Creating great content is only the first step of being a successful blogger. To get people reading your blog, you also have to have to promote your blog posts.
It best to plan your content promotion strategy in advance and keep it in mind when you’re writing your posts.
If you don’t think about how you’re going to promote your blog post before you write it, you might be missing out on some opportunities.
For example, an easy way to give your blog post a boost might be to include a quote from another popular blogger or influencer in your niche. You can then reach out to this person after you’ve published the post and if they like it, they might share it with their audience.
Start With Great Content
First things first – you have to make sure you have something worth promoting. If you don’t ensure you have a solid foundation by creating truly high-quality content that’s worth sharing, the results of your promotion will probably not be worth the effort.
Need some pointers for coming up with great content ideas that people will actually be interested in? Check out this post on how to generate content ideas that will attract traffic.
It’s also important to create “shareable” content. Content that’s great to read won’t necessarily attract shares, so you need to put in a little extra effort to ensure readers want to share it with others.
Crafting an eye-catching headline is a great start. A great headline will not only encourage a browser to read the article, but can also make it more likely that they’ll share it.
Eye-catching images are also essential for shareable content. A study by Buzzsumo found that blog posts with an image every 75-100 words got double the shares of posts with fewer images.
Images are particularly important if you’re hoping to attract traffic from Pinterest. In fact, it’s worth creating one or two Pinterest-optimized images to attract shares on the platform.
Finally, if it takes more than a click for someone to share your content, they probably won’t bother. Make sure you include social media sharing icons on all your posts to make them easily shareable, and consider using a plugin like ClickToTweet to draw attention to quotable sections of your post.
Don’t forget to simply ask people to share your content. A quick “if you enjoyed this post please share it with others” acts as a quick reminder to click the share button and you might be surprised at how much this simple tip can increase your share rate.
You can get more ideas for how to boost your blog post engagement in this article.
Email Marketing
Email marketing can be one of the most effective ways to promote your blog. But before you can start promotion, you’ll need to build your email list.
This starts by having an easy to find email signup form on your website that visitors can use to sign up to your mailing list.
However, most people won’t sign up to your mailing list even if they like your blog so it’s very helpful to give them some kind of incentive for doing so.
Ebooks, detailed guides, and other info products can be good “lead magnets” to encourage website visitors to sign up to your mailing list.
Once you’ve built your list, you have an audience ready and waiting that is interested in what you have to say and wants to know when you post new content. This is why so many marketers say your email list is true gold when it comes to effective promotional techniques.
Of course there’s more to effective email marketing than simply emailing out a link every time you publish a post.
You need to offer more value than what’s available on your blog. Exclusive tips, insider info, and other subscriber-only content are all good perks that can encourage people to sign up to your list and keep them reading once they’re on your list.
The emails that I always read and look forward to seeing in my inbox are those that have come from content creators and marketers who put a bit of their own personality into their emails. Through storytelling and personal anecdotes, they make their emails seem like an update from a friend rather than simply a way of generating clicks and sales.
Social Media Marketing
At the time of writing there are 2.7 billion active users on Facebook and hundreds of millions on other social networks such as Twitter and LinkedIn.
The power of social media marketing is that you can reach a much wider audience than other channels through amplified reach.
Even if you only have a few hundred followers on your social media channels you could potentially reach millions of people. If a few of your followers share your posts with their followers and then they share with their followers and so on, your post could go “viral” and spread rapidly around the world in a very short space of time.
Only a very small percentage of social media posts ever go viral, but social media is still a highly effective way to promote your blog posts and interact with your audience.
It’s also very quick and easy to promote your content on social media. It takes only a couple of minutes to add a link to your new content on your social media channels and you can make this process even quicker and more efficient by using social media automation and management tools.
As mentioned earlier, it’s also important to include social media sharing buttons on your content and “click to tweet” highlighted quotes where appropriate.
Looking for some more ideas for using social media marketing? See our tips on using social networking for blog promotion.
Submit Your Posts to Content Syndication Sites
Content syndication platforms are third party sites that re-publish content from elsewhere on the blog.
You’ve probably heard that content duplication is bad for SEO. This is not necessarily true (as long as the duplication isn’t happening on your own site).
There’s no Google penalty for publishing content that’s not original. Just look at the example of press releases. These articles are often published on dozens of sites with minimal change to the content, and yet the news sites publishing them continue to rank well. Syndication sites use canonical sites to let search engines know the original source of the content.
