How to Promote Your Blog: 7 (Proven) Tips To Get More Traffic

The act of blogging is something that’s pretty simple - especially when you follow my tutorial. What once used to be a somewhat complex and complicated process has been made incredibly easy thanks to the evolution of the Internet, and while the act of blogging itself has gotten easier over time, other factors relating to the art of blogging have not.

Whether you're a DIY enthusiast wanting to share tips, or an entrepreneur looking to build your business, knowing how to publicize your blog is one of the most critical things to success. You want to ensure that your content is getting viewed by as many people as possible, and while the tools that are used for promoting your content have been made more readily available, knowing how to properly implement these tools still remains as a big challenge for a lot of people.

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There are many ways to market your blog, but knowing which methods are the most effective is an entirely different story. However, it’s a story that we’re going to uncover and examine in this article.

If you’ve been wondering how to promote your blog, you’re in the right spot.

7. More Articles Means More Traffic

As a blogger, it might seem like common sense that blogging more would bring in more traffic. This is pretty much a general rule of thumb, but the actual power that a steady number of blog articles has on the traffic that you receive is quite a bit more impactful than you may think.

A recent study has shown that publishing 16 or more blog post each month results in a traffic boost by about 3.5 times. That right there is absolutely huge.

Knocking out 16 articles each month might sound like a lot of work, but if you do a bit of math, that works out to just under 4 articles every week. Starting out with your blog, producing 4 articles per week might seem like a daunting task. However, as you establish your blog a bit more and get comfortable with the act of it, doing 4 pieces each week will be a piece of cake.

In addition to this, Neil Patel (one of the most well-known bloggers of our time) said that he saw overall monthly traffic on his website go up from a visitor count of 46,134 to 59,787. The reason for this change? Patel started posted two articles each week instead of just one. By simply writing one more article each week, Patel increased his visitor count by thousands.

An achievement like that is absolutely tremendous, and although we can’t guarantee you’ll see that same exact level of growth, it’s good evidence as to how consistent content can go to great lengths to helping you extend your reach and gain more traffic on it. And, along with that, it also shows that taking things slow and gradually improving your work is the best way to go about things.

6. Email Is Still King

If you’re looking for ways to promote a blog, you need to be sure that you’re making use of email. There’s no doubt at all that social media is huge, and while we’ll talk about that a little bit later on in this guide, email still plays a very key role in the act of promoting your blog.

No matter what kind of content you’re writing about, you need to make sure that you’ve got an email list in place. An email list will allow your audience to submit their email and sign up to receive updates when you publish new content to your site. This will allow you to potentially get a big influx of traffic as soon as your work goes live, and as you build up a larger base of dedicated readers, making use of something like this can be extremely powerful.

Along with being able to update your readers whenever you have new content for them to read, establishing a database of folks that are interested in the work you’re producing is never a bad thing to have. This database will allow you to have immediate contact with everyone that’s reading your content if you for some reason need to get in touch with them, and this can be quite beneficial if you decide to run a giveaway, have site maintenance, etc.

There are tons of services out there that make creating an email list for your blog or website incredibly easy, so you’ve got a lot to choose from to help you find the software that will work the best for you and your own needs.

It’s best to integrate this functionality into your blog as soon as possible, and although growth might be slow to start out with, starting your database as soon as you possibly can is always best.

5. Get In On The Guest Blog Game

When talking about the best ways to promote your blog, another great tip that we suggest is to write for someone else’s blog.

This is something that’s called guest blogging, and for some of you, this might sound like a step in the wrong direction. “How will writing for someone else’s blog help me promote my own site?” you might be asking yourself. Well, the answer is actually quite simple.

Lots of blogs allow other writers to submit their work to be published on their site as a guest blog or guest post, and while your content will be displayed on a site other than your own, this allows for an entirely different group of readers to experience just what it is that you have to offer. The site that you guest blog with will own that work of yours, but you’ll still retain all of the rights to it.

This is important because, by you still having credit for the work, the audience of that other site you get your content published on might find that they really like your writing style, and will then come over to your own blog to read more of what you have to offer.

You can try to submit your guest posts to as many sites as possible, but we suggest only seeking out sites to submit your content to that are considerably larger than your own blog. If you have a monthly visitor count of 1,000, publishing a guest blog post on a site with 500 monthly visitors likely won’t bring in that much more traffic for you. However, getting your article published on a site with 10,000 monthly visitors would probably do wonders for you.

Each blog will have their own method and process for submitting and approving guest blog posts, so your best bet here is to reach out to the sites you’d like to get your content featured on to see how they go about that whole thing (and if they even allow for guest posts at all).

Be sure to send along examples of your past work and links to your site when submitting your content, and even if you get turned down the first few times, don’t get discouraged! It might take some time to get your work published on a considerably larger site, but once you do, the increase in traffic you’ll get will be tremendous.

4. Ensure That Your SEO Is In Tip-Top Shape

If you want to know how to market a blog, one of the most important bits of advice that we can give is the fact that you need to make sure your SEO is in the best shape possible. SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s basically the keywords and phrases you established to help your blog get noticed when people are conducting Internet searches.

