How to promote a blog? A comprehensive guide
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Abdul Wadood
Promoting a blog plays a significant role in determining its success.
Some bloggers spend a lot of time publishing a high-quality blog, but they fail to promote it. Trust me, by doing so — you’re making all your hard work go down the drain.
From my blogging experience, I recommend that — if you spend two hours writing a blog, at least spend an hour promoting it.
If you’re a beginner, you’ll probably not be aware of the strategies to promote a blog. But, don’t worry!
In this blog, I have listed the best strategies to promote a blog from my blogging experience.
Are you excited? Let’s dive straight into the blog!
1. Optimize your blog for SEO
Optimizing your blog to rank high on the search results is one of the best and most effective ways to promote it.
SEO is cost-effective, and it’s a long-term solution compared to other promotional strategies. Once you optimize your blog for SEO, you don’t have to work on it often, which means the income generated is passive.
Great!
Now let’s see how to optimize your blog for SEO and rank it high on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
1.1 Keyword optimization
First, I’ll give a quick overview of keywords.
Keywords are the phrases (query) that people enter in the search bar of Google or other search engines. In non-technical terms, we can consider keywords as a search query.
If you want your blog to rank for a specific search query, you must optimize your blog for that keyword. You can perform this optimization through keyword research, which is pretty simple.
Several tools can help you with performing keyword research. Some of the well-known tools include Ubersuggest, Wordtracker, SEMrush, etc.
Regardless of the tool you use, analyze the following factors when performing keyword research for your blog.
- Search volume – The search volume of a keyword indicates how competitive the term is. It’s better to target keywords with a high search volume as they increase the possibility of getting higher traffic. However, ensure that the keywords you target have low SEO competition (search difficulty).
- Search difficulty – It’s better to target keywords with low search difficulty, as they are easier to rank.
- Search intent – Search intent refers to the intention of the user’s when searching for a particular phrase. If you want to generate qualified visitors, it’s better to choose keywords that reflect the user intent of your target audience.
- Bid value – I prefer targetting keywords with a higher bid value. A higher bid value indicates that a keyword has good demand as people search for that phrase frequently.
Once you perform keyword research for your blog, use the best keyword as the focus keyword (primary keyword). The following are the locations of a blog where you should include the focus keyword.
- Primary heading
- Subheading
- Content
- URLs
- Meta description
- Alt text of images
Note: Beware of keyword stuffing as it can negatively impact both your SEO and user experience. Keyword stuffing is when you repeatedly use a specific keyword in the blog, hoping to rank higher on the search results.
1.2 Loading speed
In this technologically advanced era, the loading speed of a web page matters more than ever. If your website takes time to load, people won’t stay on the same page waiting for it to load — unless your website holds significant importance.
Thus, it’s better to make your website load within 5 seconds. However, I recommend achieving a loading speed below 3 seconds. You can use the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to check the loading speed of your website.
You can follow the tips listed below to make your blog load faster.
- Compress the images before uploading them.
- Host your website on the servers of reputed hosting providers like HostGator.
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to help a website run faster and use fewer resources.
- Remove unnecessary elements on a page.
- If you’re using WordPress, don’t forget to use caching plugins like WP Fastest Cache. Similarly, you can use plugins like Asset CleanUP to prevent the loading of unnecessary coding scripts on a page.
1.3 Backlinks
Backlinks are the links that you gain from other websites. They can be otherwise called inbound or incoming links.
Backlinks significantly influence a website’s SEO as they convey to the search engines that your blog is informative and valuable enough to be linked by others. This makes your blog rank higher on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
There are several methods to build backlinks. If you’re an established website and publish high-quality blogs, you’ll naturally gain backlinks from others. But, if your website is new, I suggest using strategies like broken link building and guest posting to build backlinks.
Broken link building is an effective strategy that involves finding content with dead links and recreating them. Once you redevelop the content, you can reach out to the website owners and ask them to promote your blog instead of the one that isn’t live.
I’ll explain about guest posting later in this blog.
Finally, I would also like to mention that the quality of backlinks is more important than quantity. Some people fall into the spam of purchasing backlinks. Trust me, by doing so — you’re throwing your money out of the window.
Buying backlinks can severely impact your website’s SEO, and if Google finds it, they can penalize you as it’s against their guidelines.
1.4 Mobile-friendly
In this era, smartphones have become so popular because of the convenience it offers. Regardless of the type of content — many people started to consume them through their smartphones.
