The objective of every blog is growth, and the maximization
of traffic. You might be producing some of the best, well-researched,
compelling and well-written content out there, but what’s the use when no one’s
coming on your blog to read it?
It is therefore important to take time to promote your blog.
Traffic is one of the most important things to a blog, and getting as much
traffic as possible is essential. In order to do so, it is extremely important
to take time out to promote your blog.
Here are 5 proven ‘Google-safe’ ways of promoting your blog,
maximizing exposure, and building valuable backlinks while driving in massive
amounts of referral and search engine traffic.
1. Social Media
Social media websites are an outstanding opportunity to
promote your blog as well as its content and its posts. The likes of Facebook,
Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn and Pinterest not only receive millions of
visitors on a daily basis, they are also responsible for generating a massive
amount of referral traffic as well.
For instance Facebook now has close to a billion registered,
active users (955 million to be precise)! That is a massive number, and if you
think about it, provides you with a fantastic opportunity to market your blog
and your posts as well. What could be better than potentially having close to a
billion people (or one-seventh of the world’s population) read your content!
Newer social media networks like Pinterest aren’t doing half
bad either. In fact the likes of Pinterest are now generating more
referral traffic than Google, Twitter, StumbleUpon and Bing! Pinterest’s
traffic is continually on the rise, providing SEOs, bloggers and marketers with
a great opportunity to promote their blog.
Make sure that you have a presence on all major social media
networks – this is usually as simple as creating a profile. Use automation
tools like HootSuite to send out updates on all your networks at once, however
refrain from using these only for blog promotion; sharing your links will only
make you look like a spammer, and will discourage people from following your
updates.
2. Commenting on Blogs
We spoke about using blog commenting for SEO, and as a
method to promote your blog and generate traffic in extensive detail in my last
post.
Essentially, what you want to do is choose a high-PR,
authority blog to comment on, that is relevant to your niche. So for instance
if you blog on internet marketing, choose a list of IM blogs to comment on. If
your blog is on technology, sports or anything else, choose a blog that is
relevant or similar to its content.
Make sure that you fill out all fields (especially the URL
field) before posting your comment.
Blog commenting can have a profound effect on your SEO – it
provides you with a high-PR backlink to your blog (which might be do-follow,
which means it will be indexed by search engine bots), and can provide your
blog with a massive amount of exposure and traffic. If the blog you posted your
comment on gets a decent amount of visitor, chances are that your post is
likely to be seen and clicked on by a large number of people.
Comments should always be constructive, relevant,
interesting, and related to the subject matter of the post and the blog in
general.
3. Guest Blogging
I like to think of guest blogging as win-win for everyone
involved: it’s win for you because you stand the chance to come across as an
authority on a matter, and earn a couple of backlinks back to your blog off a
high-PR source. Its win for the blog owner because he gets fresh content for
his website.
Guest blogging involves more work on your part, since you
have to create a well-written, interesting, unique,
factually-and-grammatically-correct post for another blog. You have to take
time out to write a great post, however it might seem like wastage of time,
since you could be spending the same time creating content for your own blog
instead. However it is important to know that guest blogging can (a) give you a
nice boost in page visits, (b) help improve your blog’s PR significantly, (c)
exposure to your brand and any of its products or services to a large number of
people, (d) network with, and build relationship with other bloggers and
authority figures in your niche, (e) be seen as an authority in your niche, and
(f) allow you to build a dedicated, loyal base of readers and subscribers.
Make sure that you speak with the blog owner to know if he
has any specifics you need to adhere to when writing your post. Write a
precise, to-the-point, interesting and an engaging post (quality >
quantity). Once the post is up, respond to any all comments and queries.
4. Linking to Other Blogs
Blogs often use a trackback or pingback feature. Essentially,
what this does is give you a backlink to your blog whenever you link to one of
their post on their blog. Say, for instance, you put up a blog post and link to
another blog post from another blog, a part of your post along with the link to
your post will also appear in the comments section of the post you linked to.
So linking to other blogs and earning a trackback/linkback
can turn out to be a great way of driving more traffic to your blog (maybe even
from a high-PR source but that depends on the blog you link to), get exposure,
and perhaps most importantly in this case, get the attention of an authority
blogger in your niche.
If you link to someone consistently, chances are that they
might even return the favour at some point by linking back to you. Which of
course means exposure for, and a freebacklink to your blog!
5. Contests
Doing contests is a tremendous way of getting the word out
about your blog, and can be a pretty effective promotional tool.
Start off with determining the goal, aim or purpose of this
contest is – get more Facebook likes, build an email list, get RSS subscribers
or sell a plugin. The content goals will ultimately determine the prize and the
rules of the contest.
Choose the reward/prize carefully. It needs to be something
that is relevant and something that people would actually want to win,
depending on your niche. For instance you could give a free signed copy of your
uber-famout eBook, or a Wordpress plugin pack worth $300. If you have a budget,
you might need to purchase the prize that you’ll be giving away, however if
your blog gets a lot of visitors, it might be easier (and better) for you to
get someone to sponsor the prize. Look around for sponsors and try getting in
touch with them, most of them would probably be very interested in the
publicity that they’ll be able to get using your blog.
And finally, make it easy for people to participate in your
contest, and spread the word! A contest is useless if people don’t know about
it.
For instance, one of the ways to enter the contest could be
to ‘like’ and ‘share’ a post/update/blog URL on Facebook. This way, not only
will you be getting a large number of people to like you and hear about you by
spreading the word (promoting your blog in the process), you will also be
making it super easy for them to participate.
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