Blogging is fun, but it’s not the job for everyone. Maintaining a good blog consistently is a lot of work. A good blog not only requires quality content, but also needs to be promoted and marketed in such a way that it achieves maximum exposure consistently.
In order to earn an income from blogging, you need to know how to drive traffic to your blog consistently over time. If you have traffic, the money will follow. Blog promotion is a key factor in getting that traffic, and thus the income that follows!
There are many ways to promote a blog. Effective blog promotion can happen via SEO,social media marketing, guest posting, commenting, forum marketing, email marketing, free eBooks and more.
In today’s post, I will be covering several blog promotion techniques that are easy to implement and can bring great exposure to your blog in no time.
Bear in mind that success requires hard work and smart work, and successful blog promotion is no exception.
Everyman’s guide to promoting a blog the right way:
Honestly, there are numerous ways to market your blog. My usual strategy is to pick one or two methods at a time, and stick to those for a while, giving them my time, focus, energy and effort. This ensures the maximum exposure achievable using that particular technique.
That’s what I do. Let’s have a look at some of the many techniques you can choose toward the successful promotion of your blog.
Search engine optimization:
The natural growth of your blog is important from inception through the life of your blog. If you learn how to drive traffic from popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask and others, your blog will have an ample amount of visitors, enabling you to earn income via PPC ads, PPM ads and so on.
With regard to successful search engine optimization (SEO), many factors contribute such as single post optimization, image optimization, keyword optimization — really, it’s complete blog optimization.
In 2012, SEO is not only limited to keyword research and writing articles that target your keywords. You also need to tend carefully to user experience in terms of your site’s loading speed, its ad-to-content ratio, and the implementation of social sharing buttons to get social signals.
Facebook:
Facebook, with 900+ million users, is the largest social networking website online. Many online businesses are running completely on referral traffic from Facebook, and we can’t ignore the importance of Facebook for the promotion of our blogs.
The first step to taking advantage of Facebook for blog promotion is is to set up a Facebook fan page for your blog.
Once you have a fan page, you will want to give some energy to finding ways to increase the “likes” on your fan page, so that whenever you update anything on your fan page wall, it will appear on the Facebook walls of your fans, and you will thus generate referral traffic.
You should also invest some time and energy on user engagement, and creating a niche community around your page. This is very important. In fact, your Facebook page could be one of the best ways to engage with your audience in real-time. Have a look at the ShoutMeLoud Facebook fan page to see how I engage with users.
Here are a few articles that will help you to make the most of Facebook for the promotion of your blog:
Twitter:
Most bloggers these days understand the importance of Twitter. If you’re still using Twitter only for personal use and not for marketing, you’re missing out on a lot of potential for driving traffic to your blog. Twitter traffic is great, especially when your post is retweeted with some trending topics.
If you’re already using a personal Twitter account, I would suggest that you create a profile specifically for your blog’s domain. This will be helpful for branding and as an alternate way for readers to subscribe to your blog.
- Read: How to tweet effectively to drive traffic from Twitter
Social bookmarking sites:
Social bookmarking sites can make your blog traffic crazy awesome if you know how to use it to drive traffic.
To summarize the process, Twitter is a micro blogging tool, but if you know how to command Twitter, you can use it to easily drive quality traffic to your blog. If your posts become popular on social bookmarking sites like Stumbleupon and Reddit, you can drive thousands of traffic hits in a short time. With that said, you do need to carefully monitor and understand the social bookmarking websites, and what works best for these types of forums. (For example, list posts perform very well in any search engine.)
Guest blogging:
Having your blog featured on other similar-niche blogs will not only send you traffic but it will also help you to drive targeted traffic and SEO backlinks. Especially since the Penguin update, guest blogging has become one of the best ways to generate backlinks to your blog.
I have previously shared a complete guest blogging marketing plan, and you can check out a list of blogs where you can submit guest posts, one of the most effective ways to promote your blog or website.
Interviews:
Once your blog starts getting decent traffic consistently, many other bloggers or people who are inspired by you will request an interview with you. Personally, I feel that I should not let my fans down where interview requests are concerned, as these are the people who are my greatest asset as a blogger. For this reason, if you are offered the opportunity to be interviewed, I suggest that you accept the interview and talk about yourself and your blog, and allow a whole new audience to learn from you and to learn of the existence of your blog.
Commenting on other blogs:
Like guest posting, commenting on blogs in a similar niche is one of the best ways topromote your blog. When doing so, be sure to add value via your comment, otherwise you will simply be diluting your brand.
You should also sign up for a free account on Gravatar.com to get a comment profile image.
I recommend Amit’s guide to blog commenting, which is somewhat of a holy grail for people who are trying to develop excellence in blog commenting.
Use niche forums:
Forums and discussion boards are other excellent means of getting traffic and a targeted audience to your blog. I have personally tried a few forums for webmasters, and I found that they do drive decent traffic. The amount of traffic was not huge, but forums drive targeted traffic, which results in more time spent on the site. So this is a quality vs quantity result.
There are many factors which you need to take into consideration when using forums for promoting your blog. Here are a couple of articles to point you in the right direction:
Business cards, t-Shirts, gifts:
I know our blog works online, but I can’t ignore the importance of offline marketing. “Word of mouth” marketing is always very beneficial, and in order to establish your blog as a brand, you need to use all opportunities available to you.
Business cards are little
marketing tools that do not cost much to produce. You can create and order business cards online that will help to market and advertise your brand for very little money. Whenever you attend any event or meeting related to blogging, you can simply pass your business card to people you meet. Also, when you speak with people as you go about your business, often you will be asked for a business card, and having one available only adds to your professional appearance.
You can find more examples of offline promotion techniques in my previous post on: How to Promote Your Blog Offline.
As you can see, there are countless ways to promote your website, business or blog both online and offline, and surely more will appear as time goes on.
If you want to try something unique to market your brand, think outside the box! You can even buy a Billboard ad or advertise your blog on national television. You never know how much buzz you can generate!
I will continue to update this article with new information and ideas. Meanwhile, be sure to share your tips and techniques for blog promotion in the comments section below.
If you find the information in this post useful, please share it with your friends and colleagues on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.
