Once your blog is online, you should start performing active promotions to get the deserved traffic. There are multiple ways to promote your blog, you must discover the one’s that would work you way and start implementing them
You cannot just let your content sit there and wait for people to find your website. With your website live, you have to start making efforts to make people aware of your content.
To advertise your blogs, there are several ways. While some of them are free to use, the others are advertisements that you will have to pay for.
Note: This blog post is part of the “Blogging for Beginners” series.
While there are innumerable ways to promote your WordPress blog, the one’s listed here are for beginners to create their site on their own.
- Social Media Marketing to promote your blog
- Optimizing your website for search engines
- Link Building for blog promotions
- Guest posting to promote your blog
- Promote your blog through videos and infographics
- Organized interlinking
- Commenting on other blogs
- Using Quora to increase traffic on your blog
- Paid promotions through direct advertisements
1. Social Media Marketing
The social media marketing plays an undeniably prominent role in your digital marketing strategy.
When you think about promoting your blogs, the first and most accessible option is social media. It is where you can get in touch with groups of people with similar interests.
If you regularly share important updates and post snippets on social media and keep your readers updated with useful content and links, you can build a social following base. This can help you easily promote your website using different social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, SlideShare, etc.
There are different ways you can harness the power of social media to advertise the new content and pages of your website. If used the medium properly, social media can be one of your greatest source of traffic.
Using social media as a way to reach more audience
Social media feature exclusive social groups of people that are hard to find anywhere else. Moreover, it is accessible to everyone, mostly, free of cost. Therefore, it serves as one of the best ways to reach people.
You can use social media for your blog promotion and learn as you go, or hire social media marketing experts to create a strong social media presence for your website.
Identifying social media options that could work for your business
No shoe fits all. If you are looking for a complete guide on social media marketing that will work for your business, you must know that there’s no ideal guide. For different businesses, different promotional tactics work.
You have to define a personalized approach for your social media marketing campaign. Try and find out what strategies work for you.
There is no universal manual for social media marketing,
Paid social media marketing
If you want quick results, you can resort to paid social media advertising.
Paid social media is a smarter way to deliver your promotional content to your potential customers. It obviously works faster and efficiently to make sure that your ads are viewed by the targetted users.
Social media Including share buttons and encouraging your users to share your article
Also, don’t forget to include the following buttons on your site. One of the common practices is to add the follow buttons in the footer. However, it’s up to you. You can set the following buttons anywhere on your website. It is advisable to add these buttons somewhere they can be easily noticed.
These buttons help your readers to follow you on social media. You can associate your social media account with these buttons and clicking them will automatically open your social media profile and your visitors can give you a follow.
Then there are the share buttons that must be present on your blog page. These buttons allow your visitors to immediately share the post on your social media.
Mostly, all the premium blog themes come with inbuilt share button for your blog page. If it doesn’t, it is really easy to integrate this feature using the WordPress plugins.
WordPress plugin for social media promotions
WordPress supports many plugins that can help you promote your website. These plugins are designed to improve your social media presence.
For instance: There are various WordPress plugins that shows the sharing options on your posts. Even though most of the blog themes already include this feature by default, these plugins make it easier for you if your theme doesn’t.
The plugins are lightweight and simple. You can download & install them and social media icons start appear on the page. Your visitors can click on one of these icons to directly share your article on their selected social media profile.
Besides, there are a number of plugins that you can use for a different purpose to help you promote your site through social media options. Here are some of the best Social media related WordPress plugins that can help you do so:
- Shared counts: Shows social media icons with the share counts.
- Simple Social Icons: This is a WordPress plugin that can let you add social media icons to the sidebar of your WordPress blog.
- Better Click to tweet: As the name suggests, this plugin adds a “Tweet this” button for the selected quote of your WordPress blog post.
- Social Warfare: This is a multipurpose social sharing plugin that can help you with multiple social media marketing options.
- WordPress Social login: Social login makes it easy for your users to register and login on your site. This plugin helps you enable social login for your site.
- Instagram feed: Instagram marketing has emerged as one of the most successful social marketing alternatives. This plugin lets you show an Instagram feed on your website.