Search engine searches are usually the number one source of traffic for all major blogs, and these established blogs are getting so much traffic through searches because they’ve got high-quality SEO.

The practice and concept of SEO can be a bit difficult to fully understand if you’re new to the world of blogging and running your own site, but it’s important to research it as much as possible so that you become fairly familiar and comfortable with the practice.

We’re not going to go into a full explanation of SEO in this article, but here’s a barebones explanation as to why it’s so important.

Let’s say that you’re running a blog about computers, and someone does an Internet search for “the best computers for 2017.” If your blog features SEO keywords for “computers” “best”, etc., then a search like this will scan for those keywords and display your content. However, if you don’t have any keywords that relate to the content you’re kicking out, someone searching for this won’t see your blog at all.

Finding a good mix of SEO keywords can take a bit of time, and with some sites, it’s often a matter of trail and error. This is definitely one of the more difficult tips to master, but once you do, the difference it’ll make in the traffic that you blog receives is likely to be tremendous.

3. Run A Giveaway/Contest

If you keep up with popular blogs, you’ll probably notice that they frequently run giveaways and contests for free products. And, when they run said contests, you usually need to do something along the lines of sharing an article of theirs, subscribe to their YouTube channel, follow them on Twitter, and more to get entries into the giveaway.

This is a practice that a lot of blogs are making use of more and more each day, as it’s proven to be a great way to get a big influx in traffic and shares on your content.

When running something like this, you are going to be faced with a lot of people who share your stuff and follow you on social media without any intent to follow your blog and the content you’re kicking out as they’re only interested in the prize. However, while there will be people like this, there will also be others who will get involved because of the giveaway, but then go that extra step to see what else your blog has to offer.

If funds are a little short for you, you can do something as simple as buying a $25 Amazon gift card and then give that away to your audience by having them share your content, subscribe to your email list, etc. As your blog grows and gets more traction, you’ll likely even get to a stage where you can get another company or blog to sponsor you and give you something for free to use in a giveaway or contest that you run.

You can choose to run the giveaway entirely through your blog, or you can choose to make use of a site like Rafflecopter that will make running a giveaway about as easy as they come. If you’re looking for one of the best promotion techniques and are want something that will help you get a great deal of traffic in a relatively short amount of time, this is one of the best tips that we have to offer.

2. Create A Strategy For Your Social Media Outreach

When talking about blog promotion, we simply have to mention social media. Social media is absolutely huge in our day in age, and not being relevant on it is a huge shot in the foot for both you and your blog. However, as powerful as it is, you need to create a strategy for publishing and promoting your content in order to get the most out of it.

A lot of new bloggers take to social media and promote their content by simply spamming their account with links to their blog and articles they’ve published, but this is not something you ever want to do. It’s certainly okay to share links to content you’ve published on a moderate basis, but there’s so much more to social media than just link sharing.

Along with sharing your own content, also share content that’s being written by blogs that are similar in subject matter to what you write about. Interact with people who are following your social media account to develop a more personal relationship with your audience, and be sure that you’re updating your social media pages on a regular and consistent basis.

Similar to publishing content on your blog at a consistent rate, it’s equally as important to make sure you’re doing the same thing with your social media accounts. Social media is a great way to interact with folks who are already following your blog, and is also fantastic for reaching out to other people that aren’t loyal readers of your work.

Just like SEO, developing a social media campaign that works best for you can prove to be a bit challenging right off the bat. This is also something that might require for a bit of trial and error right off the bat, but once you find something that works for you, sticking with it is quite easy.

You can choose to post content manually at first, but once your blog starts bringing in lots of traffic and your social media accounts get more and more popular, you’ll likely want to make use of a service such as Buffer. Buffer will allow you to queue up posts that you want to send out on your social media pages, and it makes the whole process of running a social media outreach campaign that much easier.

1. Make It Easy For Readers To Share Your Content

No matter which blogging platform you’re using, there’s a good chance that you can include extensions or plugins on your articles that will allow your readers to easily share your content on their own social media pages.

Developing your own social media campaign is extremely important, but by including links and buttons that allow your readers to easily share your work with their friends and family, you can allow them to do a bit of work for you as well.

The people that they share your content with opens up even more doors in regards to who’s seeing what you’re writing, and this is a step that really doesn’t require much work from you at all. Once you’ve got those sharing links on your blog, you can pretty much leave them there and forget about them entirely. It’s an incredibly simple thing to make use of, but like all of the tips on this guide, it’s been proven time and time again to do wonders for blog traffic.

Final Thoughts

Figuring out how to promote blogs on the Internet in 2017 is no easy task, but if you follow the tips that we’ve gone over in this guide, it doesn’t have to be impossible. The question of how to promote your blog is one that we get asked more than anything, and while there isn’t necessarily one perfect answer, making good use of all the tips here should allow you to see some noticeable growth after a bit of practice. Good luck!