A lot of bloggers these days don’t want to useย ads and sponsored posts to promote their content.
You might have read umpteen posts advising bloggers to advertise their content intelligently across platforms. Harsh has also suggested quite a few variations of this practice.
That said, advertising is not the only way you can boost your blogโs popularity. There are many other sustainable ways to get your blogย into the Bloggers Hall of Fame and steadily improve your traffic and visibility without over-spending!
Ways to get the word out:
1. Throw money at your content
If you want to reach people who have a voracious appetite for content, your best bet would be to target them on other content-intensive sites.
This is where content recommendation tools come into the picture. These are great alternatives to paying for Google advertising.
There are many content recommendation and native advertising tools that allow you to promote your content on third party sites.
From Time to Inc, Forbes to Huffington Post, you can choose from over hundreds of high-quality publishers to show your ads. If a link to your content appears as a suggestion below a highly shared article on a popular site, it can do wonders for you.
Source: Times.com
However, you have to be very careful when choosing a content discovery or amplification tool.
You donโt want your content to be shown on someย spammy scraper blog that just wants to make a few more pennies.
So make sure the tool of your choice has no low-quality sites in their network. For instance, content marketing industry leader Outbrain has very high publishing standards and you have to follow their guidelines in order to be accepted into their network.
Further, their smart recommendation engine ensures your content is only displayed on the most relevant sites.
Outbrain allows advertisers and publishers to reach audiences with targeted and intent-based recommendations to ensure high engagement and CTR. It also provides many ways to keep users engrossed, encourage them to explore your website for longer, and lead them towards a high-quality experience.
As opposed to this, some content recommendation tools are just shoddy ad networks that sell ads underย the guise of content.
In the example below, the highlighted ad, which is irrelevant to the main articleย (mobile security), as well as the ads around it, take you to websiteโs homepage (The Lotter) rather than the article.
This is decidedly misleading and can turn the reader against you.
Source: CIO.com
2. Optimize your blog for search
One of the most painstaking, but rewarding methods to gain popularity is to optimize your blog for long tail keywords. SEOs these days canโt stop raving about the success you can get using long tail keywords, and we continue to see great results with them.
A modernย SEO strategy for any blog should be based on long tail keywords related to its niche.
Here’s ShoutMeLoud guide to finding the best long tail keywordsย . Furthermore, once the post is completed, many bloggers will try and follow the basic guideline of keeping Yoast happy with most of their posts:
However,ย optimization should never come at the cost of user experience.
If you need to even go to the extent of deleting content for the sake of better readability and authority, you shouldn’t hesitate in doing so.
Whileย it takes time and hard work, SEO pays off in the long term.
So it wouldnโt be wrong to say that:
- Search optimization is a sustainable way to increase your blog ranking and popularity.
Hereโs a great checklist for SEO that every blogger must pin to their wall so they can gradually optimize their blog.
Here are some other hand-picked articles that you shouldย read about SEO:
- How To Use SEMRUSH For Your Blog’s SEO
- How To Write Perfect SEO-Optimized Articles In WordPress
- On Page SEO Techniques To Rank On First Page โ Current Edition
3. Create engaging social media posts
Unless you are a world-class photographer or have a hundred cute kittens running around your workplace, finding ways to keep your social media audience engaged is not easy.
However, there is no dearth of options โ from Twitter polls to Facebook quizzes โ for creating engaging social media posts.
Letโs see how Luke Moulton of Sit the Test, a Melbourne-based startup, used Facebook ads to promote a quiz.
His objective was to use a third-party platform to build an email list because his blog wasnโt getting much traffic at that point. Luke ran the campaign for 13 days on a budget of $30 per day and was able to build a list of over 570 people.
So the effective cost per conversion (the cost of acquiring an email address) was $0.66.
If you want to drive viral traffic using quizzes, there are many popular platforms that allow you to create them.
4. Make podcasts and videos regularly
The last method on our list is using audio-visual content to boost popularity.
Bloggers using podcasts and videos are instantly elevated to the thought-leader level.
These formats are a cut above text and allow you to come across as a more professional and accomplished blogger.