Thus, if you want to provide a good user experience to smartphone users, you should optimize your website for smartphones and computers. You can check whether your website is mobile-friendly by running the Google Mobile-Friendly Test.
Google strives to provide a good user experience to its customers. So, if you don’t optimize your blog for smartphones, people won’t read your content, which gives a red signal to Google — making them rank your website lower in the SERP.
1.5 Internal links
Internal links refer to linking to the pages in the same domain. In other words, it refers to linking to pages within your own website.
Internal links help to build the site architecture. Moreover, it makes it easy for the readers to navigate across a website.
Unlike backlinks, you, as the website owner, have complete control over building the internal links. Once you publish some blogs, you can set up an internal linking strategy for your website and implement it.
2. Social media
According to statistics, over 4.48 billion people use social media worldwide, accounting for about 57 percent of the global population.
Regardless of the type of business — if you ignore social media as a promotional channel, you’re leaving behind a lot of money on the table.
You can promote your blog on various social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. To achieve the best results from your posts, you should discover the time when your audience is the most active. By doing so, you can get more clicks and interactions.
Some of the advantages of utilizing social media as a promotional channel include:
- Increase in traffic – Social media allows a blog to reach a larger audience, which increases its traffic. Furthermore, if the blog is informative to the users, they are more likely to share it and promote it to others.
- Cost-effective – Social media platforms allow bloggers to make their website visible to a targeted audience for free.
- Better engagement with the audience – With social media, you can engage with your audience better and get to know their feedback on your blogs.
Note: Social media is a two-way interaction tool. Thus, as a blogger, you should initiate conversations, reply to comments, solve people’s queries, etc. In general, you should interact with your audience when they want something from you.
3. Email marketing
If you want a cost-effective and effective strategy to promote your blog, you should definitely consider email marketing.
Email marketing may seem like a complex process, especially if you’re new to it. However, if you get a clear idea of the concept, it isn’t as hard as you’d imagine.
Nice!
Email marketing refers to promoting products by sending emails to your email list subscribers. Many companies utilize email marketing to promote their products as it yields a high Return On Investment (ROI) of about $40 for every $1 spent.
Below, I have clearly explained the steps involved in email marketing.
3.1 Build an email list
If you want to email your subscribers, you should first collect their email addresses — which is obvious.
You can build your email list by offering people something for free in return for their email addresses. E-books, courses, tutorials, etc., are some of the products you can provide to people for free.
If you want to collect people’s email addresses, it’s mandatory to provide value to them. Ask this question to yourself. When a random person asks for your email address, will you say it to him?
Most probably, you’ll think that he’s spamming you. Thus, don’t hesitate to create a fantastic product to attract people to provide their email addresses.
Once you’re ready with the product, it’s time to sign up for an email marketing automation software like GetResponse.
The email marketing automation software helps send emails to the right person at the right time, saving a lot of manual work and time.
GetResponse offers a 30-day free trial that you can utilize to learn the software.
3.2 Email your subscribers
After putting in lots of hard work in building your email list, now it’s time to make money out of it by sending your subscribers updates about your latest blog posts.
Before that, make sure that the emails you send have a compelling subject line and body. If they aren’t appealing and valuable to your contacts, they may ignore your emails in the future. Much worse, they may even unsubscribe from your email list.
Here’s an example of a good blog promotional email.
Similarly, here’s an example of a bad one.
The information shared is the primary difference between both emails. In the first one, I have provided some value to the readers. However, I made the second email look like it’s too promotional.
Note: If you frequently update your subscribers about your latest blog post, they will lose interest in reading it. This point applies especially to those who publish blogs often. Generally, it’s better to stick with emailing your subscribers twice a week about your latest blog updates.
If you implement the correct email marketing strategy for promoting your blogs, I’m pretty sure that you’ll see an increase in your blog’s traffic.
4. Guest posting
Guest posting or “guest blogging” refers to writing blogs for other websites. It’s a fantastic strategy to market your blog since it allows you to reach out to the loyal audiences of other bloggers.
Moreover, the guest posting strategy helps establish oneself as an authoritative figure, especially if you guest post on websites with high domain authority.
If you’re a beginner, getting an opportunity to guest post is pretty challenging. However, if you try hard, it’s possible to get fantastic opportunities.
