5 Ways to Promote Your Blog

Getting people to visit your blog is essential to building a following. Of course, to get traffic to your blog you first need to write great content. Once you’ve got the content,  focus on promotion.  Here are a  few ways to promote your blog.

Social Media

Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and even Pinterest can help drive traffic to your blog. You may already have accounts with social media sites. You’ll want to consider whether you should create a separate account for your blog.

If you want to keep your personal and professional life separate, it is a good idea. However, if your personality is your blog, then your social media accounts should be under your personal name.

You can use your social media page to interact with others who are interested in your topic and to drive traffic to your blog. In addition to interacting, sharing, and commenting on relevant information, you can share snippets from your blog and link to your posts. This will help drive readers to your blog and help you develop a following.

Keywords

What keywords do you think people will use to find your information? For example, if you’re blogging about nutrition then someone might search “how to eat right or what should I eat to be healthy.” If you have posts on that topic, with those keywords, your blog will show up in their search results.

You can identify potential keywords in a number of ways. One is to pay attention to trending topics and hashtags on social media. What keywords and hashtags are people using? You can also use keyword tools like Google’s Keyword Tool, https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner.

Use keywords in your blog posts and your title where they logically fit. Don’t try to pack your posts with keywords, it doesn’t work and can backfire on you. And you always want to write quality content – focus on your readers first.

Great Headlines

Great blog post headlines entice people to open your posts. They’ll share, link to them, and like them perhaps before even reading all of the content. Great headlines often pique curiosity or they evoke an emotion.

Study the headlines that you click on. Ask yourself why you clicked on it. What attracted your attention to the headline? Also, think about what your audience might be interested in. And finally, pay attention to the headlines that your readers respond to.

Guest Blogging

Consider seeking guest blogging opportunities. As a guest blogger, you’ll write and publish content for other bloggers. You gain a new audience and the opportunity to promote your own blog. Make sure that you’re posting on blogs that are relevant to your blog topics.

For example, if you’re blogging about fitness then you might guest blog on a sports nutrition website. You want the audience to be people who may be interested in your blog and you want to add value to the blogger whose site it is.

Search the Blogosphere

Spend time surfing the web and find other bloggers who are relevant to your own audience. Start commenting on their blogs. Begin developing a relationship with relevant bloggers and provide thoughtful comments. Generally speaking, comments will attract attention from other commenters and blog readers. You can generate traffic, and opportunities, when you interact with other bloggers.

Once you have people coming to your blog, you are in a position to begin profiting from their visits. As a blogger, there are many ways to profit. They include, but aren’t limited to:

• Selling Ad Space on your blog – the more traffic/visitors you have the more you can charge a company that wants to advertise.
• Selling your own products or services, including information products
• Promoting affiliate products or services and earning a commission from the sales

For any of these models to be effective, you need to create a community of followers who get value from what you write about. You want your visitors to come back to your blog again and again.

We will take a look at how to how visitors come back again and again in the next post.  Let me know how these tips work for you.