Using hashtags for better exposure
Hashtags make it easy for the users to find the social media posts of a particular subject. For your blog promotions, it can help you categorize your post under a relevant hashtag so that it is found easily.
What more? You can find relevant hashtags and use them in your posts. You can use multiple hashtags in a single post for wider prospects.
Remain active on social media
If you are running a business, socializing is necessary in order to convey your ideas and messages. And there’s no better place than the social media to spread your message.
To make sure that your social media presence is effective, you must keep it interactive. This includes posting frequently, interacting with your followers, and participating in other activities to keep them entertained.
Active social media presence helps you maintain your social media following and even improve it.
2. Optimizing your website for search engines
There are multiple methods of blog promotions to gain traffic but the natural way to do is by making your website SEO friendly. An SEO friendly blog opens up the huge doors to the organic traffic to your website.
Once Google starts listing you as one of the top search results, you can be assured of new readers day in day out. However, impressing Google to rank you as its top search result is not that easy. The whole concept of SEO is to make sure that your content qualifies to compete with (the very intense) competition on the internet, and maintain high standards and relevance.
You don’t actually have to be an SEO expert to optimize your website. Obviously, you must invest in a good SEO firm when the need arises. But there are some basic SEO hacks that you must know to make your pages SEO friendly.
Keyword research & optimization
This is to make sure that when your article is live on the internet, Google should know what it is about. Keywords are the search phrases that your readers might use to find your content on the internet.
Here is an indepth guide on keyword research that can help you to plan keyword for your article.
Besides the main keyword, also prepare a list of other closely related keywords. And this article here is about how to optimize your webpage for the chosen keyword.
One of the easier ways to rank is to target long tail keywords. Generic keywords are hard to rank for, therefore, you can target specific keywords or phrases instead.
Content Marketing to promote your blog
Since a blog website is everything about content, there are more chances for you to rank with your content.
Your blogs and articles can help you cover more and more keywords and increases your relevance. Also, Google will surely appreciate your efforts of generating fresh, exclusive and useful content.
You can even try writing a series of similar or related posts that improves the value of the interlinked articles and increases the chance of scoring a better rank on search engine.
But while you focus on content marketing and other SEO strategies, you must keep in mind that getting traction through SEO takes time and continuous efforts. The results may not be as fast as other promotional methods, but still investing in SEO is worth it all.
3. Link building for more traffic
Link building works best for promotions because they are a direct source of traffic. With the link of your blog shared on other platforms, it is possible to redirect the interested people to your website. Also, backlinks to your website are a signal to the search engine that your website has some valuable content.
Quality of Links & Sources
When a link is attached in an article/page, it is indeed a recommendation for the users to find the relevant content there. And therefore, Google interprets it as resourceful and legit content.
Moreover, Link from authority sites is obviously more valuable than that from low sources. Always remember that a single link from a credible website is far better than 50 links from poor sources. It is also advisable, to avoid black hat techniques of link building like creating doorway websites or poor guest post on other sites, just to get a link back to yours.
A few things you must keep in mind while you try to get links back to your site:
- Be very selective about the sites that link to you.
- Approach the credible bloggers in your niche to get the citation.
- Make sure the anchor tag contains the targetted keyword for your article/post you are linking.
- If you are posting an article for getting a link to your site, make sure that the quality of the content is the best.
Link building is a very vast subject. When done properly, it can help you boost your traffic, conversions and Search ranks. But you can start with the basic and learn as you go. Here’s a useful article on link building that can throw some light on this subject for you.
4. Guest posting to promote your blog
This is the traditional method of promoting yourself. You can request an authority website of your niche to feature a post written by you. These post typically contains a link or two to your web blog.
Guest posts can help you:
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- Build credibility as a niche blogger
- Attract traffic and get backlinks
Guest posting frequently and on popular websites of your niche can help you become a recognized name in the niche blogging community.
To start guest posting, you must find sites related to your niche that can help you draw traffic and build credibility as a blogger.
It helps your voice to reach to new audience. When you post on an established blog, with an average to large reader base, you introduce yourself to a new group of audience.
