One of the most enjoyable and exciting parts of your journey will be the starting of your blog. After spending so much time and energy on picking an idea, researching your target market, and narrowing down your niche, this is where your hard work pays off.
However, there are some steps you must take to lay the groundwork for your blog to be successful from the start. We’ll walk you through a comprehensive and straightforward blog promotion checklist in this article.
Read on to learn about everything you should have in place when you first launch your blog, as well as what you can do to ensure your blog’s long-term success.
Pre-promotion checklist
Before you start a blog promotion campaign, make sure your blog is ready for the public eye. Keep in mind that not every blog receives attention. Popular blogs are popular for a reason: they have a compelling unique selling proposition. You hardly see any influencer promoting a spammy generic blog. As a result, you must determine what makes your blog unique and work to promote it.
Let’s look at what should be on your pre-promotion checklist.
Figure out whether you need to hire freelancers
It’s not easy to promote a blog: it involves multiple tasks and resources that overlap. This could mean doing the promotion yourself or hiring freelancers. If you have other priorities, you can employ various freelancers and manage a remote team to work on your blog while you’re on the go.
Another important consideration is the organization, which includes how you plan to promote yourself. You can use a phase-by-phase approach to focus on the most critical aspects of your blog promotion strategy and create a solid project management plan to manage your blog promotion strategy.
Ensure you have high-quality content
Make sure you’ve published enough high-quality blog content. Your blog must have helpful, one-of-a-kind content that is relevant to your services or products.
Feature guest writers on your blog, and include how-to and top 10 guides. This diversifies the types of content you publish and highlights different perspectives, providing readers with useful information.
Don’t be afraid to follow the latest trends. While evergreen content is necessary for every blog, content based on trends, seasonality, and current events can help to keep your brand relevant and your blog interesting.
Use content tools like Grammarly to check for plagiarism and improve other important aspects of your content before sending it out (readability, grammar, etc.).
To Contents ↑Make your blog searchable
Optimize your blog content for Search. To help your content appear in search engine results pages, use on-page and off-page SEO techniques.
Do keyword research to find high-ranking terms and naturally include them throughout your content when writing blog posts—link to internal pages that are relevant and external sites that are authoritative.
SEO will help readers from search engines find, read, and share your blog content. Even better, it’s less expensive than paid advertising in the long run.
Build relationships with your readers
Building real relationships with your readers can be just as beneficial as promoting your blog online and on your blog. To begin, establish and grow a loyal readership. (Email subscription is one way to cultivate this base). Building off-site relationships with other bloggers and businesses is another way to leverage genuine relationships for blog promotion. Share other people’s content on social media, in emails, and via links in your blog content — you never know who might share yours in return.
Remember to capitalize your blogging efforts with high-paying ads. With Adsterra, you can install an ad code in minutes and start getting paid for every 1,000 impressions.
To Contents ↑How to promote your blog via email marketing
Despite the latest marketing fads, email remains the most powerful and cost-effective method of communication. For many people, it is still the preferred mode of communication. Consider this: almost every account you create requires an email address.
Build your email list
An email list is the most effective way to convert organic traffic into engaged readers who return to your blog regularly to see what you’re up to. Any plugin should help you establish your initial email list and provide a readership to read your articles and share them. Increasing your email list is a vicious cycle. You gather subscribers, notify them when an article is published, and they read it and share it with others.
Here are a few quick tips to help you get the most out of your new blog post emails:
- Sell the benefits of reading your posts to your subscribers, so they understand WIIFM (what’s in it for me?).
- Use action verbs in your buttons to help your subscribers understand what exactly you want them to do.
- Make these emails brief and straight to the point. You want to direct them to your blog so they can continue reading.
Plain text emails or visual emails?
It appears that many people are now preferring plain text emails. We noticed that HTML-enhanced emails had lower open and click-through rates and concluded that some email clients might block them from reaching primary inboxes.
So plain text emails get more opens than HTML emails. But use them sparingly to avoid spamming people’s inboxes.
Combine those posts with a few others from industry experts to create an email newsletter that your subscribers will enjoy?
That’s a great way to re-share your new content, as well as a few of your older excellent posts, and make the time you spend curating social media content worthwhile.
Send out an email newsletter with your most recent posts, as well as your best-ofs and curated content. This is a great way to remind your subscribers to check out your content while also adding a lot of value by sharing other people’s great content.
