Managing your blog doesn’t end with just writing it. One needs to publish it as well. Just a great content is not enough. A full-proof blog promotion is required to keep your brand up and thriving. If you still ignore the potentiality of promoting your blog, you must be missing a lot of eyeballs out there. Don’t waste the hard work you have put into your content.
Without proper promotion, neither your content will reach the right target audience. Nor the readers can figure out what exactly you want them to act on. To get maximum impact with minimum work, promote your blog the right way.
Promoting your Blog – Key to the Success of a Brand
Nowadays, a brand lives upon content marketing. The more you produce valuable content for your audience, the higher is the chance for growth of your brand. So the primary goal is to garner as many visitors you can before you monetize your blog. Apart from the services you provide, your brand can make money from the visitors who convert – be through PPC, affiliate referrals, or those who turn into steady buyers of your services.
Simply speaking, you can’t just pen down your creative genius and then idly sit back, hoping your audience will find their way to read it. On the contrary, blog promotion helps you to –
- Fetch the existing audience
- Boost social shares
- Drive new prospects
- Trigger opt-ins and sign-ups
- Garner backlinks
In a nutshell, promotion of your blog must be the staple of your content strategy, not just an extra. If you want your content masterpiece to be consumed by all, you must share.
Checklist for Blog Promotion!
There is no secret formula to learn how to promote so effectively that creates a buzz. Many big brands and blogs started their journey slow. But with time and right step, they made it big! One must be patient enough to wait for the right time and the right opportunity to hit the bull’s eye. Spend time and money judiciously to get the ball rolling. With each day, perfecting your moves count. Crazy Egg’s 206% jump in blog traffic didn’t happen in one day.
Below is a handy checklist that may help you in the task of getting yourself in the correct position before you launch the promotions.
- Ensure your blog has working social media buttons. Proper and prominent social media buttons from the leading platforms make it easy for the readers to share the blog at one go.
- Fancy up your content with tweetable links that readers can share instantly. Click To Tweet is one such tool that makes this thing happen. With just one click, anyone can share anything on Twitter; this gets you a lot of tweets.
- Check the blog comment box whether it is easy enough for people to leave comments.
- Your contact form must work correctly and must enable the readers to leave their email address and other details.
- Check that your blog opens in the common leading browsers, viz, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer.
- If your audience finds value in your content, they will expect to connect with you and subscribe to your blog. Help them by including an option to subscribe through an email ID.
- Check your menu bar and sidebar links, whether they redirect to the correct links or not. Also ensure, whether the interlinks and cross-links are working fine.
- You need analytics to know how good or bad your blog is performing. Check that you have a proper set up of Google Analytics to track the number of traffic to your blog post, the source of that traffic and the top posts of your blog.
With all these points duly checked and arranged, you are all set to promote blog to increase traffic!
The 10 Tried and Tested and Comprehensive Guidelines for a Triumphant Blog Promotion:
1. Optimizing your Site
This includes choosing a proper host, optimizing the speed of your website, WordPress security provision, the theme of your website, the plugins – all of these contribute to the smooth functioning of your blog. Each of the aspects perform a specific role and checking on them is your duty. The onus is on you to choose a strong hosting provider that facilitates the smooth running of your WordPress site. Ensuring the speed of your site so that people don’t have to wait to read your blog, also falls in this.
Moreover, weak WordPress security is the prime target for hackers. So, install the proper security provisions.
And finally, the themes and plugins constitute the crux of your site. These being the most integral part requires due management. A lousy theme for your blog that is not mobile-friendly is a strict no-no. Likewise, installing plugins from an unauthentic site can backfire.
So, pay heed to these guidelines if you ask for a successful promotional effort.
2. Select the Best Content. Only!
This is the most crucial part while you market your blog. There’s no faint doubt over it that the best content is worth posting or promoting. So let the best person (read, content) win! Given the time and energy, one has to put in the whole promotion itinerary, if the content is not your best, the entire effort goes in vain.