If you want evidence that podcasts offer a great way to not only become famous, but also to gain authority, consider Mitchell Levy, โChief Aha Instigatorโ (yes, thatโs the title he chose for himself) at Aha Amplifier, who regularly uses podcasts to talk about “thought-leadership”.
In the process, he has become quite an authority on the topic.
The same goesย for video.
My new friend David Bain at Authoritas has come up with a great series of quick, insightful interviews with thought-leaders in SEO about where they think the industry is headed.
If you havenโt yet gone this route,ย you should start byย setting up your own channel on popular video networks like YouTube, Vimeo, or Vine.
Alternatively, you can host your videos on your own site using a custom hosting tool like Wistia.
Whatever platform you choose, make sure you use all means of promotion that work for you in order to gain visibility.
Once you have built up a sizable audience, you can also try live-streaming.
Live-streamingย is one of the toughest and the most time-consuming of all the above-mentioned methods, but if you really want to go that extra mile, there is no substitute for it.
For further reading:
- How to start a Podcast: Podcasting 101 for Beginners
- 13 Must-listen Podcasts for Serious Entrepreneurs
Final words
It is very important for bloggers to grow their blog and carve out a niche for themselves using unique and individually distinctive ways. Although advertising provides a great way to boost popularity in bursts, it is important to use more sustainable methods that can provide value to audiences over extended periods of time.
Are you a blogger? How do you promote your blog and keep your audience engaged? Have you tried out any methods discussed here? Let me know in the comments!
The part throw money at your content got me wondering.. Like seriously i really haven’t been doing this and i think its time i focus a little more on marketing some of my content, thanks a lot for the eye opening
Hey,
Thanks for sharing some amazing ways to make blog famous.
I really appreciate you help.
Keep posting awesome content.
Harsh looks like your team is getting bigger and better day by day.
Keep growing man !
Thanks,
Piyush
Wow nice information. Really getting popularity is to get success in the goal.
The new Yaost plugin has a ‘readability’ menu. It never seems to score me good no matter how much I try to edit my sentences and optimize my articles. But I always get ‘good’ for seo. Please does aanybody have an idea on how to improve the readability?
As you rightly pointed out, getting SEO results takes time and isn’t easy. Personally, i just focus on content and thus, sharing to all my social media handles. I allow Google do the rest regarding search engine traffic.
I never tried outbrain but heard a lot about it. I may give this a try when I get back from vacation. I’m still in the middle of a project editing content on my blog.
I just had 1 blog post goin viral on twitter after I submitting it to blogengage. lol
I wasn’t ready for all the traffic as I was in the middle of adding a new theme.
I agree with the points mentioned in the post and yes not to forget about the Yoast SEO plugin,It’s the best SEO plugin for WordPress and have also helped me to list my website in the first page of google using the focused keyword.
Yes you are right. My blog is a programming tutorial site where some programs are included in post. So, it fails to score in “flesh reading test” and “keyword intensity” mostly. Is there any way to overcome it.
Also provide some suggestion/review about my blog.
Hi Pratik, I am reading your first blog, It is a great content, you shared a lot of information on this blog, I tried Outbrain with $10 budget/day, and we collected 200 mail subscription from Outbrain only in a month campaign, Great place to advertise if you are limited with budget.
Yeah, i also don’t care of this Focus Keyword in YOAST, and your point # 3 is just great must follow.
Nice informative post i am already using SEO by Yoast, but every time when i use long tale keyword yoast says “stop word in your keyword” this is the only problem i am facing, all the option like your is not going to green. What to do?
Thank you
Nice post, going to apply these methods on my news website.
Thank you.
Good. Please continue providing great contents which helps newbies like us to improve a lot
Thanks for the article… I too find Yoast Seo plugin the most useful SEO plugin ever..
Informative article here PRATIK, Yes it is true that most bloggers don’t want to spend on sponsored post to boost their blogs popularity. Most even only make use of only facebook adverts which is not okay enough. Guestposting and participating in online forums will also help in boosting blog popularity.
Thanks for the additional tips.
Best Regards,
Hadharm Hiidee
How To resolve stop words problem? Have you any idea…
great tips infact i am using yoast and to be honest it is really useful and must use plugjn if you are on wordpress