Chapter 12: How to Promote Your Blog

When it comes to blogging, writing the actual content is only half the battle. You need to promote it too!

If you don’t promote your blog, you’ll likely have issues getting an audience – or growing the audience that you already have. So, it’s important to understand the different ways you can promote your blog.

As the title indicates, this post is number 12 in a series about becoming a successful blogger. In our previous post, we talked about writing your first blog post and then doing SEO Optimizations. In this post, you’ll learn how to promote your blog. While there are nearly unlimited ways of promotion, we’ll cover only the most powerful and effective ones in this post.

If you want to get more readers on your blog, you absolutely must implement the tactics in this post. Don’t miss out!

Let’s get promoting!

What Is Blog Promotion?

What is blog promotion, anyway? The concept is quite simple, although the execution can be complex. In essence, blog promotion just means doing a variety of different things to get more visitors.

These methods can range from sharing your content on social media to email marketing and everything in between.

Truth be told, pretty much anything can be considered blog promotion, as long as it gets more readers to your website.

However, there are definitely some tried-and-true tactics that are the most effective.

Why Is Blog Promotion Important?

Promoting your blog is absolutely essential if you want people to read it. Without promoting your site, it’s very difficult to get a larger audience. In fact, you might not get any readers at all.

With an estimated 1.86 billion websites out there, you need to work hard to get noticed!

Some bloggers are lucky enough to get readers without having to do any promotion. However, after creating a blog this is a very rare scenario and not one that you can rely on.

Pre-Promotion Checklist

Before you begin to promote your blog, it is important to make sure you’re ready for it. After all, if you get a ton of traffic to your site but fail to capitalize on it, it’s a huge waste.

So, it helps to run through a small checklist of items to ensure that you’re prepared for promoting your blog.

Below, we’ve covered just a few of the different things that you should check:

Make Your Website Search Engine Friendly

First, make sure your WordPress site is SEO-optimized. This means your website should be using an SEO-friendly theme, running one or more SEO plugins like Yoast or AIOSEO, and doing other tricks like adding schema markup to your site.

If you don’t have these things set up, you will lose out on potential traffic to your blog. So be sure to make your site SEO-optimized!

Ensure You Have High-Quality Content

This one is a bit obvious, but it’s worth remembering. Before putting in the time to promote your content, first make sure that it’s high quality content!

Sometimes bloggers focus too much on quantity and not enough on quality.

Go through all of your posts and double-check them for any grammatical errors, typos, or other mistakes.

It also doesn’t hurt to make sure that your information is up-to-date and correct, especially if the post is technical in nature or makes recommendations. Double check that your suggestions are still current and haven’t been made redundant since you first wrote the post.

Always Use Quality Images

Finally, don’t neglect the power of imagery! As they say, images are worth a thousand words, so don’t forget to choose powerful images for each of your blog posts.

Images are also a major factor in SEO. While you don’t want too many images (as they slow down your site), you also don’t want to have a text-only site.

A good balance of optimized images is a great SEO strategy.

However, be certain that your images are compressed by using an image compression plugin. Without compressing images, your pages will likely be too slow – resulting in a punishment by Google and other search engines.

Is your site ready for promotion? If so, it’s time to move on to the next step.

How to Promote Your Blog

Now let’s dive into the actual tactics! Here are nine different ways you can promote your blog and build a larger following.

Use Search Engines to Promote Your Blog

Search engines like Google and Bing are one of the main ways that readers will find your content. As such, it’s important to optimize your site for them.

This is known as SEO, or search engine optimization.

SEO is a very complex topic, but setting up a WordPress site’s SEO is fairly easy to do. You’ll want to pick an SEO-friendly theme like Astra and install some SEO plugins like AIOSEO or Yoast.

Do Keyword Research

Then, you’ll need to do some keyword research. This is basically just finding keywords that relate to your site’s niche and then incorporating them into your content.

Be sure to only have about 3-5% of your content contain the keywords. If you add too much, your site will be penalized for keyword stuffing.

Build Links to Your Site

Finally, you’ll want to build links to your site. The easiest way to do this is by encouraging readers to share your content on social media. You can also do guest posts, which are posts on other blogs that link back your site.

Overall, the best way to get good results on search engines is simply to write great content. Everything else is just extra.

Share Your Blog on Social Media

These days, social media is a must-have for any marketing strategy. The number of social sites increases every year, but you should be sharing your content on at least three or four platforms.

These include Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and as many other channels as you have time for.

Use Social Media Sharing Buttons

You should also be sure to include social media sharing buttons on your posts, both at the top and at the bottom of the post. This is easy to do with the right social media theme or plugin.

Depending on your particular niche, you may or may not want to focus on a particular social media platform and not pay much attention to others.

For example, if you focus on video content, you’ll likely want to focus on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, as these platforms have a focus on video content.

Create Social Media Channels or Groups

On social platforms, it is helpful to not only share your content, but also create a community.

For instance, on Facebook, you can create a group for your particular topic. If you run the community successfully and offer help and advice to members, it can be a fantastic asset for your site.

Plus, channels and groups provide a more focused community of like-minded people, which can increase engagement and engagement.

Smaller, more focused communities can be very rewarding to participate in!

Create Shareable Content

When it comes to content itself, try to make your content shareable.

This means that it should have a good title that grabs attention and is easy to understand. It also means that the content itself should be something that your followers on Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/etc. want to read.

For instance, sharing a long blog post on Instagram probably won’t be popular, as Instagram is focused on images and video, rather than text.

Instead, you should post visual-heavy content on Instagram and leave the text for Twitter or Facebook.

Optimize Open Graph Data

Open Graph is a Facebook, now Open Web Foundation, protocol that enables you to control how Facebook posts format data from third-party websites. The protocol is so useful, Twitter and LinkedIn also began accepting Open Graph.

The benefit of optimizing for Open Graph is so you can influence how your Facebook posts look when pulling information from outside websites.

It’s a bit like rich snippets for Google where a post can show much more than the default listing, which makes it much more likely to engage.

Email Marketing

After SEO and social media, email marketing is the next most important way to promote your blog. Thankfully, it’s usually much simpler and easier to set up than some other marketing methods.

Build Your Email List

When it comes to email marketing, the overall goal is to build an email list. An email list allows you to send content directly to those individuals that are interested in your blog posts and/or other products or services that you offer.

To build up your email list, you can do a few things. One is to send emails to notify of new blog posts.

Send Emails For New Posts

Once you have a few names in your email list, you could begin sending new posts as emails. It’s a simple way to let fans know of new content to help drive traffic.

You’ll need a plugin that enables you to link to your mail service, which we’ll cover in the next section. Otherwise, plugins like Email Subscribers & Newsletters can automatically email subscribers every time you post new content.

Make sure to keep an eye on open rates or feedback though as not everyone is a fan of this type of email!

Send an Email Newsletter

First, start an email newsletter. There are a ton of great WordPress plugins to help you do this, including MailPoet, MailChimp, and Newsletter.

Once you’ve created an email newsletter, you should put subscription forms in various places around your website.

Typically, you’ll want to have one in the sidebar, one at the end of every post, and (if it fits your brand) one in a popup window. Using a WordPress popup plugin, creating a popup that isn’t annoying is very easy.

Include Blog Links in Your Email Signature

Using your email signature to promote your blog is a quick and easy way to promote your work.

You can include a permanent link to your blog’s home page in your signature or use a Firefox addon to include a link to your latest posts.

Either way, an email signature is a useful thing to have if you’re trying to promote yourself and adding a link to your blog could widen your reach considerably!

Create Partnerships

Once you’ve created great content, optimized it for SEO, shared your work on social media, and set up email marketing tactics, it’s time to step outside of your own website.

One easy way to do this is by building partnerships with other bloggers, companies, and individuals in your space.

Invite Influential Bloggers to Contribute

You can start by reaching out to influencers and bloggers and asking them if they’d like to contribute to your blog.

Most smaller bloggers will be happy to, as it gives them a larger audience to pitch their work to. You can also usually offer to do a guest post on their site, too, which is another great way to promote your site.

Reach Out to Influencers

Doing the same for social media influencers is also a good move. You’ll need to have something to offer them, like free merch, free promotion, a mention or two or something else, but many influencers in your niche should be interested.

Influencer marketing is huge and something we all use, so why not try it yourself?

Publish Roundup Posts

Another great way to interact with the community is by publishing round-up posts. These are “best of” posts that link to a variety of different websites and products.

For instance, if your niche is travel blogging, you can publish posts like “The best travel bloggers based in Scandinavia” or “The best websites for hiking travel bloggers”.

Everyone loves more traffic, so the sites you link to will start to like you too!

Try Cross-promoting

Once you have been blogging for a little while, you will begin to get to know others in your niche or complementing niches.

You can use those contacts to cross promote. It’s the ultimate ‘I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine’ scenario. You promote their blog, product or service and they do the same for you.

It’s incredibly popular, cheap to do and everyone can benefit from it. What’s not to like?

Guest Post on Popular Blogs

Once you’re more established and are making a name for yourself, you can begin reaching out to other blogs and guest posting.

Lots of websites accept guest posts. You write a post for another site to feature and they give you a backlink or two as a reward. It’s a very common tactic and something most bloggers do.

Just make sure to read the destination website’s guest blogging guidelines before submitting!

Comment and Interact on Other Blogs

Finally, be sure to actively engage with the community at large – and not just for self-promotion.

This means commenting on other blogs and social media posts, Some of the most successful bloggers built their businesses by becoming a known, respected person in the community.

Although it can take some time to build a good reputation, this is a great path to long-term success as a blogger!

Paid Blog Promotion

If you have a budget, it’s also a great idea to start doing some paid promotion. Paid simply means anything that requires you to pay an amount of money, no matter how small or large it may be.

Not all bloggers need to (or should) use paid promotion in order to get readers.

However, for many, it’s a great way to speed up the growth of your blog. If you have the budget for it, it’s definitely something to explore.

Search Engine Advertising

When you search for something on Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo, you’ll normally see ads at the top and side of the page. These are placed there by companies who pay to have their ads displayed on certain search result keywords.

If your blog relies heavily on search engine traffic, paying for ads might be a good investment. This is often the case if you cover a topic like travel, food, or another niche that has a lot of competition.

Social Media Advertising

Social media advertising is paying to promote your content on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. The effectiveness of this tactic depends largely on the nature of your blog and the social media platform that you’re targeting.

Definitely investigate the user base before spending money on ads!

Content Discovery Platforms

Depending on your particular site, you may also want to look into content discovery platforms. These include sites like Product Hunt that have a community of people interested in new products and sites.

While you usually can’t pay directly for promotion on these sites, you often need to become a member and contribute to the community over a longer period of time, which can often come with costs like membership fees.

Nonetheless, these content discovery platforms are often one of the most effective ways to build a large audience quickly.

Run a Giveaway

Finally, a giveaway or contest is a great way to build interest in your site. You’ll need to get creative, but some common ideas are product giveaways, submission contests, or random drawings.

While you can offer a cash prize, it’s often more affordable to give away things like free subscriptions or your own personal time (for an interview or advice).

Also, be aware that depending on your location, there may be some laws restricting certain kinds of contests. Usually these are related to anti-gambling laws.

Other Ways to Promote Your Blog

Now that we’ve covered the main ways to promote your blog, let’s briefly mention a few other solid tactics.

These are definitely things to do after you’ve optimized your SEO, shared on social media, utilized email marketing, and done the other things mentioned above.

However, they aren’t necessarily required. It really depends on the type of blog that you have and where your audience is online.

If you have the time and resources, it doesn’t hurt to implement some of the methods below.

Create High Quality Visuals to Get More Shares

Adding high quality infographics, images, charts, and other visual elements to your website is a fantastic way to get the attention of readers. This is especially true if the topic of your post is very technical or otherwise complex in nature.

Image from Freepik.com

Visuals also make it more likely that readers will share your content on social media channels, as images like infographics are more popular to share than large blocks of text.

Most people don’t like reading huge posts, especially on social media sites like Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok, where the focus is on brief, short pieces of content.

You can include a ton of information in a single infographic and share it on Twitter in a single tweet, while sharing the same amount of information as a block of text will be broken up into multiple tweets.

This makes infographics a must if you utilize Twitter for marketing purposes.

Turn Your Blog Posts Into an Ebook

An often underestimated way to promote your site content is by turning it into an ebook. Many people have eReaders (like a Kindle or Kobo) or just prefer to read content in ebook form.

For these readers, it’s very helpful to include a PDF or ePub version of your posts on your blog.

Ebooks are also a great way to collect email addresses from your readers. A very common tactic is to offer an ebook to subscribers that join your mailing list.

Be sure that the content in the ebook is unique and not simply copies of your blog posts, However, you can use the blog posts as a base to build on.

Update and Upgrade Old Content

Many writers think that once you write a post, it’s done, never to be seen again. Wrong!

You can always make use of old content. One of the best ways to use old content is to update it with more recent information.

This is an especially good method for any posts that are “Best of the Year” or otherwise relate to time or season.

By updating old content, you can republish it on your blog and social media channels, making it as good as new!

Readers will also appreciate it if your content is consistently up-to-date. After all, no one wants recommendations from a year or five years ago!

It’s also a great method for your most popular posts. If a certain post gets a ton of traffic year after year, it’s a good idea to keep updating it with new content that places the old post in context.

Make Guest Appearances on Podcasts

Another underrated way to build up interest in your blog is to go on podcasts. There are literally thousands of podcasts online today and you can probably find at least a few dozen that relate to your blogging niche.

Most podcast hosts are open to new guests, especially if the podcast is small or new. Hosts are always looking for new content that they can promote in order to grow their audience. So, going on a podcast is a win-win situation for both you and the host.

To be a guest on a podcast, simply find the contact page on your favorite podcasts. Be sure that you have good audio recording equipment before offering to be a guest, as hosts may be less likely to include you if your audio recording sounds low quality.

Use Push Notifications

Finally, push notifications are an excellent way to get more readership for your blog. They can help your readers know when you have new content, a special deal, or any other exciting news.

Setting up push notifications in WordPress is pretty easy and there are a variety of tools you can use to enable them on your blog.

These inform your readers when new content is available. Just be sure not to overdo it, as too many pop ups and notifications can sometimes drive potential readers away.

Wrapping Up

Bloggers have a tough job. They need to both write content and promote it. Thankfully, learning how to promote your work is pretty easy if you follow some simple steps.

Once you follow these steps, you can get back to focusing on your content, the most important thing for any blogger!

In this post, we covered exactly what those steps are. They include optimizing your site for SEO, sharing your content on social media (and making it easier for readers to share it too), creating an email newsletter, and building partnerships with other bloggers in your niche.

We also talked about some paid promotion methods like running a contest or paying for social media or search engine ads. Finally, we shared some other tips that you might want to implement.

In our next post in this series, we’ll talk about building an email list. Stay tuned!

How have you promoted your blog? Did you use any of the methods above? Or maybe we missed something important? Share your experiences in the comments below to help other bloggers out!