One potential disadvantage of sharing your posts with content syndication sites is that sometimes the syndicated article will rank ahead of your own site. But isn’t always a bad thing, particularly if it gets your content and brand in front of a wider audience.
However it’s a good idea not to give away everything to other sites. Keep some original content for your own site (especially articles targeting keywords you’re trying to rank for) and be sure to link to it in your syndicated posts for browsers who are interested in reading more of your content.
Some content syndication platforms to consider include:
- Medium
- Quora (this question and answer platform lends itself well to posting a concise version on the site and then linking through to your full article on your own site for more details)
- SlideShare
Reach Out to People and Sites Mentioned in the Post
If you’ve mentioned influencers or linked to other websites in your post, don’t be shy to let them know about it.
Of course you don’t want to be a nuisance by emailing someone every time you link to their website, but if you’ve included their bio in a roundup of influencers in a particular field or included them as a case study or example in your post, it often pays to draw attention to the fact.
Often a quick shout out on social media will do the trick. Something like “Hey influencer, I included your profile in my list of the top 10 people to watch in 2021 – thought you might like to check it out. Keep up the good work!”
The trick to success with this technique is targeting people who have a large enough following to make it worth your while but not so large that they’ll ignore your message.
You can also ask other bloggers and influencers to contribute directly to your post like this post on Kikolani that’s a few years old but still includes plenty of gold nuggets: 32 Experts Share Their Best Blog Promotion Tips.
This method of attracting links and shares is more successful if you build a good relationship with other bloggers and influencers before you start asking them for shares.
Comment on their posts and videos with useful additions, engage in conversation, and make sure to share their content before you expect them to share yours.
Internal Links and Cross-Promotion
Don’t overlook the importance of cross-promoting your content. Internal linking is something that’s easy to do, you have full control over, and it can also give a significant boost to your SEO.
The most obvious place to link out to the post you want to promote is within your other content. For example, if you’ve written a post on social media marketing, you could link out to another post you’ve written that goes into more detail about Facebook marketing.
You can also use a plugin like Yoast, which will suggest related articles to link to from each new post you write.
It’s also a good idea to include a list of related articles at the end of your posts that your readers might also be interested in reading. There are several plugins that can manage this for you.
Don’t forget to cross promote your content across multiple platforms. For example, you could include a link to a relevant blog post in a video you publish to YouTube.
Internal promotion of your content in this way not only helps you out by sending traffic to multiple pages of your site and improving your SEO but it also improves the user experience by giving them additional information on topics they’re interested in.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging can be a great way to get your name known, send more traffic to your site, and reach a wider audience.
It does take quite a bit more time and effort than some other promotional strategies, but the benefits you can gain from guest blogging make it worth the effort.
Guest blogging essentially means writing a unique blog post to publish on another site. By doing this you can reach an audience that might not have found your blog through other methods, and you can also link within your article to other blog posts on your site.
Some of the benefits of guest blogging include:
- Reaching a wider and more diverse audience
- Networking and building relationships with other bloggers
- Building links and improving your SEO
- Establishing your name as an authority in your niche
To get started with a guest blogging strategy, make a list of potential blogs you’d like to publish on including the topics they cover, contact details of the owner or site manager, and other relevant information. Not all sites accept guest posts, so see if you can find any information about this before you get in touch.
Here’s a good tip for finding relevant blogs to guest post on. Most blogs that accept guest posts will have a page labeled as “write for us”, “contributor guidelines”, or “submit a guest post”
By doing a Google search for some keywords in your niche + different variations of these guest posting terms, you can quickly find blogs that are actively accepting guest posts.
It helps if you already have some kind of relationship established with the site owner before you pitch a guest posts, so try to spend some time commenting on their posts (more on this below) and engaging on social media before you reach out.
You also need to put the time in to producing really high quality content if you’re going to be successful with guest blogging. Nobody wants to post inferior content on their blog just to give someone else links and exposure.
Tailor your guest posts to the content and audience of the blog you’re posting on and try to come up with unique topic ideas that add real value.
Blog and Forum Commenting
Blog commenting has been considered a low-value link building activity for years. But when you do it properly, commenting on other blogs and forums in your niche can be a great way to let more people know about your best content and send more traffic to your site.
The trick to being successful with this strategy is to be truly helpful and be active in the community around the blog or forum you’re posting on. If you comment only to draw attention to your own content, it will be immediately obvious.
Start by making a list of sites and forums to focus on. Look for blogs in your niche with an active comment section, communities on social media, active forums, and sites like Quora and Reddit can work well too.
