7 fundamental ways to promote your blog successfully

by Lili Petkova | Nov 01, 2012

Or, what are the basic things you should include in your blog promotion strategy?

When we’re talking about blogs, it’s all about content – you’ll read that everywhere. But even if your blog (personal or business) has great and useful content, does it matter, if there is no one to read it? I would say that when we’re talking about blogs, it’s all about content AND promotion. And having a successful blog requires more time spent on promotion than on writing. Let’s go through 7 fundamental ways you can effectively promote your blog, so that you won’t waste your time on meaningless efforts – you’ll need that time for creating great content.

1. Social Media

Well, it’s been so popular in the last couple of years that I will start with promoting your blog through social media channels. Social media sites have a lot of traffic and users visit them to find content – especially Twitter. Promoting your blog through social media will cost you a lot of time.

• Be active. These sites are “social” because they’re meant to be used for interactions between people. You should not only post your new article on Facebook, but also share it in LinkedIn or Google+ and tweet it. This could look more like spam, so to avoid that, interact with other users, make some friends. The more connections you have, the more users might read your blog. But think about quality, not just quantity – make sure you actually speak with your connections. In other words, be social all the time.
• Be different. Every social media has its own rules and specific behavior. For example, if you share something on Facebook every 10 minutes, you’ll become really annoying, but on Twitter people expect this from you in some way. Spend some time on each social network just observing other users in order to explore the standards. Follow some bloggers in various networks and learn from them – what do they post, when do they post it and what else (other than their own articles) are they talking about.
• Find suitable networks. Sometimes the biggest sites may not be the best decision for you. Smaller and more focused social media can give you more benefits. Don’t be present in every social network site that you know or hear about – being there without being social and only posting your content won’t help you find more readers.

In fact, using social media to promote your blog is not enough – but it is a significant part of your strategy for finding readers for your blog. Give Facebook a chance because of the large number of users there, and definitely try Twitter. Follow relevant and popular people there and send them replies. If they get back to you, you might become more popular. Promote yourself or your business, then promote your blog, and you’ll see the power of social media in increasing traffic to your site.

2. Guest blogging

Writing a post for someone else’s blog is a great opportunity to attract attention to your blog from audiences of other blogs. Guest blogging is popular with bloggers because of the benefits they get from it. For the host it means some diversity; for the guest it’s an opportunity to make their blog more popular and to generate traffic and backlinks.

• Write your best post. Then publish it in another blog. Seriously. Try your best when you’re a guest blogger, because you have one shot to impress the other audience and win it for your blog. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should publish your best articles only in other blogs and not in your own – you have readers who, once won, must be kept.
• Pick blogs carefully. Choose the right blogs where you want to publish as a guest blogger. Seek the type of readership that you want and topics which have something in common with your blog. If you have a blog for cooking and recipes for example, posting as a guest in a blog for reviews of smartphones and tablets is probably not the best decision, right?
• Don’t overshoot. Don’t publish too much in other blogs. You have your own blog and it needs most of your attention. Your ideas for new posts can’t be used only for guest blogging. Keep your blog alive and don’t ignore it for the sake of gaining a couple of new readers. You’ll lose them anyway if you have nothing of interest to offer them.

Don’t write only guest posts, and invite other bloggers to write in your blog. This will improve your SEO and it can provide different content for your readers and for social media. And don’t forget to talk to the audience of the other blog – answer their questions and try to build a relationship. That is, if the blogger who you are writing for lets you, of course. Some bloggers are jealous of their readers, so ask them first.

3. Social bookmarking

Social bookmarking sites can help you increase the traffic to your blog when used wisely. How you can successfully use those tools can be read about in Make your own online business library (part 1).

Of course when we’re talking about social media and social bookmarking, logically we think about advertising. And advertising is maybe the most obvious way of promoting your blog – but I didn’t mention it. Advertising requires some investment. For your business blog it might be necessary. For your personal one – it depends on what you are willing to pay. Either way, promoting your blog with online advertising is no different than promoting any other business. Use Facebook advertising or Google AdWords – they tend to be the most effective and most targeted ads. Other effective ways for promoting your blog can be read about in 7 fundamental ways to promote your blog successfully (part 2).