Chapter 12: How to Promote Your Blog

26 Ways to Promote Your Blog Post

It seems like every B2B company these days has a blog, and there’s a reason why. They are a great way for you to establish yourself as a thought leader and create useful and easily accessible content for your prospects and leads at every stage of the sales funnel.

Now while we’ve written several posts about creating engaging content and the power of blogs, this is not one of them. This post is about how to get your prospects and leads to pay attention to it. Because despite the potential of your blog to help you reach more leads, this tool is only useful if you get people to actually read what you write. And even if your SEO game is strong and your seeing tons of organic traffic, investing time in promoting your blog can help you see even better results.

Although blogs have been around for a while, the digital marketing landscape has definitely changed, and with that so has the way we perform outreach to promote our content. If you haven’t been keeping up with trends on how to promote content or looking for new ideas to expand your reach, today we’re rounding up a few ways you can promote your content in 2018.

What Is Blog Promotion?

What is blog promotion, anyway? The concept is quite simple, although the execution can be complex. In essence, blog promotion just means doing a variety of different things to get more visitors.

Promoting your blog is absolutely essential if you want people to read it. Without promoting your site, it’s very difficult to get a larger audience. In fact, you might not get any readers at all.

Pre-Promotion Checklist

Before you begin to promote your blog, it is important to make sure you’re ready for it. After all, if you get a ton of traffic to your site but fail to capitalize on it, it’s a huge waste.

Make Your Website Search Engine Friendly

First, make sure your WordPress site is SEO-optimized. This means your website should be using an SEO-friendly theme, running one or more SEO plugins like Yoast or AIOSEO, and doing other tricks like adding schema markup to your site.

Yoast SEO Plugin

Ensure You Have High-Quality Content

It also doesn’t hurt to make sure that your information is up-to-date and correct, especially if the post is technical in nature or makes recommendations. Double check that your suggestions are still current and haven’t been made redundant since you first wrote the post.

Always Use Quality Images

ShortPixel homepage

However, be certain that your images are compressed by using an image compression plugin. Without compressing images, your pages will likely be too slow – resulting in a punishment by Google and other search engines.

How to Promote Your Blog

Use Search Engines to Promote Your Blog

SEO is a very complex topic, but setting up a WordPress site’s SEO is fairly easy to do. You’ll want to pick an SEO-friendly theme like Astra and install some SEO plugins like AIOSEO or Yoast.

Do Keyword Research

Build Links to Your Site

Finally, you’ll want to build links to your site. The easiest way to do this is by encouraging readers to share your content on social media. You can also do guest posts, which are posts on other blogs that link back your site.

Share Your Blog on Social Media

These days, social media is a must-have for any marketing strategy. The number of social sites increases every year, but you should be sharing your content on at least three or four platforms.

Facebook Post editor

Use Social Media Sharing Buttons

Create Social Media Channels or Groups

For instance, on Facebook, you can create a group for your particular topic. If you run the community successfully and offer help and advice to members, it can be a fantastic asset for your site.

Create Shareable Content

This means that it should have a good title that grabs attention and is easy to understand. It also means that the content itself should be something that your followers on Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/etc. want to read.

Open Graph is a Facebook

Optimize Open Graph Data

Open Graph is a Facebook, now Open Web Foundation, protocol that enables you to control how Facebook posts format data from third-party websites. The protocol is so useful, Twitter and LinkedIn also began accepting Open Graph.

Email Marketing

Build Your Email List

When it comes to email marketing, the overall goal is to build an email list. An email list allows you to send content directly to those individuals that are interested in your blog posts and/or other products or services that you offer.

Send Emails For New Posts

You’ll need a plugin that enables you to link to your mail service, which we’ll cover in the next section. Otherwise, plugins like Email Subscribers & Newsletters can automatically email subscribers every time you post new content.

Send an Email Newsletter

MailPoet homepage

Include Blog Links in Your Email Signature

Create Partnerships

Invite Influential Bloggers to Contribute

Most smaller bloggers will be happy to, as it gives them a larger audience to pitch their work to. You can also usually offer to do a guest post on their site, too, which is another great way to promote your site.

Roundup post example

Reach Out to Influencers

Doing the same for social media influencers is also a good move. You’ll need to have something to offer them, like free merch, free promotion, a mention or two or something else, but many influencers in your niche should be interested.

Publish Roundup Posts

Try Cross-promoting

You can use those contacts to cross promote. It’s the ultimate ‘I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine’ scenario. You promote their blog, product or service and they do the same for you.

Guest Post on Popular Blogs

Lots of websites accept guest posts. You write a post for another site to feature and they give you a backlink or two as a reward. It’s a very common tactic and something most bloggers do.

Comment and Interact on Other Blogs

Paid Blog Promotion

If you have a budget, it’s also a great idea to start doing some paid promotion. Paid simply means anything that requires you to pay an amount of money, no matter how small or large it may be.

Search Engine Advertising

When you search for something on Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo, you’ll normally see ads at the top and side of the page. These are placed there by companies who pay to have their ads displayed on certain search result keywords.

If your blog relies heavily on search engine traffic, paying for ads might be a good investment. This is often the case if you cover a topic like travel, food, or another niche that has a lot of competition.

Search Ads

Social Media Advertising

Social media advertising is paying to promote your content on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. The effectiveness of this tactic depends largely on the nature of your blog and the social media platform that you’re targeting.

Promoting Your Blog offline:

10. Business Cards

Business Card Abhishek Bhatnagar

Business cards are little marketing tools that do not cost much to produce. You can create and order business cards online that will help you market and advertise your brand for very little money. Whenever you attend any event or meeting related to blogging, you can simply pass your business card to people you meet.

They really are great promotional tools and when I give 100 of them out, I normally get 100 new visitors and loyal ones too. Business cards are not expensive and I can get 100 done for about $5.

11. Press: Newspapers, Magazine, and TV Channels

Frankly, one of my friends who is a journalist told me that they always lack news. It’s not easy to fill a newspaper or magazines with news and sometimes they even need to get some online. So the point is if you can get them some news which is shockingly awesome for FREE, they will publish it.

Getting newspapers to feature you especially local’s one is definitely easy and writing about some teen making $10k in three months is surely much enticing compared to some old grandpa who lost his cat. Since I was featured in my country, India’s TV and newspaper, my blogs and list became larger thus more money came in.

12. Wear your branded T-Shirts or Hoodies

Gifts are people’s favorites and giving them some free gifts like your blog’s t-shirt is definitely going to rock their day up. T-Shirts featuring your blog address with a great design equal to free publicity.

If you want to try something unique to market your brand, think outside the box! You can even buy a Billboard ad or advertise on national television. You never know how much buzz you can generate!

Sources:

https://act-on.com/blog/26-ways-to-promote-your-blog-post-in-2018/
https://wpastra.com/blogging/how-to-promote-your-blog/
https://www.shoutmeloud.com/how-to-promote-your-blog.html

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