You then need to put some effort into giving back to these communities before you start promoting your own content. Make sure the comments you add are relevant and say something more than “nice post!”
Share links to other relevant content, not just your own. And only promote your own blog posts if they’ll truly be useful to people reading the forum threads and comments.
Paid Promotion
All of the above techniques are “free” in that they only take your time to benefit from. There are also many paid promotional methods that you can use. It’s best to choose just a couple of these and use them in combination with the techniques described above.
Triberr is a reciprocal sharing site that uses the power of “tribes” to get bloggers more shares for their content.
Once you’ve registered with Triberr, your blog content will be imported automatically to relevant “tribal streams” for other users to share with their audiences. Tribes are simply a niche or topic area such as “design” or “marketing”.
You can also share other users’ content directly to your own social accounts.
Triberr has a free account to try it out with limited exposure, and paid accounts start from $20 a month.
Quuu Promote is a paid content promotion and curation tool that works in a similar way to Triberr. You add your blog RSS feed to automatically import your content. It is then manually reviewed and added to the content bank in relevant categories. Quuu users will post content that will be of interest to their audiences to their social media accounts.
Quuu membership starts from $50 per month, per site for unlimited shares
Zest is a content curation platform designed for specifically for marketing professionals. Zest users use a Chrome extension to access a constant stream of vetted high-quality marketing content to share with their audiences. 92% of the Zest community are marketing professionals, so this can be a very effective platform to promote content in the marketing niche.
You can submit your content to Zest for free but its paid promotion option ensures you get clicks. Zest’s content boost costs $125 for 125 clicks.
Paid Social Media Marketing
While of course it’s free to post your content to your social media accounts, all the major social media platforms offer the option to pay for additional promotion.
Promoting your posts on social media ensures that your followers will see them and also helps you to grow your audience and following by pushing them to people who are not currently following your account.
Paid social media advertising can be quite effective because social media networks hold so much information about their users. This means you can be quite specific in who sees your paid promotions and target a very small audience to get the most out of your budget. You can target users by age, sex, location, interests, other accounts they’re following, and more.
Paid Content Discovery Platforms
Content discovery platforms like Outbrain and Taboola will display links to your content as “native ads” designed to integrate with the existing content on a site.
You’ve probably come across these native ads before at the end of posts on news or entertainment sites listed as “you may also like”, “recommended for you”, or “promoted content”.
There are some very big sites that use these native ad services (CNN, Mashable, and Business Insider to name a few) so your potential exposure is high. However, your content will be shown alongside others, which may look a bit “spammy”.
These sites work on a cost per click basis and you can start a campaign for as little as $10 a day but like many PPC networks, the cost can quickly add up if you’re not keeping track of your analytics or you don’t really know what you’re doing.
How to Track the Effectiveness of Your Content Promotion Strategies
Some of these techniques for promoting your blog content take quite a bit of time, so it’s important to make sure your efforts are paying off.
By tracking your promotional activities and the effect they’re having on your blog traffic and engagement, you can make a more informed decision on how to spend your time and resources.
For example, if you realize that blog commenting is having little effect, it would be wise to either adjust your strategy (by posting on different blogs or adjusting the content of your comments) or to abandon this technique entirely and spend the time on a more effective activity.
Start by getting organized and keeping a spreadsheet of all your blog posts including the URL, headline, keywords, any people or websites you’ve mentioned or linked to, and any other relevant information.
You can then add any promotional activities you do to this spreadsheet as you complete them.
You can measure the performance of your content by metrics such as traffic to the post, keyword ranking, social media shares, backlinks, and blog comments.
More detailed analytics can also help you to gain insight into which promotional techniques are the most effective. For example, you could track traffic from a particular guest post or from a forum you post on regularly.
You can also use Google’s Campaign URL builder to create different tracking links for each platform you promote your post on. This will make it easier to see which platforms are sending the most traffic and track what that traffic is doing after it lands on your post.
Conclusion
We’ve really only skimmed the surface of all the different ways you can promote your content. But if you’re feeling overwhelmed, don’t worry.
You don’t have to use all these methods to promote your posts – just pick a few to concentrate on and make sure you do them really well.
It will probably take a bit of experimentation to figure out what promotional techniques work best for your content and audience. But once you’ve figured this out, it’s simply a case of putting systems in place to make the process as easy and efficient as possible.
Remember also that the work you put in is cumulative. You might not see very impressive results at first, but as your traffic, links, and reputation start to grow, you’ll soon see that the effect is exponential. Don’t give up!
