How to promote your blog: The ultimate guide in 12 points

With today’s article, I want you to discover how to promote your blog on the Internet with some tricks that, if used well, can bring a lot of visits to your “corner on the Web”. Visits that, if you are good at attracting users, will turn from simple numbers into people, into faithful readers of your blog to be precise. What are you waiting for to try?

Sometimes knowing how to write well is not enough to attract new users to your blog: the online giants, before becoming such, spent entire months, if not years, promoting their blog, following some simple and effective strategies. Which ones are they? Learn the main ones in this definitive 12-point guide.

Join communities on the web

It may seem trivial, but online communities play a significant role in promoting your business blog. How? By participating in the various online communities, your name will begin to circulate on the web and you will be associated with your site and your blog. In this way, you will establish relationships with other professionals in the sector and you can increase your visibility and brand awareness.

How is it possible to make the most of the potential of communities? Let’s see an example below:

• It might seem easy to fall into the temptation to insert the link to our articles in the comments section of a community. But the truth is that, before starting to SPAM and being kicked out, it would be advisable to establish real relationships with the participants: you can introduce yourself, you can answer questions, interact.
  
• After gaining the trust of the participants, we can begin to insert our articles in the comments. These will be added with some discretion, based on the topic of reference: if someone asks a question about which we have written an article, we will link it as an answer.
  
• We show the added value that our article can bring to those who will read it. There is a big difference between commenting with a “read my post now!” and an “I understand your problem perfectly and it is for this reason that I decided to link you to an article I wrote about it“. If possible, quote some phrases from your post to intrigue the user. In this way, they will no longer see you simply as someone who wants to advertise, but as someone who really wants to help.

At this point, let’s see what the main communities to access could be. I will list only a few so as not to go too far: Reddit and Quora are particularly successful. The first platform was born in 2005 and brings together all those who have doubts about different subjects. Quora does exactly what the old Yahoo Answer! did, but it is much more monitored and, at the same time, professional, just think that its slogan is “a place to share knowledge and better understand the world”.

In addition to Reddit and Quora, there are also communities within Social Networks: we can also cite the example of Facebook groups. Thanks to these communities it is possible to get in touch with people who need us and our content and that is why they should not be underestimated.

When to use online communities to promote your blog. If your goal is not only to bring traffic and views to your blog and get user conversion but also to increase brand awareness, online communities are the right way. These platforms allow you, in fact, to create a link between your image as a serious and competent professional and that of your brand, which will reflect the same values.

Share your articles on social networks

Staying on the subject of “social”, we come to another particularly useful tool to better advertise our company blog: Social Networks. These are hugely successful platforms, attracting millions of users around the world every day. It is precisely because of their popularity that it is essential to be present and publish our contents within them: thanks to Social Networks we can obtain maximum visibility.

But not all that glitters is gold: Social Media must be used in the correct way in order to fully exploit their potential. It is not enough to publish a post in the evening to be able to be successful in Social Networks. More needs to be done. Here are some interesting techniques to advertise the blog on social platforms:

• Use a different approach for each Social Network. When you link to your articles, you need to remember that Facebook is different from Twitter and Instagram is different from LinkedIn. It is for this reason that you will have to use a different language depending on the social platform you are on. If the way of communicating must be different, it is also true that the tone of voice must be the same, the one that reflects the values ​​and peculiarities of your business and your blog to be fully consistent.
  
• As with articles within the blog, it takes a certain consistency in publication. It is useless to hope to be able to promote your articles on Social Networks if you make a post every 2 months. Also, when you opt for a specific deadline in posting, you will need to think about the best days to do so. Let’s take an example: you decide to publish one post per week that features a specific article from your blog. At this point, you need to choose which day is best for your business. How to do it? The main strategy is to test the different time slots and analyze the data: a study in which time slot and on what day you receive the most interactions and, based on these considerations, identify your “day X”. This will allow you to create an “appointment” with the user, who will eagerly await your posts.
  
• Add share buttons to articles. In this way, you will increase spontaneous shares.

When to use social networks to promote your blog? When you want to target an extremely wide audience, social platforms are the best solution for your needs. This is the best way to showcase your articles: if they are interesting enough, you will immediately notice the results, with a constant increase in the number of readers on your blog.

