How To Promote Your Blog (12+ Actionable Blog Promotion Techniques)

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Blogging is fun, but it’s not for everyone. Maintaining a good blog takes a lot of work. A good blog not only requires quality content, but it also needs to be promoted and marketed in such a way that it consistently achieves maximum exposure.

In order to earn an income from blogging, you need to know how to drive traffic to your blog. If you have traffic, the money will follow.

Blog promotion is a key factor in getting that traffic (and thus the income that follows). I followed these techniques to drive more than 10 million page views, last year alone:

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There are many ways to promote a blog.  Effective blog promotion can happen via:

1. Cutting edge SEO
2. Social media marketing
3. Guest posting
4. Blog Commenting
5. Forum marketing
6. Email marketing
7. Push notification marketing
8. Content syndication
9. eBooks
10. …and more.

In today’s post, I will be covering several blog promotion techniques that are easy to implement and can bring great exposure to your blog in no time.

Bear in mind that success requires hard work and smart work, and successful blog promotion is no exception.

How To Promote A Blog The Right Way:

Honestly, there are numerous ways to get your blog noticed.

My usual strategy is to pick one or two methods at a time, and stick to those for a while, giving them my time, focus, energy, and effort. This ensures that each technique gets an equal chance to work.

Let’s have a look at some of the many techniques you can choose for the successful promotion of your blog.

But, first thing first.

Get the foundation right before starting the blog promotion:

There are a few basics stuff that you should have it right before you start working on blog promotion.

Hosting:

Make sure your hosting is idle enough to handle increased traffic. Usually, most of the shared hosting can handle up to 10-15k page views a day. Depending on how much traffic you are expecting after blog promotion, your hosting should match that.

Some of the good ones are:

• Bluehost
• A2Hosting
• Kinsta

We have a few good guides on hosting and the one you should start with is:

• Which is the best WordPress hosting & how to choose one

WordPress theme:

Make sure your blog design is outstanding and compels users to stay more on your blog. At the same time, from a technical perspective, it should be well coded for performance and is SEO friendly.

These two things go hand to hand and if you are still using an outdated theme or design, you should upgrade it.

Getting a new theme does not cost a lot and there are a few free and premium themes that you can look at:

• Genesis theme (That’s what we use here at ShoutMeLoud)
• Newspaper theme: A blazing fast WP theme.
• Astra theme (They have a free and premium version)
• GeneratePress (Free + premium version)

Set up Analytics:

You should be measuring your existing traffic to see the effect of these blog promotion techniques. The best analytic tool that you can get is Google analytics as it’s free and let you measure traffic at every level.

Even you can see which post is getting maximum traffic and the traffic source. If you have not done it, you can read our earlier guide on:

• How to add Google Analytics to WordPress

Once you are done with this, now it’s time to look at various methods of promoting a blog

11+ ways to promote the blog:

1. Content Syndication

One of the smartest ways for blog promotion is using content syndication. Do you know, that you could reshare your existing blog posts on platforms like LinkedIn and Medium.com to drive significant traffic? 

The quality of the audience on these platforms is really high and you can expect a better ROI when doing this. If you are worried about creating duplicate content, then you can take advantage of canonical tag.

It’s an SEO technique to reuse your content on multiple websites without diluting the value of the existing one.

Read my guide on “How to republish content on medium” to learn more about this technique.

Two platforms I could highly recommend in 2022 for content syndication:

• LinkedIn
• Medium

The Task for you:

• Create a Google sheet and create a few columns called “Article title”, “URL” and pick only those articles which create higher engagement.
• Pick a team member or hire a VA who could syndicate 2-3 pieces every week.
• If you have a long post, you can break it down into mini posts.

2. Search Engine Optimization

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This is one of the aspects that is in direct control of yours and you can quickly make your blog discoverable in Google search. There are two aspects that you should pay attention to:

• On-Site SEO (Technical SEO)
• On page SEO (Keyword optimization)

Here is what you need to do:

On-Site SEO:

This part helps the search engine discover your blog. This also involves submitting your blog to Google.

If you are using WordPress as your blogging platform, here is what you need to do:

• Create a sitemap of your WordPress blog
• Submit the sitemap to Google search console

This tells Google search engine about the content that you have on your blog and that’s how you will become discoverable in Google search.

Configure the Yoast SEO plugin:

This is the most popular WordPress SEO plugin in the market. Follow my earlier guide to learn the steps of setting up the Yoast SEO plugin:

• How to set up Yoast SEO plugin

On Page SEO:

This part is something that a lot of bloggers and content marketers get wrong and miss out on the big opportunity of getting their blog seen by the intended audience.

Here is how this works:

1. You do Keyword research before writing
2. You optimize the content for a specific keyword
3. Make the content high quality

I have a detailed guide on how to write SEO friendly content and On-page SEO, that covers everything you need to know to ace this.

While you are on it, do read our SEO Image optimization guide to make sure your blog is seen on Image search as well.

3. Facebook

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Facebook is the largest social networking website. Many online businesses are running completely on referral traffic from Facebook, and we can’t ignore the importance of Facebook for the promotion of our blogs.

The first step in taking advantage of Facebook for blog promotion is to set up a Facebook fan page and Facebook group for your blog.

In 2022, Facebook groups are more effective than Facebook pages.