Keep in mind that you should look for guest posting opportunities on websites related to your niche. If not, you’ll most probably not be able to provide a backlink to your blog in your guest post.
The following are some of the methods to get guest posting opportunities.
- You can search on Google for the websites you want to guest post. Once you find them, you can reach out to the website owners via email and ask them whether they can provide you an opportunity to guest post.
- You can search on popular social media platforms to find guest posting opportunities.
- You can join the community of guest bloggers to find pretty good guest posting opportunities.
5. Paid advertisement
If you can spend some money to promote your blog, you can give paid advertisements a try.
Though advertising your blog has several advantages, there are some disadvantages that you should consider.
Unlike SEO and email marketing, advertising blogs can’t yield passive income. Moreover, compared to other promotional strategies, advertising is much expensive. If you advertise your blog without using the correct tactics — trust me — you’ll end up losing a lot of money.
There are several types of paid advertising strategies. Below, I have explained them in detail.
5.1 Social media ads
People spend a lot of time on social media, which makes social media ads to be effective. Moreover, unlike SEO and email marketing, it doesn’t take much time and effort to make a social media ad campaign successful.
Facebook (Instagram included), Twitter, and LinkedIn are some of the best social media platforms to promote a blog.
If you don’t have prior experience running social media ads, I recommend starting with a low budget. Once you get an idea of how things work, you can increase the budget gradually.
5.2 Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads
As the name suggests, in PPC ads, the advertisers pay a specific amount each time people click on their advertisement.
Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Pinterest, etc., are some of the best platforms to run PPC ads. However, among them, I find Google to perform the best for blog promotion. Besides myself, many expert bloggers find the same.
If you want your PPC ad campaign to succeed, you should target the correct audience group and select the right keywords. Also, you should ensure that your landing page looks fantastic enough to bring conversions.
5.3 Video ads
YouTube is the most popular platform to run video ads. You can run ads on YouTube through your Google Adwords account.
Video ads are usually more engaging than photo ads. However, I personally feel when it comes to promoting blog posts, simple photo ads perform better.
Creating a video advertisement consumes a lot of time and effort. Thus, it isn’t feasible to create a new video ad for every blog you publish.
5.4 Display ads
Display ads are the ones that appear as banners on websites, applications, etc. They can be in the form of images, videos, and texts.
Running display ads is pretty affordable and effective — which are its primary advantages.
If you plan to promote your blog through display ads, Google is the best platform for doing so. With Google Display Ads, your advertisement can display on over 2 million websites and reach about 90% of the global internet users. These figures are mind-boggling!
6. Forums
Answering questions on forums is an engaging way to promote blogs as you get to interact with people directly. Moreover, it’s free!
Among the wide range of forums available, I prefer Quora to be the best for promoting blogs. Reddit is also worth mentioning.
When answering questions, you should keep in mind that forums are not marketing platforms. Instead, forums are a platform to discuss a topic and share people’s opinions on it.
Thus, providing value to people should be your priority when answering questions on forums. You should promote your blog in the answer only if you find it relevant.
7. Influencer marketing
If your blog is high-quality, you can reach out and ask influencers in your niche to promote it. However, if you’re a beginner, it’s pretty challenging to find ‘good‘ influencers to promote the blog at an affordable price.
There are several ‘so-called‘ influencers out there on social media platforms. Trust me, paying them to promote your blog is pretty useless.
You can find the ‘so-called‘ influencers by looking at their post’s quality, consistency, engagement, and comments.
Ok!
If you want ‘good‘ influencers to promote your blog, you can offer them a favor by mentioning them in your blog post. By doing so, they may agree to your deal. Next, you should negotiate the price.
Generally, the price that influencers charge for promotion depends on their popularity and demand. If you’re a beginner, you can look for influencers with average popularity.
If you build a strong relationship with an influencer, you can also request them for an interview. Interviews are a fantastic opportunity to increase the reach of your blogs.
Conclusion
If you want your blog to become successful, you should use the correct strategies to promote it.
If you’re a new blogger, the implication of these strategies may overwhelm you. Trust me; even I felt the same when I started my blogging journey.
However, as you start implementing these strategies in your own blog, you’ll find that they aren’t as complicated as you’d imagined.
I hope you found this blog beneficial. Also, I hope that you got a clear idea to promote a blog.
Before ending this blog, I have a simple question for you. Will you implement these strategies in promoting your blog?
Let me know in the comment section below by answering “YES” or “No“.