The guest post also accommodates a link back to your blog, which is good for the SEO. Guest posting, ultimately, helps you build relationships with other bloggers and audience. On the other hand, you can even allow guest posting on your website. It can help you in one way or the other.
5. Promote your blog: Videos and Infographics
It is a busy world we live in. People who come to your blog may not have the time to read a very useful article of 3000-4000 words.
Obviously, that doesn’t mean you don’t have to write it for those who want to read it. However, videos and graphical representation of content on a blog has proved to be of great importance for your blogs.
They are useful in two ways
- Graphics, Videos, and infographics are appreciated by most visitors because it makes your content easier to understand.
- With graphics, videos, and images on your site, your chances to appear in different searches increases.
You can write articles with video and self-explanatory images because that will make it interesting and make your readers stay longer and return to your website for the excellent content.
With multimedia rich content, you visitors find many reasons to stay on your site.
6. Promote your blog through Organized interlinking
Proper interlinking helps you maintain the user who has already landed on your website. By interlinking your article as and when required, you can make your visitors stay on your site for further reading.
The links to the useful articles can be direct, as shown in the image above. There is a direct reference to the articles you might be interested in reading. Many websites implement this technique that includes a ‘further reading’ section on the page.
On the other hand, you can also include links subtly in your content. Such links are also effective because they add useful navigation for your blog readers. The image below shows an example
Moreover, it also helps you improve the average staying time on your pages, which is great for SEO. Interlinking your articles also helps make your content more resourceful for your visitors. There can be as many reference links as you want, for further reading.
7. Commenting on the other blogs
Visit the websites/online forums related to your blog’s title and indulge in the community. You can be a part of their discussions through your comments.
Commenting on other blogs helps you establishing your identity in the niche blogging sector. Make sure that the comment you add, brings some value to the discussion. Along with a valuable comment, you can subtly mention your article, or blog.
For example: Here is a comment with links to other sites. Commenting in a similar way can help you direct readers to your site.
8. Be a part of the Quora community to promote your blog
Quora is the most popular question and answer community that can help you bring traffic to your website. Maintain an active quora profile by asking questions and answering the relevant questions.
By answering the questions relevant to your article, you can promote your blog directly among the targeted audience. When you answer a question, you are directly addressing those who are interested in the answer.
Below is an example of how an answer on Quora promotes a blog.
Quora allows you to be creative with your answers, by allowing you to add images, videos, and links. Using the inbuilt editor, you can create a mini-article with a link to your blog. It is free and easy to use, and one of the best way to promote your WordPress blogs.
9. Paid Promotions through Google AdSense as well as banner advertisements
Want to promote your blog? You can use the concept of advertising for your blogs, just like you use it for your product and service based websites.
The concept is similar to the traditional method of advertising. Approach a relevant platform owner, and ask them if they are interested to promote your blog on their website.
While you choose the websites and platforms to advertise, always make sure that they are from the related niche. There must be something common in the site you choose to advertise and your blog. There must be a reason for your visitors to click on the advertisement and read your blog.
For example, The image below shows a blog post with the advertisement of another blog post. Both the posts target the similar audience, people who want to create a classified website. While the main post shows a list of the best Classified themes, the advertisement is about the tutorial on how to create a classified website.
Besides the conventional classified website, you can also turn to Google AdSense to promote your blog. It helps you reach more audience with smart targetted advertisements.
By all means, direct advertisements work as fine for blogs, as they do for any other product/services. A properly planned and strategized approach to this can ultimately help you increase the traffic on your site.
Choose the best approaches to promote your blog
Different businesses have different requirements and different methods of promotion. Unfortunately, there’s no fail-safe instruction manual on what could work with your website.
However, when you own a blog and you want to make it big, you must keep trying new things. To make sure your articles make a mark, you will have to do much more than just creating a blog and posting new articles regularly.
Constant efforts for Search Engine Optimization and promoting your blogs through various channels can help you gain more exposure. And traffic is vital for your blogs, once you start having enough traffic, you will see endless possibilities lying ahead of you!