To Contents ↑Enable social shares directly from Emails
When you include click-to-tweet links in your plain text emails, you’ll get a lot more shares for each blog post within the first few hours after they’re sent out. Just enter your social message and the link to your blog post into Share Link Generator. To encourage social engagement, create the link and include it in your email.
How to promote your blog via social media marketing
Promoting your blog on social media is still a great way to gain more exposure and ultimately boost traffic and shares. But it’s not as simple as making a single Facebook post and then moving on to something else. You must implement a social media marketing strategy.
- Concentrate on the social networks that are most relevant to your blog.
- Interact with those who use those platforms, such as influencers and brands.
- Join social media groups to expand your social media reach.
1. Maintain a consistent presence on your chosen social media platforms and post regularly
Don’t just show up when you’ve written a new blog post. Use tools like Blog2Social and Sendible to customize your posts with a long or short message, add relevant hashtags or mentions and choose an image aspect ratio for each platform.
Sendible also has a social inbox to manage replies and engage with your audience and content recycling to keep promoting your content regularly.
2. Use reciprocal sharing websites
These social websites work based on reciprocal sharing. You earn ‘credits’ by sharing other people’s content, which you can then use to post your own and have it shared.
Triberr is a fantastic tool for promoting your blog. Each of your blog posts will be automatically imported (via RSS). You can use your featured blog post image to make your post stand out in the stream. Remember to engage with and share the content of your tribemates.
Viral Content Bee is a tool that allows bloggers to promote their content on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. You can add your post to get it promoted once you’ve earned enough credits by sharing other people’s content. Connect with people in your niche and share their content for the best results.
To Contents ↑3. Check out niche social bookmarking websites
If your content has the right audience, sharing it on niche-specific sites will lead to more relevant shares and traffic.
Here are a few examples to get you started:
- ManageWP – WordPress
- Zest – Marketing
- Techspy – Technology
- GrowthHackers – Business & Growth Hacking
- Hacker News – Startups, Programming, Technology
- 11×2 – Sport
- DesignFloat – Graphic Design
4. Join social groups, communities, and forums
You can contribute, build relationships, and establish your authority by participating in online communities. However, just like Reddit, you have to participate in discussions to get noticed.
Look for active, well-moderated groups that have been around for a while. Also, check out groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, and more.
5. Include your blog link in your social media profiles
Check your social media profiles to see if you have a link to your blog. This idea works especially well if you’re sharing content on Instagram because you can’t include a link back to your blog posts in the messages themselves.
6. Share your blog posts on social media right when you publish them
Share your blog posts to all of your business’s social accounts as soon as they’re published.
The more immediate retweets, likes, and general shares you receive, the more credibility the post gains. Some of your audience may follow you on various social media profiles; switch it up to optimize each message for your different social media profiles instead of sending every message with the headline of your most recent post.
How to promote your blog via influencer marketing
There’s an entire blogosphere out there for you to explore and get noticed. All you need to do is form relationships with the right people.
Influencer marketing
Rather than trying to reach your target audience on your own, influencer marketing involves asking individuals who are popular with your target audience to promote your content.
Here are two ways influencers can help you promote your blog:
1. Mention influencers in your social media posts (individuals or expert roundups)
Include a relevant link to a popular influencer in your blog post. As long as the content is high quality, they’ll be happy to share it with their audience.
2. Interview an influential blogger
Why not take it a step further and include a quote or two from a well-known blogger in your new blog post? It’s a great way to distinguish your post from the crowd by including some unique content. If you ask nicely, most bloggers will give you their opinion. Once it’s published, they’ll share it with their followers.
Blogger outreach
Influencer marketing is similar to blogger outreach: it also involves enlisting influential people in your field.
The goal here isn’t just to get an influencer with a large following to promote your product. Blogger outreach is now more focused on forming content partnerships, guest blogging, and acquiring backlinks.
Guest blogging
One of the most effective ways to promote your blog is through guest blogging. Writing your best content on relevant blogs in your niche with many followers and subscribers is the key to making it work. Include a link to a landing page on your website in your author bio, where visitors can get an exclusive download or learn more about your services.
Blog commenting
When you start commenting on the top blogs in your niche, other commenters and the blog’s owner will notice you. If your comment is helpful, other readers will go to your blog to learn more. You might even receive an invitation to write a guest post from the blog owner. Just be careful not to include links to your content in the comment itself.
