may notice your content and choose to share it to his big audience.
5. Submit your Blog Posts to Content Communities
There are many online content communities that you can take advantage of.
First of all, you have to create good content. Then, you got to register and list your content on the portal. Other interested blogs will take your content and share it with their audience.
You can also find individuals who are particularly interested in your content and they can become your loyal readers and customers.
6. Just Ask for Shares
Good bloggers understand the value of their audience. Whenever they want to make a blog post viral, they simply ask the audience for social shares.
If the content is good enough, there’s no problem with sharing it.
Being a human being, we do things when we are asked to do.
So at the end of the post ask your readers to share the content with their friends.
7. Use StumbleUpon Paid Tool
StumbleUpon paid discovery tool is a great tool to promote your content. Basically, you are pushing your blog posts towards a pretty huge network of readers.
These people are waiting to stumble upon interesting content. Using the paid advertising feature, you can target the audience you wish and get targeted traffic.
8. Social Sharing Buttons
At the end of your articles, images, videos, make sure that you make it easy for the viewer to share what he has just seen.
It’s all about making it very accessible for him. People don’t like wasting time on searching for options or copy pasting on their social profiles.
Blogging Cage is using Ultimate Social Deux plugin to have those awesome looking share buttons.
9. Infographics
Infographics are a great form of content that can bring thousands of potential customers towards your business. It is what the name says: graphics with information.
The good thing about Infographics is that they’re efficient and extremely shared within social media channels. Most of the professional Infographics become viral.
10. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engines can bring consistent targeted traffic if leveraged well. Good content is a big factor in the SEO practices.
It’s the same with social media shares, backlinks, and more other factors. If you’re first hearing about SEO, then you really need to do your homework before even attempting to create SEO strategies for your business.
Here is a small guide to learn SEO.
11. Forum Posting
Forum posting, or better called forum marketing, is often used by webmasters and marketers in order to leverage their promotion.
Forum posting consists of creating an authority profile within a niche forum and bring value through your replies.
The moment you gather enough authority and reputation, you can begin to promote your business through your forum signature or through links.
12. E-mail Marketing
Every successful online business has an e-mail list filled with subscribers. Those subscribers consume exclusive content every week and purchase products and services at the recommendation of webmasters (affiliate marketing).
You can do the same; start creating a list of e-mail subscribers and create an e-mail sequence that automatically sends content throughout the month or year.
Read: How to Get Your First 500 Subscribers in 48 Hours
13. Solo Ads
Solo ads are also a widely used technique of promoting content. You must approach certain individuals: blog owners, solo ads companies, and/or influencers and ask them to feature you into their e-mail sequence.
Alternatively, you can sometimes even get the information of the people (e-mails, details, etc.) and you’ll be able to promote yourself through your own e-mail.
14. Video Marketing
Videos are awesome traffic machines. First, you have to create them, then post them, and then rank them.
The moment you finish these three steps, you are guaranteed to get passive traffic for a long time. By the way, videos can have a great impact on your blog traffic and sales.
Just link your website details on the description side of the video and wait for the traffic to roll in.
15. Pay Per Click (or PPC)
Google Adwords, Bing Ads, even Facebook Ads are pay per click platforms that help marketers reach extremely targeted audiences.
It usually works like this: you will choose a specific keyword phrase like “red dresses New York” and choose the target audience. In this case, you’ll look for people around New York that interested in red dresses.
With Facebook ads for example, instead of focusing on click behavior, you are selecting your audience based on interests. It’s the same with Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.
16. Quora & Yahoo Answers
Question and answers portals like Quora and Yahoo Answers are another good source of traffic. People all over the world try to fix their problems by asking questions online.
You can be the one who answers and leads them to a high quality article of yours that will let them solve their issues.
Be careful not to look like a marketer or spammer. Provide as much value as you can and think about your reputation
Let’s dig in.
17. Use the Power of Social Media Profiles
Did someone ever tell you this?
I don’t think so.
What you might have seen is people come to Facebook and Twitter to share their articles and walk away.
Is that you think called social media sharing?
I doubt that.
Forget about sharing for a sec.
