Publishing a well-written blog post is great. But it won’t serve its purpose of delivering knowledge to a reader if your blog sits on page 8 of Google’s search results, collecting dust.
Unless you’re a famous influencer in your field, don’t expect people to readily check out your blog the moment you hit the “Publish” button. Writing the post is just one part of the success equation; you must promote the heck out of it as well to help it gain traction.
Got no clue how to promote it? Check out these:
Did you know that 93% of all online experiences start with a search engine query?
That means that your blog’s visibility on the search engine results pages is crucial if you want people to know about your post.
And to make it to Google’s top rankings, you need to optimize your blog.
Here are some essential elements you need to pay attention to make your blog rank higher on Google:
✅ Select a reliable web host. If your website is always down or is loading too slowly, your reader will look for another blog to read.
✅ Speed up your site loading time. One of the things Google considers in its rankings is how fast your blog loads. Aside from having good hosting, you can speed up your page loading time in a variety of ways.
✅ Secure your blog with an SSL certificate to lessen your chances of getting hacked. You may also install some WordPress plugins like Wordfence and VaultPress to further enhance your blog security.
✅ Use a mobile-friendly, responsive theme so that your blog won’t have a problem loading in any device.
✅ Make sure Google can crawl and index your blog by updating your Robots.txt file.
✅ Know your most popular blog posts by adding an analytics tool in your blog. This way, you get feedback on what worked best in the past, allowing you to copy that formula in your future blog posts and promotions. An excellent tool to use is Google Analytics.
Who are you writing for? Ignore that question, and you won’t be able to build an audience for your blog.
Knowing your audience means understanding their needs and problems and tailoring your content to address those. That way, your blog post will resonate with them and they’ll keep coming back for more. It’s like your blog is promoting itself already.
Here are some ways to know your audience:
✅ Create an audience avatar or buyer persona to give you a clear picture of who you’re writing for. Is it a he or a she? How old is he? Where does he live? What car does he drive? How much does he earn? What are his most noteworthy traits? What are his hobbies? What does his typical day look like? What are his problems and challenges?
✅ Conduct surveys. If you have subscribers, you can ask them what they want and need from you, what their favorite blog posts are, and what challenges they need help with. It can give you ideas on what to write about in your future blog posts.
✅ Check out your competitors. You can get an idea of how your competitors are promoting their blog posts to their audience. You’ll see what’s working and what’s not, and then apply them to your blog.
It’s already a given that you should create high-quality content that’s useful for your audience. But you should also optimize your content so that search engines can index your blog and put it high up in the rankings.
Check out the following ways to optimize your blog:
✅ Research keywords. Naturally insert keywords into your blog post so that users can easily find your post when they do a Google search. Make sure to also include them in your headings and subheadings.
✅ Add metadata. When your blog post appears on Google’s search results, it will feature a meta title, meta URL, and meta description. Make sure that you include keywords here as well.
✅ Build internal and external links. Link your blog post with other posts on your site to encourage readers to navigate around your blog. Include links to relevant pages outside as well to show your credibility.
If you have a robust online presence, you also have other avenues where to promote your blog post.
✅ Email marketing is one of the best ways to promote your blog directly to your readers. Simply emailing your subscriber list can drive traffic to your blog post, enabling you to reach your audience better. And since these people are already following you, they’re more likely to share your post with others. You can also add your latest post to your professional email signature as a subtle way of promoting it.
✅ Social media marketing is another promotion method that will surely get a lot of eyes on your blog. With all the social media channels out there, focus on the ones that are relevant to your network. Engage with people in those platforms, especially brands and influencers with lots of followers. You may also participate in groups to increase your social media reach.
Got several posts about a single main topic? You can collect all those blog posts and combine them in one new post. This way, you get to shine the spotlight even to your old blog posts, as long as the posts are connected to one another.
You may also combine your posts with other people’s posts and put together a major resource of the best stuff on a specific topic.
If you don’t want to do it in your blog, you can use content curation sites like Scoop.it, Flipboard, and Paper Trees. You may also use content aggregators like Popurls, WP News Desk, and Blog Engage.
No man is an island, and that goes the same for blogging.
While you can certainly promote your posts on your own, you’ll make things a lot easier for you if you enlist the help of other bloggers. Not only does it show your credibility and trustworthiness, but it also gives you access to the audience of other bloggers.
But it’s not as simple as asking someone else to promote your blog. It’s all about building relationships first, which you can do through the following:
✅ Mention other bloggers in your post. You can show a fellow blogger or influencer how much you value their work by mentioning them in relevant blog posts. If the quality’s tight, they’ll be more than happy to share it with their audience even if you don’t ask them to.
✅ Interview other bloggers. You can do expert roundups and feature several bloggers in your post. Aside from free shares, you also get excellent insights from industry leaders.
✅ Do a guest blog. Writing a post to be featured on another blog is one of the most effective ways to promote your blog. It’s also great for building your authority as an industry expert. Just don’t forget to include a link to your landing page in your author bio to collect all your leads.
✅ Comment on other posts. Leaving useful comments in other people’s blog posts can attract the attention of the blogger and other readers, prompting them to check out your blog. Who knows, you might even get an invitation to guest post for that blog!
Online communities, groups, and forums allow people to have meaningful conversations on a particular topic. It’s also a great avenue to post a link to a relevant post and lure readers to your blog.
But you can’t just join a community and start dropping links. That’s the easiest way to get tagged as a spammer. Again, it’s all about building relationships.
Become an active member first and only plug your links when they make sense in conversations. Blog promotion is merely a byproduct here, as your main goal is to be seen as an authority in your niche.
Just focus on a few online communities and make sure that your mindset is giving value, not blatantly promoting your blog.
Repurposing is all about turning your blog post into another format, like a video, infographic, or podcast. It’s the best way to reach people who are not really into blogs.
If your initial blog post got 5,000 views, repurposing it into an infographic may generate 5,000 more. And you don’t even have to create a post from scratch because you’ll just be using the same content over and over again!
You may also republish your blog on a different platform, like LinkedIn or Medium. Alternatively, just post a snippet on those channels and link back to your original article for additional blog traffic.
Either way, this is a great way to display your content to a broader audience.
This 2020, make sure that no blog post of yours would get zero views. With these blog promotion tactics, you can put your content right in front of the people who need and want it the most.