You are losing it by investing in something that won’t give you any ROI. So, think content first. Let others in your team voice their opinion whether a particular blog is fit to promote.
3. Identify the Trending Search Keywords and Phrases
Keyword Research comes in the preliminary phase of blog creation and promotion. To make your content enough optimized for the search engine crawlers to crawl it, the content itself must be rich with targeted keywords. Google wants to see content that has all the accurate keywords that people use while searching.
To rank in the topmost section of the SERPs, trending and popular keywords must be found in the content. You may expand your keyword list based on your discretion. Understand the user intent behind each search, and make your content directly aligned to those terms. To amplify your ranking potential and augment your attempt, a thorough keyword research is vital.
4. Engage in Search Engine Optimization of your Blog
SEO trends and practices change as soon as they are adapted. But come what may, some rules of thumb remain unchanged. Identifying a primary keyword and the associated secondary keywords is the initial starting point. You may include several long-tail keywords.
However, the usage of first-person is generally avoided. If you are at a loss as to how to find a suitable keyword that gives you the much-desired optimization, take help from tools like BuzzSumo, LSIGraph or Answer the Public that gives you the trending keywords.
Come up with a compelling Meta description that reflects what’s inside of your content. This will trigger the clicks. And then comes the cross-linking and the inter linkings. Make the keywords your anchor text and cross-link with relevant contents you find on the web.
5. Image Optimization in the Blog post
This blog promotion strategy works effectively, because in the current era, people are enthusiastic about engaging visuals and graphics. Visual contents generate hype, attract traffic and elevate your business. If you want to create a long term brand identity, you need to stick to visual content marketing.
Likewise, your blog post needs supporting graphics to amplify the quality of your content and make it more engaging. However, the images must be optimized in the right manner so that they get crawled. For e.g., the dimensions of your images must be aligned to your blog page.
If the page is 600 pixels wide, then the images must also be the same, to fit within the theme. The file size and resolution must not be more than 72dpi or 92dpi, or else it will make the image excessively large. Since your blog is for web purpose solely, optimize your image at a low web-friendly resolution.
And finally, ensure there’s a meaningful description to the Alt Text on the images that help visually inspired individuals to understand the image. And mainly Alt texts help in indexing of your images.
6. Create a Valuable Email List
Email is an effective platform for promoting your blog, just like social media platforms. And sending emails that are thoughtful and nuanced generates more traffic than any other medium. MailChimp is one of the most used and preferred tools for dispatching email campaign.
Using an RSS-to-email feature enables automation for email deliveries. This helps you to know whether the emails have been delivered successfully or not. The most important way to create compelling emails is to come up with a persuasive subject line. The subject is the first thing that a person sees when they receive an email.
The open rate of an email increases when the subject line is engaging. Include your existing customers, as well as your new leads in your database. Send emails in intervals that talk about the blogs. That way, your reach will be diverse, and more people would know about your content.
Lead people to sign up your email list with compelling reasons, with lead magnet. Include your existing customers, as well as your new leads in your database. Send emails in intervals that talk about the blogs. This will diversify your reach, and more people would know about your content. Lead people to sign up your email list with compelling reasons, called lead magnet.
7. Avail the Leading Social Media Networks
One of the most potential blog promotion techniques, is to avail the top-most social network channels. Harness the power of social media channels and tell your followers about the new blog posts you come up with. Using social media management tools like Hootsuite allows you to post your content in all the social media networks, your brand has a page in, in just a single click.
You may schedule as well, that will save you a lot of hard work. Consider leveraging Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, for your blog promotion, as the most eyeballs are on these leading channels. If you have any marketing influencer or another renowned blogger mentioned in your content, don’t forget to tag them along in your post.
If you don’t, then you miss the chance of them promoting your content on their channels. Marketing influencers already possess a horde of fans and followers. So if your content gets an exposure there, imagine the number of eyeballs it would attract and the subsequent new followers you would acquire. So if you think about how to promote your blog on social media, hope you have got your answer.
