<b>How to Promote</b> your <b>Blog</b> without Spending Too Much Time |
| <b>How to Promote</b> your <b>Blog</b> without Spending Too Much Time Posted: 20 Feb 2014 09:00 PM PST
What gives? When blogs first built massive audiences in the early 2000s, it was a heck of a lot easier to attract a dedicated following. Blogs at the time were new and fascinating, and those that managed to hit on a niche grew explosively in popularity. Now it's a different story…you're out of the loop if you're not blogging. You can't just blog and hope for visitors anymore – promotion is necessary if you want to have any chance at building your audience at all. If you're not careful, you can easily spend more time promoting your blog than you have hours in a day. So, if you have a limited amount of time, what do you do? I suggest you follow these steps: 1. Consistently Write Great Content This is still the first part of the equation. Your content has to be unique and fascinating. You should have at least 10 posts or so before you even start thinking of building an audience. Try different things. Go highly in-depth with your content. Keep some posts shorter. Use infographics, video, regular graphics, and create your own graphical information. Whatever you do, give it your very, very best. 2. Build Relationships with B-Level Bloggers Going for the A-listers – that takes time, networking, luck, and you have to be a master in your niche to have any chance at getting published on the big-name blogs. You can certainly go for them, but focus the brunt of your time on going for those blogs just below everyone's radar. What types of blogs are these? They usually have a page rank of 3-5, posts with 3-10 comments, and a couple thousand social media followers. You can get in with these guys much easier, and you can receive some decent traffic from many of them. Then, all you do is write a good guest post, and that gets you 20-40 unique visits per month right there. 3. Participate in High-Traffic, Relevant Forums Ahh the forum. It flies way below everyone's radar these days, but it works incredibly well for links and traffic. Google's slowly working on phasing out the value of the links forums provide, but you can get some very nice traffic. The key here is to provide awesome answers to people's questions. The better the answer, the more people read it, and the more traffic you get. With the links, which help you rank organically (and still do as far as I know), just make sure 80% of the link text does not target your primary keywords. 4. Reach out to Influencers Getting in touch with people who have large social media followings is a tough endeavor. It takes a ton of time, but if you want to create a blog with a massive following, you're at the mercy of the "big dogs." The Skyscraper Technique, created by Brian Dean of Backlinko, maximizes the results you get from contacting influencers. This is what you do:
5. Do Organic SEO It's very hard to rank your blog posts individually. I've tried it and have done better when not trying at all. To get a blog post to rank for a search, do keyword research in Adwords. You're generally looking for keywords with a few hundred to a couple thousand searches per month. Make sure the target keyword appears in the post's title. Add a couple other keywords throughout the post. From there, you cross your fingers and hope. If you really want the post to rank, build links to it. But, there's not promises on how that'll work. The better SEO to do is the following:
That type of SEO is more reliable and yields stable long-term results. 6. Content Syndication Networks Credit Quicksprout for this tip. You know those groups of pictures you see at the bottom of websites like Huffington Post and Forbes? Those are content syndication networks. Yeah, they're kind of spammy, but Quicksprout's information is always as good as gold. Zemanta is a good one. The process for you is easy:
7. Participate in Social Sharing Communities like Reddit and StumbleUpon When you do participate, do so with the intention of contributing value. Just dropping a link or a simple "thank you" comment won't get you very far. Also, keep your eyes open for what topics trend on these communities. That gives you ideas for future posts. 8. Make Sure You Have a Great Design The "feel" of your website – how it initially looks to your visitors – has a lot to do with how much they comment, like, and how long they stay on your site. Make sure you have an attractive, professional design. If you can scrape up the cash, have a pro do the design. Or, talk a friend or family member into it. Do whatever you have to in order to make it look good and load fast – that makes it something people want to share. So, I can't tell you in what ratios you should use those tactics, but those are the most effective ones I know about. What tactics do you think give you the best return for your time? Let me know in the comments below: Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/76657755@N04/7214596024/ |
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Kim Garst shares a list she's compiled of "strategies that will help you promote your blog and drive traffic to your website," such as promoting posts to your email list, commenting on other blogs, participating in industry forums, creating a Slideshare based on a post, and buying "cheap banner ads on niche sites."
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Mike Alton updates a detailed post about post promotion, helpfully advising readers not only how to promote their blog posts but also which tactics to avoid or drop, as they are no longer effective; for example, regarding social sharing sites, "The New MySpace no longer allows link sharing. And I have dropped Bebo and Diigo and Viadeo."
Heidi Cohen serves up more than two dozen tips for promoting your blog through social media, among them: writing "regular features responding to your audience's needs and interests;" including sidebar links that make it easy for readers to follow you on Facebook and Twitter (and other social networks, as applicable): and thanking people for sharing your posts.
Guest author Samuel Pustea suggests more than four dozen ways to promote blog posts, from the big social networks to newer tools like Pinterest, Triberr, Pligg and Scoop.it to RSS directory posting, infographics and guest blogging.
As Arvid Linde notes here, there were once hundreds of blog directories across the web—but most existed solely for "spam purposes." This post provides a short list of 43 still-active, reasonably high-quality directories that can actually drive traffic, even if the links no longer have much SEO benefit.
You're a passionate blogger and have churned out great posts. You've published them on your blog and are worried why the posts haven't been driving as much traffic as you would have liked? They need promotion. The Internet is vast and you just cannot sit back and wait for folks to discover your posts. Drive traffic to your blog posts by promoting them handily on social media, using these five simple tips: