If you create great content but do nothing to promote it, then you waste your time and money, unless it is your hobby and you don’t even think about financial profit. But if you do business blogging and expect it to benefit your company with new leads, then you must do your best in order to get your content consumed by the right audience.
In this post, I will share actionable blog promotion ideas that you can you use today. Some of them are really time-consuming but they are free and will definitely give you extra traffic no matter what you write about – SEO, marketing, food or beauty.
1. Write an SEO-friendly Post
As you can see there are 2, 400 monthly searches on average of the phrase ‘how to promote your blog’, not including dozens of other related key terms. This means I am likely to get some readers from Google if the post ranks well. Your post can rank for really lots of key terms if you do keyword research prior to writing. Just don’t try to manipulate; once you learn what key phrases you want to rank for, make an effort to understand the intent hidden behind the queries. The best way to give your post extra free boost is to answer people’s questions and to solve their problems.
2. Share it on social media
You can also use the power of your friends. Reach out to your friends and ask them not only to share your content but also to ask their friends to do the same. This trick can considerably increase your reach.
Find relevant discussions and suggest a solution. If you followed by first advice then most likely you can find related groups where you can expose the post to the right audience.
3. Email your posts to the subscribers
If you have no subscribers’ list, then it is a huge mistake. Email marketing (don’t confuse it with email spam) is a powerful tool. You can ask your subscribers to share your content, why not? You can either directly say that you will be grateful to such shares or do it in such a way so that people would feel involved in the process even deeper. A phrase in the image is taken from a newsletter of a marketer I am always happy to read from.
As you can see there is a pretty friendly and straight-forward message here (“Guys, I’d like you to publish it on these two websites”), while there is no annoying push.
4. Find relevant discussions or start one
I will mention several places where you can leave a link to your blog post and attract the attention of your target audience. Be careful while using these tips because your content promotion is at a risk to turn into spam.
Q&A websites
It may seem strange but people do actively participate on the websites like Yahoo Answers and Quora. You can either start your own discussion or answer the questions posted by others. Make sure you bring real value.
Forums
Yes, I recommend posting on forums as well. Some of the forums might even allow dofollow external links which will give you an extra boost in rankings. Contribute to the forums before you post links to your content otherwise you might get banned.
Comment on other blogs
Find blogs that write about similar topics, read the discussion and recommend your content. Lots of comments and links are deleted by the admins even if they are not spammy. Here are some tips to leave a good comment –
- Register at Gravatar and upload a good image of yours to show them you are a real person
- Write longer comments, I’d recommend writing at least 150 words; it depends on the necessity of course
- Read the article you want to comment on, disagree a contradictive statement, provide your reasons, ask questions, suggest and inspire discussion
5. Do Outreach
What outreach actually is? Outreach is letting people know about your content by means of emails, tweets and even phone calls. It is a really hard work but it is free. Why should you do it? You should because you want industry leaders to share your content and link to it.
There are stages in the outreach process.
Find blogs
Technorati, Postrank and Wikio are three of the great places to find popular niches blogs and try to establish relationships with.
Find people
You need to establish contacts with people who run popular blogs. Picking up the fish of the same size as you might be a good idea, because big guys might be too busy and uninterested in your offer. Learn more about what these people are interested in to create a better pitch.
Contact people
There is only one thing you should remember – most of the people you are going to contact receive tones of emails every day, they are extremely busy, so your message must be short and straight-to-the-point.
Build meaningful connections
You should carefully analyze what a person is interested in. Since you don’t offer any commercial benefits there should be a different sound reason for them to deal with you. Think of how you can gain their attention or what you can offer in exchange.
It is always good to know what works for you. Create KPI (Key Performance Indicators) that would help you to measure success and failures (e.g. number of valuable connections made, the number of leads, shares, etc.).
Tip: Some blogs publish roundups on a regular basis; this is another good opportunity to offer your content for review.
6. Re-package your content
Content re-packaging (or repurposing) is putting the content that you already created into different formats. What are those formats?
Slide deck – you can turn your post posts into great slide decks.
Podcasts – record an audio version of your articles for those who prefer listening to reading.
PDF files – there are lots of websites like Scribd where you can upload PDF files to get extra content exposure.
Infographics – creating great infographics require proficient design knowledge, however, you can find free infographic templates and insert your data there.
Coda
As you can see there are pretty many ways to promote your content on the web for absolutely free. Yes, they are time-consuming and not always effective in the way you might expect but they bring results. If you are really passionate about what you do, success will come. You are welcome to share your experience and ideas in comments.
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