You should also invest some time and energy on user engagement and creating a niche community around your page. This is very important. In fact, your Facebook groups could be one of the best ways to engage with your audience in real time.

Have a look at the ShoutMeLoud Facebook fan page to see how I engage with users.

Here are a few articles that will help you to make the most of Facebook for the promotion of your blog:

• How To Promote Your Website On Facebook
• How To Make A Popular Facebook Fan Page

4. Twitter

Most bloggers these days understand the importance of Twitter. If you’re still using Twitter only for personal use and not for marketing, you’re missing out on a lot of potential for driving traffic to your blog. Twitter traffic is great, especially when your post is retweeted with some trending hashtag.

If you’re already using a personal Twitter account, I would suggest that you create a separate profile specifically for your blog’s domain. This will be helpful for branding and will be an alternate way for readers to subscribe to your blog.

• Read: How To Tweet Old Posts To Automatically Drive Traffic From Twitter

5. Social Bookmarking Sites

Social bookmarking sites can make your blog traffic crazy awesome if you know how to use them.

If your posts become popular on social bookmarking sites like Flipboard, Pinterest and Reddit, you can drive thousands of traffic hits in a short time.

That said, you do need to carefully monitor and understand these social bookmarking websites, and what works best for these types of forums. (For example, list posts perform very well in any search engine.)

6. Guest Blogging

Having your blog featured on similar niche blogs will not only send you traffic, but it will also help you drive targeted traffic and build SEO backlinks.

Especially since the Penguin update, guest blogging has become one of the best ways to generate backlinks to your blog.

I have previously shared a complete guest blogging marketing plan, and you can check out this list of blogs where you can submit guest posts.

7. Interviews

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Once your blog starts getting decent traffic, many other bloggers or people who are inspired by you will request an interview.

Personally, I feel that I should not let my fans down where interview requests are concerned, as these are the people who are my greatest asset as a blogger.

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For this reason, if you are offered the opportunity to be interviewed, I suggest that you accept the interview and talk about yourself and your blog, and allow a whole new audience to learn from you and to learn about the existence of your blog.

8. Blog Commenting

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Like guest posting, commenting on blogs in a similar niche is one of the best ways to promote your blog.

When doing so, be sure to add value via your comment, otherwise, you will simply be diluting your brand. Never, ever, EVER spam someone else’s blog.

You should also sign up for a free account on Gravatar.com to get a comment profile image.

I recommend Amit’s guide to blog commenting, which is somewhat of a holy grail for people who are trying to develop excellence in blog commenting.

9. Niche Forums

Forums and discussion boards are some other excellent means of getting traffic and a targeted audience. I have personally tried a few forums for webmasters, and I found that they do indeed drive decent traffic. The amount of traffic is not huge, but these kinds of forums drive targeted traffic, which is far better than just any random visitor.

With traffic in general, quality is way more important than quantity.

There are many factors that you need to take into consideration when using forums to promote your blog.

Here are a couple of articles to point you in the right direction:

• 5 Secrets To Promoting Your Blog via Forums
• 10 Ways To Drive Traffic From Forums

Promoting Your Blog offline:

10. Business Cards

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Business cards are little marketing tools that do not cost much to produce. You can create and order business cards online that will help you market and advertise your brand for very little money. Whenever you attend any event or meeting related to blogging, you can simply pass your business card to people you meet.

They really are great promotional tools and when I give 100 of them out, I normally get 100 new visitors and loyal ones too. Business cards are not expensive and I can get 100 done for about $5.

You can use Fiverr to find someone who can design a business card for you. Further, you can use services like Moo.com or Inkmonk to order business cards for you.

11. Press: Newspapers, Magazine, and TV Channels

Frankly, one of my friends who is a journalist told me that they always lack news. It’s not easy to fill a newspaper or magazine with news and sometimes they even need to get some online. So the point is if you can get them some news that is shockingly awesome for FREE, they will publish it.

Getting newspapers to feature you, especially local ones is definitely easy, and writing about some teen making $10k in three months is surely much more enticing compared to some old grandpa who lost his cat. Since I was featured in my country, India’s TV and newspaper, my blogs and list became larger thus more money came in.

It’s all about getting your words out and making people familiar with your brand. In the long run, this adds into your brand reputation and people tend to recognize it.

12. Wear your branded T-Shirts or Hoodies

Gifts are people’s favorites and giving them some free gifts like your blog’s t-shirt is definitely going to rock their day up. T-Shirts featuring your blog address with a great design equal to free publicity.

If they wear them around, you will get free eyeballs looking at your blog URL when you don’t even need to pay a penny.

Personally, that really sounds superb and they won’t really cost you anything.

Printing T-shirts with your blog URL and logo will get you free walking billboards whether they’re going to the cinema, shopping for daily utensils or food.

You can use a service called Teespring to order a branded T-shirt for your brand.

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As you can see, there are countless ways to promote your website, business, or blog both online and offline and surely more will appear as time goes on.

If you want to try something unique to market your brand, think outside the box! You can even buy a Billboard ad or advertise on national television. You never know how much buzz you can generate!

I will continue to update this article with new information and ideas. Meanwhile, be sure to share your tips and techniques for blog promotion in the comments section below.

If you find the information in this post useful, please share it with your friends and colleagues on Facebook and Twitter.

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