A Comprehensive Guide to Promoting Your Blog Posts

More exposure, better search engine rankings, more visitors, more readers… these are just some of the things every blog owner wants for their blog, right? Promoting your blog and the content you put on it remains a task as important as actually writing posts and creating great content… if not more! For many blog owners out there, the process of creating content is easy – actually getting people to visit your blog, read your posts, engaging with it is something that most bloggers struggle with.

This comprehensive guide includes many solid tips and tricks aimed to help you promote your blog posts and get a solid boost in traffic on your blog. Here goes:

Promote your content on social media

Very effective, and costs next to nothing. Social media websites remain one of the best ways to promote your content for free on the internet and get more exposure and targeted traffic on your blog. Depending on the nature of your blog and where you think the most of your fans and followers might be, you might want to use the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram and so on.

It is important to understand that every social media platform is unique in function, and has a specific type/kind of audience. Do a bit of research to determine if the people you’re targeting actually use certain types of social mediums or not.

There are also some useful social media promotion platforms you might want to try. If your content is marketing related, then JustRetweet is hands down the best one to use. It allows you to get more retweets, FB likes and Google +1’s on every piece of content you right. Earning credits is easy because the quality of content allowed on the site is very high, so I highly recommend using this one.

Other choices to try include ViralContentBuzz and Triberr. These are solid choices as well, but are a little more difficult to use.

Write compelling, content-rich posts

… that actually make people share your content! If your content is interesting to read, provides valuable information to your readers and is just all-round epic, people will want to share it themselves. Doing so will not only ensure that Google ranks you well (Google loves good content!), but you will also get more visits, likes and shares on your posts and on your blog. This is also know as free and effortless marketing!

Don’t know where to start about writing great content? Just read these terrific blog posts and start implementing them.

• 5 Steps to Blast Through Fear and Create Epic Content
• How to Create Consistently Great Content for the Long Haul
• Cutting the Crap: Real Advice for Creating Epic Content

Link to other influential and popular blogs

This is a great way to get noticed by influential and popular blogs out there. Link to them, send them some link-juice and they will return the favor. If your content is thought-provoking, high-quality, or just provides a different perspective then there is a good chance that they will agree to do so.

Be sure to let people whom you’ve linked back to know that you’ve done so by sending them a message on social media, or just by emailing them. For instance write them a tweet, which can easily retweet it and as a result a tweet with a link to your article and blog gets seen by their followers as well.

How can you find out which blogs are influential and popular? Check out sites like BuzzSumo, Social Crawlytics or Bloggerscope which can help you discover popular blogs by how many social shares their posts get.

Email your subscriber list

Contrary to popular belief, email lists are not dead. Sending out an email broadcast to your email list as soon as you publish a brand-new post is one of the best ways to get traffic on it. Keep an eye on those analytics, and you’ll notice a massive influx of traffic as soon as you do.

Email remains one of the best, most effective ways to engage your loyal readers because these are people who voluntarily gave you their email addresses because they actually wanted to hear from you.

Make full use of this and start building a subscriber list if you haven’t done so already. Integrate a web optin form or design a full blown landing page to collect emails from your site. Some themes like Divi theme from Elegant Themes makes this incredibly easy to do.

You will also want to make full use of a reliable autoresponder. Aweber (get discount) or GetResponse (see why) are very good choices for most marketers.

Leverage big social sharing sites

Reddit lets you post in what are called ‘sub-reddits’ or topic/interest-specific sub-forums. These are sub-niches where you can post relevant content from your blog, promote it and get a ton of exposure. Reddit is one of the busiest websites on the internet, and if your post makes it to the front-page, it could be potentially seen be thousands, if not more.

Similarly, marketers can submit their content to a wide variety of more marketing related ocial sharing sites as well. Get your content to the front page, and you can get quite a bit of traffic from these sites as well. Here are some some of my favorites:

• BlogEngage
• Blokkube
• BizSugar
• DoSplash
• Inbound.org

Build personal relationships with other bloggers

The blogging community is amazing, and most of the times, fellow bloggers – even the more influential ‘big’ bloggers – would love to lend you a helping hand. Reach out to them. Send them an email, write on their Facebook or Google+, send out a Tweet to them. Ask them if they can promote your blog or one of your newer posts.

Many bloggers also do round-up posts of some of the best content from the internet – Kristi Hines of Kikolani is one such example.

Recycle your old content

Pick up an old post – any old post off your blog – and try to repurpose or recycle it. Think of ways in which you can either update it, expand on it, give an alternative perspective, or perhaps just try turning it into another piece of content.

For example, maybe you have several review type posts on your blog. Constantly make sure your review is up-to-date, especially if the product or service you are reviewing has undergone changes since you wrote your original post.

Get More Involved With Guest Posting

The former can be very time consuming, but if you can find the right blog to write on, and can produce an excellent, high-quality post for it, the benefits can be amazing! Look at blogs in your niche, think of a topic that you could write on for them – something that you can contribute – and get in touch with them.

Look for high-quality blogs that only allow certain exclusive guest posts. Pitch them the idea by writing them a nice, concise email.

Avoid low-quality and spammy guest-posting designed to spam the other blogs with backlinks – Google hates that. Remember, don’t make guest posting about the backlinks. Instead think of the ways that each guest post can bring target traffic back to your site.

Similarly, invite other bloggers to guest-post on your blog as well. Ask them to link back to their post on your blog. Create relationships with good bloggers and make guest blogging a regular practice.

Over to you

Creating amazing content is great, but it is equally important that people actually see it and read it and share it! What are some of the things that you do to promote your content? Leave your comments in the comments section below and let us know.