8. Do some Guest Blogging too
Despite all the recent fads, an excellent way to appeal to the social media influencers is to seek the opportunity to guest blog on theirs. It happens to be a great strategy to boost awareness, establish brand credibility and raise your own influence on the social media.
When people see you have featured in those heavy-weight blogs, they would recognize you as anew influencer, or at least a brand of value. Not only you can generate awareness for your brand or website, but you can also create new quality links for your SEO.
In your post, you may interlink some texts to your blogs. This won’t work instantly, but will take time since it is a long-term strategy. But if you are dedicated, you may reap the fruits of your efforts and the positive effect it can have on your social authority and influence.
9. Social Groups, Online communities and Q&A Forums – Best Places for Promotion
The more you join these communities, the more your name spreads. Here you can build relations, establish yourself as an industry expert and get opportunities to contribute. Most of the participants in these communities and online forums come with a question and search of its answer.
If you can help them get their answer, through your blog content, in no time you will be welcomed as an expert. You must make friends there by helping with answers that will urge them to share your blogs in their own networks and social circles. Identify your audience where they flock in, and be always active there.
10. Harness the Potential of Social Bookmarking Websites
You must never stop spreading the word. The more you let the world know about your valuable content pieces, the more that would raise the impact of the contents. You may find several social bookmarking and voting sites on the web. Target those that are within your niche and have a steady flow of quality users.
Digg, Reddit, AllTop, BlogEngage, StumbleUpon, GrowthHackers, etc. are some of the most popular bookmarking sites. Many of these sites also have a voting system, and if your content gets an ‘up vote’, catapulting your blog to more exposure. The secret is to find the right social bookmarking site that resonates with the nature of your business, most beneficially.
Bonus Point
11. Come up with an Engaging Expert Round-Up
Sometimes it’s better to leave things with the experts. This is a brilliant way of promoting a blog that has been tried and tested many times with mostly positive outcomes. Pick any topic from your niche and ask the experts to contribute their feedback on the same. This promotional strategy helps you to reach a larger audience for your blog, and get on the radar of the marketing influencers.
Expert round-ups will get you more shares and likes, what exactly you want. A crucial thing to remember is your question/topic for the round-up must be unique; something has never been covered by anyone before. Bland and silly topics won’t get appreciated by any expert or reader alike.
And lastly, promoting your blog contents on Instagram has its own benefit. With a steady and whopping 1 Billion monthly users, Instagram gets you a tonne of new eyeballs and subsequent traffic. Quality post and relevant graphics are much adulated there and build genuine audience. The answer to how to promote your blog on Instagram, lies in understanding the metrics that the channel has.
Final Words!
Knowing the techniques, and actually implementing them, are two both different things. Pulling off a successful blog promotion is a combination of doing the same processes over and over again. With mistakes made in every step, you would learn the right way of doing it.
Having read the tips and guidelines, hope by now you have gained some knowledge of the requisites for a promotional campaign for your blog post. It’s impossible to implement all the tips at once, but there’s no harm in starting with one or two. Start small and continue making minor tweaks along the way.
All must see your content. So make sure you promote your content in all the places it needs to be promoted in. Once you are done with this, consider the analytics and data. Which of the content gets the highest traffic, the source of your traffic, are they taking action. All these analytics are required to make the right decision.
Don’t be in haste to eliminate a strategy the moment you find it is not working. Give some time and some techniques take longer to deliver result than others. You can seek the assistance of a professional branding agency whose skillful experts will do the job on behalf of you. In exchange The option of employing an external branding agency comes with a plethora of benefits, one of which is saving much time to concentrate on making the core business strategies.
Apart from the blog promotion ideas listed in this blog piece, you may come up with other equally creative and smart ideas that would make you come out victorious with your effort. Please do share them in the comment box below. We would love to cover them in our next blog post.
Until then, Happy Blogging!