You might come to know about RELATION BUILDING and HELPING OTHERS on social media. It’s all true. You should do that. But before even getting started, you need to do one thing…
And that is IMPROVING YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA PROFILES.
What does it mean? (You’re thinking now…)
It means following things must be showing off your blog’s URL nice and clean.
- Cover Image: Have you ever heard about people who don’t even bother to look at the link mentioned somewhere in your profile? All they look at are two things. 1) Display Picture, 2) Cover Image. You better make a clean and superb cover image with your site’s URL on. Check out mine if you don’t believe me.
- Website Link: You got to be kidding if you say that you haven’t added it yet. It’s the most appropriate and suitable chance to put your blog’s link out there on social media. Utilize it when Facebook is giving you a chance to do that.
- Your Bio: This comes handy too. You have to write your small bio data in this section but you can sneakily end your bio with a certain call-to-action statement with a URL of your about page at the end.
18. Participate in Discussions
This is no technical thing.
You need to be a human, though.
Luckily, we all are.
The blog promotion doesn’t always mean that you’re shamelessly putting your links everywhere and spamming around the social media. Be advised, you’re there to build connections and develop long-term relationships with the audience. So, help people out with your suitable answers or valuable comments. Share what you’ve seen or learned.
Always tell them the truth. Make sure you’re jumping over to everyone’s Facebook wall to comment. You must know when someone writes on Facebook as a status or share (an article) with a note at the top, most of the times, he/she expects friends to check it out and give feedback. The idea of sharing is definitely based on being social with connected people and friends.
So, participate and tell them what you know or think. When you share some stunning that helps others, it always attracts people to talk to you or get connected with you.
This is something you should be pursuing. I use BrainyQuote website to get quotations and make quotation graphics on Canva.com to share on social media. My friends love it.
19. Share Others’ Content
Now, most of the bloggers think that why they need to share others’ content when they have their own to share.
What they don’t see is that what lies in it.
Don’t be an introvert who doesn’t think outside the box.
In today’s social media world, the only legit way to earn respect and love is by giving respect and love. It’s my first-hand experience, though. When I was stuck around 700 Twitter followers and they were not increasing, the only thing I did was started giving value. I started sharing others’ content.
Did you know what happened afterward?
I crossed 900 followers mark now. And it’s growing.
This lesson of GIVING I learned from one of my favorite books ‘GIVE AND TAKE‘ written by Adam Grant.
Although, it was the only book that I bought so far (I want to be honest with you)…
But I started making a list of books to read after this one.
When I applied that lesson of GIVING into my twitter campaign, it really worked.
You know, a good way of getting connected with like-minded bloggers and to share their content is Triberr. You will find a number of bloggers and their articles to share. Always share to help, not to just share. You might not want to upset your Facebook friends and Twitter followers with bombarding their walls with your sharing.
20. Link to Relevant Content
You won’t believe this.
Linking to relevant content seems to be a promotional activity to promote others.
It is, actually.
But linking to the relevant and the most helpful content out there that could help your audience.
How?
Two reasons for that:
- When the author (you’ve linked to) will find out about that, that person is likely to check out what did you write and how you have linked out. So, that earns you a visitor, plus, a chance to increase your one subscriber. Maybe, you make a connection there or reach out to a prospective customer.
- When readers find out that you have linked to a reference that talks like or authenticates your point, it makes you an authority in their eyes. In fact, if all that content does help the audience, you earn a lot of credit for that. Trust me, you do.
21. Repurpose Your Articles
One of the ways of promoting your blog is by repurposing your content.
Don’t be sad, please.
I’m here to explain.
The concept of content repurpose is that using the same great content you have worked on and turning into another form. It doesn’t have to be a cheeky or complex process.
Take what you need and leave the rest.
The content marketers and brands are doing this.
You can convert a long article into an infographic, or maybe a YouTube video, or maybe a Slideshare deck.
The options are just incredible.
Imagine, your next article goes to YouTube, Pinterest, and Slideshare at the same time.
Would that effect the main article ranking?
Hell yeah.
What if your article doesn’t do well and the same infographic goes viral, then would you do the process again?
I’m sure you will think about repurposing the content.
Megan Marrs is certainly smarter than me. She wrote a whole article on content repurposing last year.