How to promote your blog via paid marketing
There are some paid options for promoting your content, so let’s look at some of them.
Social media advertising
As organic (non-paid) reach on social media declines, you may want to consider paid advertising. Different demographics and advertising formats exist for each social media platform. For instance, there’s:
- Facebook Video Ads
- Instagram Carousel Ads
- Pinterest Promoted Pins
- Twitter Promoted Tweets
- LinkedIn Sponsored Content
But before going all into social media ads, consider the following:
- What’s the best platform for your campaign?
- Where does your target audience hang out?
- What’s the best ad format: images, video, or just text?
- What are the costs per network and your budget?
Search advertising
Search advertising, or search engine marketing, is a marketing technique that involves placing online ads on search engine results pages (SERPs). It’s also known as PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising because you have to pay a small fee every time someone clicks on your ad.
Other tips on promoting your blog
Repromote older successful content
Repromote your old best-performing content to your social media accounts. This will boost traffic again to your blog. Use a tool like CoSchedule to see which of your posts are the most popular and schedule even more social shares to keep the traffic coming in.
Stand out with visuals
Posts with images receive more engagement than those that do not. Use text overlay to improve your images’ effectiveness and create more visual posts with graphics and captured images.
Including images in your tweets can increase your clickthrough rate by 150%, and using animated GIFs can increase your clickthrough rate even more. So make your blog visually appealing, reuse the images, graphics, animated GIFs, and videos that appear on your social media platforms.
Content syndication (blog republishing)
Content syndication is republishing the same content (article, video, infographic, etc.) on multiple websites. Small and large publications alike enjoy syndicating content to keep their readers informed. This practice also benefits the sources by exposing the content to new audiences.
The best practice is to first publish on your blog, then wait a few days for Google to index your post before republishing on other platforms such as Medium and LinkedIn. You could post a snippet of your article on syndication sites and a link to the full article.
Content repurposing
Content repurposing involves reusing your most popular posts into new forms of content. This is only possible if you have a summary of what you’ve already published and what each one has to offer your audience.
You can repurpose a blog post as an infographic, a YouTube video, a podcast, or even a Slideshare presentation.
You can also use CTAs to encourage your readers to become leads in your blog post. You could, for example, include a sign-up form for an online course or a free e-book.
Repurposing your content can increase your blog’s traffic by threefold while also increasing engagement.
Use heat maps
A website heat map is an excellent way to assess user engagement on a page-by-page basis. Heat maps are a great way to visualize your data and turn it into insights that you can use to improve your user experience. In the case of websites, they display which features users interact with and color-code them from ‘hot’ to ‘cold.’
This can include elements such as what pages users visit, where they bounce off, how far they scroll, what content they look at, and so on.
You can better visualize your user’s experience and work to improve it by using a heatmap.
Measuring your blog promotion efforts
Web analytics
You’ll have a lot of data to sort through, regardless of which web analytics tool you use. You can see where your blog visitors came from in Google Analytics by looking at the ‘Acquisition’ section and ‘Channels.’
- Organic Search – People who find your website through search engines like Google and Bing.
- Direct – Visitors who came to your website without using a traceable referral source, such as typing your URL into their browser’s address bar or using a bookmark.
- Social – Visitors who arrived at your site via a social media platform (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, etc.).
- Referral – Visitors who arrive at your website via a link from another website.
- Other – Visitors from traffic sources with an incorrect UTM Medium parameter.
- Paid Search – Visitors came to your site due to a paid search ad, such as Google AdWords.
- Email – Website visitors who arrive after clicking on links in your email marketing campaigns.
Google Analytics is as good as the data it receives. So, if you’re serious about tracking your data, you’ll need to make sure your tracking parameters are set up correctly on all of the links you have control over.
To Contents ↑Use SEO tools for auditing and tracking website performance
If you don’t have a healthy website, your blog content won’t rise to the top of search engines. You might want to consider using an SEO tool to analyze your website’s performance and identify areas for improvement to optimize for both users and search engines.
Social media monitoring
You can use social media monitoring tools in addition to web analytics tools to see how your blog posts are performing.
Conclusion
Start with one or two blog promotion strategies and see which ones are the most effective. After that, try adding another until you find something that works. Depending on your content and audience, one tactic might work for one blog post, and another might work for another. Don’t disregard any strategy quickly, as some may take longer to work than others. After a while, you’ll be able to compile everything that works into a solid personalized content promotion strategy.
