If you are having trouble getting traffic to your post, or need a refresher on how to promote your blog posts, this article contains some of the most successful strategies to do so.
In this article you will learn useful strategies for promoting your blog posts.
Let’s dive right in.
Here are five steps for promoting your blog posts:
Advertise on social media
Collect an email list through newsletters
Optimize your post for SEO
Use paid advertisements on search engines
(Bonus) Share with your content with your friends
1. Advertise on social media
Advertising on social media is the most popular method that takes the least effort. You can find people advertising a wide range of content on any social media platform. This method is best used when starting out to gain traffic as it takes little effort to paste your advertisement all over the internet. This method is average for getting traffic to your site; it is not great, and some say it is not worth doing at all for how little traffic you gain, but when beginning it is recommended to start small and slowly ramp up to larger investments such as paid advertising.
For this method, simply join social media platforms with an advertising prompt that looks organic (not just a link to what you are trying to advertise) and paste it into groups where it seems relevant, for example, if you have a blog post, that has kitchen cleaning techniques, post it to social media groups that focus on cooking.
Be careful not to spam advertisements on social media as the platforms will recognise you as an advertising robot and block you from posting.
As I mentioned earlier, try to keep it organic; in the advertising prompt make yourself out to be the selfless person kindly sharing their “secret” techniques that helped them make their own life so easy, for example, “These kitchen cleaning techniques have made cleaning the kitchen so much easier and even fun! So much so that I have generously decided to share them with you all!”. And try to gear it towards solving a problem; everyone has problems and everyone wants solutions, this means that if you can advertise your post to large groups of people who all have the same problem and all want a solution they will be more likely to believe that your post will solve their problem (whether or not it will does not matter) and will be way more likely to click.
Another tip for this method is to create your own social media groups to advertise to. This is useful if you want to be able to advertise to a large group of loyal and like minded people. Not only that, but you can advertise as much as you want in your own group and, for most social media platforms, you can make it so your advertisement always has priority over other posts, in other words, it will always be the first post people will see when they view your social media group. To create a social media group, simply follow the steps specific to your social media platform for creating a group. Try to center the group around your content niche, for example, if your blog content is centered around computer programming then make your group centered around computer programmers.
In the case that pasting your prompt everywhere on the internet does not suit you, or has not been working so well because you do not have enough followers, there is a solution that still involves the relatively low effort of prompt-pasting.
If you do not have enough followers on social media, simply reach out to those who do. Open up whatever social media platform you use and find influencers that have content relevant to your blog post, for example, if your post is about some sort of technology or device then find influencers on social media that do product reviews for technology or devices and then contact them asking if they would be willing to post an advertisement about your product. For some influencers this is a daily occurrence and they have details for advertising on their account, like pricing, already in their profile descriptions, be sure to check. Just know that the price per advertisement increases with the number of their followers; the more followers they have, the more expensive it will be to advertise on their account.
2. Collect an email list through newsletters
This is an important step in any successful blogging career that is sometimes overlooked. Building an email list through newsletters is crucial for sustained traffic to your website. When you take the time to build an email list you create a community of people that will be actively reading your posts and providing important feedback. With a loyal community you have many more options, such as, a safety net for your content, if a certain post does not do well you still get the usual traffic from your list, and, if you have an important post that needs to do well, you can email your list telling them to read your content as well as sharing it with their friends, boosting your traffic as much as possible through an email list, and finally, if you need to switch platforms but worry that traffic will not be as good, at least in the early stages, you have loyal followers who will read your content no matter what platform you use- but do not forget to email them if you do make significant changes.
To start collecting emails for your list, simply add an option on your website for readers to input their email and consent to receive emails about your blog. While this does work on its own, if you want to get the most emails for your list you will need to incentivize signing up. Try adding an option to download a PDF version of your posts for those signed up for email newsletters, this is useful for people who might only have a sustainable internet connection in one place and/or want to read your post offline. Also try giving out special “rewards” for signing up such as, a badge next to their name when they comment on your post, a free ebook that comes with signing up (provided you have one to give out), or even special posts exclusive for those in your email list if you want to put in the extra effort. Get creative with incentivizing signing up to maximize your email list.
Now that you have an email list, do not forget to upkeep the list and keep those who are in the list feeling included and informed. When emailing your list try to make each email you send to each person on the list feel personalized. Use their real name when referring to them and, if you have the time, write out each individual email rather than pasting the same one to everyone on your list, you can even try to start a pseudo conversation that will go back and forth with each promotional email you send, or, if they have commented on one of your posts, bring up their comment telling them how much you appreciate it and/or whether or not you agree with it, you can also tell them that you have responded to their comment in the comments section. With these strategies combined people on your list will be less likely to unsubscribe to your newsletter due to spammy emails.
3. Optimize your post for SEO
Optimizing your post for SEO will make your post rank higher on Google search results, it is completely free to do so (without the use of tools and if you do it yourself instead of paying others to do it for you), and is advertisement on autopilot. This technique is so important and effective that it is hardly possible to do it justice in a single step. Luckily for you, we already have a post covering this topic
To briefly summarize, find a topic that many people will click on, usually a topic that solves other peoples’ problems. Use a headline that has your target keyword (the target keyword being related to the chosen topic) in it. Make sure the post is lengthy and is structured well. Include the target keyword in the post where it is organic and where possible can but do not keyword stuff. Finally, add internal links to the post and craft the link for the website, shorter is better.
4. Use paid advertisements on search engines
This step is for advanced bloggers who have the money to go the extra length and are willing to take the risks associated with paid advertising on search engines.
That being said, this is a great way for people to increase traffic to their website when they have the money to do so.
The most common form of advertising on search engines, such as Google, is Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising and is what will be discussed in this step.
PPC advertising is when an advertiser advertises their website to appear near the top of search engine results if the advertisers specified keyword, or similar, was searched. The advertiser pays a set amount of money for each click on their advertised website link. The average amount of money the advertiser pays per click is around $0.50-$1.00, and, from my experience, can cost around $200-$2000 dollars per month on the low end, depending on clicks and where your spot ranks on search results.
There is also competition for certain keywords on search engines. The more advertisers on certain keywords the more you might have to pay to rank higher than your competition. A very quick way to get a good idea of how many people are advertising a certain keyword is simply to search that keyword and see how many advertisements appear on the first page. If there are almost a whole page of advertisements on the first results then there are many people advertising that keyword.
Paid advertisements are something that will need to be monitored closely so you can pull your funding out should your clicks start tanking or the price gets too steep. Be careful when using paid advertising because those problems can happen quickly.
5. (Bonus) Share your content with your friends
With the internet dominating our everyday lives, including online communication, people underestimate the tried and true method of word of mouth. An absolutely free way to spread the word of your blog is to tell your friends to check it out. Then have your friends tell their friends and so on and so forth. You do not need to spend hours of your day every week creating a complicated network of traffic and advertising just to neglect the natural one that already exists.
While this is a bonus step that will only benefit those who have not done so already, it can still highlight how important it is to do this step and that you can still make friends, not to mention for free, that you can share your content with.
Conclusion
In summary, try to share your post with everyone you can, including your friends, and everywhere you can. But do not spam advertisements, especially on social media otherwise you will get blocked, and only advertise where it seems relevant to not waste your time. And collect an email list and try to personalize your emails to your list.
But which one of these steps will you try first? Tell me in the comments below.
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