You can republish your articles on Linked Pulse and Medium as well.
22. Mention in YouTube Videos Description
If you’re a YouTube video maker (which you should), then you can add up your related articles links and even blog URL in the description. You must check default uploads settings on your YouTube channel.
The idea is, YouTube takes you in front of a newer audience. The chances are, most of your YouTube subscribers or first-time viewers are not your blog subscribers. So, they might come over to read your blog.
The mission is to promote your blog.
YouTube does the job.
In fact, YouTube recommended default uploads to the regular uploaders. If you’re not comfortable with those long and filthy links, then use the URL shortener like Bitly to do the job.
23. Leave Valuable Comments on Others’ blogs
This might interest many of you.
Be advised. Don’t be considered a spammer by leaving a comment like “Nice Article”…
Everybody knows what that means.
So, please don’t leave that type of short comments with your blog link.
Do you know what a comment can do for you?
It could earn you so much respect.
The comment is your chance to put your best views out there in front of many other people.
You don’t know who is going to read that!
A long time ago, when I first pitched a guest post to GrowMap blog, Gail Gardner accepted it saying that one of your guest posts has the comment from authority bloggers that she knows personally. At that point, I realized the importance of comments.
So, guys, always take care when you comment.
This happens when you put so much energy into it.
Energy means value here.
24. Describe Content While Sharing
If you think sharing your article’s link on social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ would do the job then you’re mistaken. It won’t.
Whether you have the rich snippet feature on your blog or not, something else needs to be done. People think adding a plugin that creates a rich snippet while sharing the content does the job. Well, a rich snippet might display an image with the article title but it doesn’t explain to your followers that what this article is all about.
This is the job that you have to do.
Similarly, Twitter has developed the Twitter Cards feature to deal with it. Schema is used for search results display improvement for your WordPress site. All these options help improve the user-experience through an explanation.
This tells us how important describing your content is.
So write a two or more lines along with your sharing on social media, so that people get an idea of what this content is all about. They don’t want to risk their next 15 minutes on your sharing. There is something else, it actually shows that you have read it and that’s why you know what inside it.
25. Utilize Live Streaming
One of hottest things on the internet in 2016 is live streaming. I have seen Darren Rowse utilizing the power of live streaming. In fact, many other experts do the same but as far as blog promotion is concerned he does it very well.
The best thing that Darren does, is a sort of on-demand blog promotion. People asks him the question and he answers them, whereas sometimes he answers and refers to check the previously posted content on his blogs.
You can use Facebook Live, Periscope, or YouNow for social live streaming.
I found live streaming as one of the best engagement and promotional ways on the internet.
There might be many other options to utilize such as YouTube live streaming or Snapchat these days but if you don’t understand the essence of sharing value, and rather target your blog post sharing then it’s not going to work.
Consider promotion a byproduct of the value you deliver.
26. Build a Community of Like-minded People
There is no better way of promoting your blog than building a community of people. The idea behind should be forming a community that contributes to each other rather than promoting our content. When we do that, we ultimately build connections that pay attention on whatever community members publish.
Aha-Now is a good example of forming a community of like-minded people.
A variety of bloggers have joined this community site and they share their content. Not only do they share but also try to read and comment on others’ blogs.
It could be a closed facebook group as well where like-minded people come together to discuss blog related things.
Once I pitched that idea to a couple of Facebook friends and they liked it but we couldn’t start it.
If you want to build a long-term relation with your blog audience, or, in fact, want to bring a new audience in, I would recommend establishing the community of that sort.
Have you seen BloggingCage Facebook group?
I’m actually a big fan of ‘The Freedom to Freelance Project‘ by Leah Kalamakis.
Do something like that.
Your Part
I have tried to share some of the best blog promotion ways that I could possibly share.
I have learned this in my 6 years of blogging that whenever you share something, bring the best out of you.
When it does change someone’s life, they will always come back to give you credit, somehow.
And the last but not least, promote not to just promote, do it whatever helps others.
Just be there for others. If you’re writing, write to benefit others, if sharing, share to help others, once you start doing that, your online brand’s growth will start increasing perpetually.
If you have some cool ways to promoting a blog, I’d love to read in the comments below.
Share it with us.