So, you’ve just started a blog but you need to increase your audience and get more shares. This is when you need to start focusing on blog promotion to build your audience and establish yourself as an expert in your industry.
But, where to you start?
Many bloggers believe that they can simply share their blogs on social media and leave it there. But that won’t be enough anymore. You’ll have to spend time on blog promotion, actively be involved with your audience and connect with influencers.
Here are a few great tips to help you successfully promote your blog.
Pre-promotion
This is the part where you get everything ready to start promoting. It’s all about making sure your content is in tip-top condition and ready to be shared all over. So, start by looking at your site optimisation, or your technical SEO. Make sure that your content is search engine optimised and that search engines can find your site.
Make sure you have reliable hosting, and that your blog loads fast. Nobody wants to sit and wait for a page to load and they might just click away to another blog. Also make sure that your site is secure, especially if you use WordPress. It’s a very popular platform but you might get attacked at some point, as thousands of websites do every day.
Finally, check your content. Apart from being well-formatted, make sure you have the right number of internal and external links and that you have the right plugins to help you manage and improve your content and SEO.
Email Marketing
Despite the many tools available today, email marketing still remains one of the most powerful blog promotion tools available. The average ROI for email campaigns is around $44 for every $1 in the U.S. and £38 for every £1 in the U.K.
Once you have your marketing list you can start using it. Email your list of subscribers and ask them to read, comment on, and share your blog post. The more they share, the more likely your blog post is to reach a wider audience. Be sure to use a professional email signature.
Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing remains one of the most powerful tools out there. Popular platforms like Facebook and Twitter will help you to share your content and get it in front of the right audience. Start by focusing on the right social media channels for your blog, engage with people on those platforms and participate in social groups to increase social reach.
You can also use reciprocal sharing sites that gives you credits for sharing other people’s content. Other people will then share your content as well. Great examples of these services include Triberr and Viral Content Bee.
Next you can use social bookmarking sites like Reddit and Flipboard to help organise and share your popular bookmarks. You can bookmark your blog and also allow others to ‘upvote’ your posts to help gain more exposure.
Don’t forget to leverage social groups and forums.
These can help to establish your authority and boost your blog promotion efforts. You can build relationships too, by using tools like Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, web forums and platforms like Quora.
Content Leverage
By only writing and publishing a blog post, you are missing out. You can leverage your content and get it in front of a larger audience. There are a few ways you can do this:
Content curation
Some sites will allow you to take your content and curate it into lists and collections. A few examples include Scoop.it, List.ly and Paper.li.
Content aggregators
You can have your content collected and aggregated so that more visitors find it and you get in front of a larger audience. Examples are Alltop, Blog Engage and WP Clipboard.
Content syndication
This is the process of a blog that is pushed to a third-party site for republication on their own websites. So, publish your post on your blog, wait a few days, and then use a content syndication tool like Medium or LinkedIn.
Relationship marketing
Running a blog won’t be very successful if you try to do everything on your own. You can tap into a very large audience by using the right tools and platforms, and relationship marketing can be a great benefit.
Mention influencers in your post and let them know how much you value their work by including a link to your post. Just make sure it’s high quality content that they will want to share.
You can also interview an influential blogger and turn this into a great blog post. Or you can ask an influential blogger to contribute to your blog by using an Expert Roundup. This basically means you get many experts involved in giving tips or insight into a topic. You then publish this as ’25 Ways to …. With Experts’.
Blogger Outreach
You can also ask help from influencers in your industry and ask to publish or promote your content. You can ask to promote your content to their followers, and in turn publish a high-quality post on their blog. It’s a very effective way of promoting your content, but again, it should be valuable and well-written.
Finally, you can also use guest blogging as a way of content promotion. It’s highly effective, especially if you can get your content published on popular, high-traffic blogs.
Now that you have a great blog post to share, plan your content promotion effectively to build your audience and establish yourself as an expert in the industry. The more you promote, the more you will build your audience and grow your blog effectively.