Write more content

It’s always the same story: quality or quantity?

Let’s say that, according to Hubspot and a research carried out in recent years, sites / blogs that publish 16 or more contents per month usually get about 3 times more traffic than blogs that publish 0 to 4 articles per month.

Without underestimating the quality of the content, therefore, one of the best strategies to have a blog followed is to consistently publish quality content.

It may seem obvious to you, but it isn’t.

Related to this topic is also the review of published content, which should be periodic.

You might think that writing content doesn’t help promote your blog, and that’s partly true, but without content… you have very little to promote!

Practice guest blogging effectively

In recent times, Guest Blogging has been dominating the world of the Web. What is it about? We are talking about a strategy that allows us to publish our articles in an external blog or to host external bloggers on our blog. All this leads to establishing relationships with other professionals in your same sector, obtaining new ideas to grow your business. In addition, you will have not only the visibility of your site but also that of the external blog.

Why is Guest Blogging becoming more and more popular? First of all, because we gain credibility in the eyes of the user who, finding our blog and our articles written on another site, feels more attracted to our reality. Not only. When we host an important blogger on our site, we can better capture the attention of numerous potential readers who, attracted by the name of the author, already known, will come to visit us. This is why it is important to establish relationships with those who already have a blog, full of information and visitors, and become both guests and hosts.

Why is Guest Blogging becoming more and more popular? First of all, because you will gain credibility in the eyes of the user who, finding your blog and your articles written on another site, feels more attracted to your website. Not only. When you host an important blogger on your site, you will be able to better capture the attention of numerous potential readers who, attracted by the name of the author, already known, will visit you. This is why it is important to establish relationships with those who already have a blog, full of information and visitors, and become both guests and hosts.

In the same way, the so-called “mention posts” are also gaining ground: these are articles in which theories or statistics sought by third-party sites are taken up, which are obviously cited. This is the case, for example, of the “Man Moving Method”, a famous link-building strategy.

When to use Guest Blogging to promote your blog? If your blog is well underway and already has a good number of visitors and a good authority score, you can start a Guest Blogging strategy. You will hardly be able to host important bloggers from your industry if you are still a beginner and are not yet well known enough.

Make a video to embed on your article

Contrary to what one might think, an article is not just text and even the “accessory” elements can be useful for promoting your blog. In this sense, in a world that is increasingly in a hurry and has no time to read, immediacy becomes an important point of reference, sometimes even essential, to get your blog off the ground.

YouTube is the real revelation of recent years, also for the importance, it holds worldwide: the most famous video platform in the world turns out to be the second search engine par excellence, after Google. This is why, to promote your blog, you will have to think about adding new elements to your articles: videos.

If you have already written a perfect article but have not yet achieved the expected results, you can make a video that takes what you talked about in textual terms. The video will be professionally produced and will be neither too long nor too short, with simple language and within everyone’s reach. In the description under the video published on YouTube, remember to insert the link that refers to the article of your blog. In this way, you will get a considerable wave of visibility.

Create infographics to enrich your articles

In case, in addition to the video, you want to create other elements related to your article, you can take advantage of the popularity of infographics. These are images that contain multiple concepts, such as statistical data and definitions, in a very small space. In recent months, infographics have been gathering the approval of many, thanks to the fact that they are short and intuitive and, at the same time, complete with the main information of an article.

How to use videos and infographics to promote your blog. Videos and infographics take on a leading role within an article. However, to be particularly incisive, they need the support of professionals in the sector: you will need the help of those who edit the videos and a graphic designer who knows how to concentrate various information in a single image. If your blog is essential for your business, it is good to spend time and money on this solution, which will prove effective.

If, on the other hand, you run a blog as a hobby, try other cheaper and less demanding strategies to achieve good results.

Optimize your articles for search engines

In addition to being written to appeal to your audience, articles must also appeal to search engines, Google, Bing, etc. What does it mean? Each indexed page, that is, visible to search engines, gets a ranking for certain keywords.

To promote your blog, we should make sure to appear on the first page looking for a specific term. The strategy that follows in this regard is called SEO, Search Engine Optimization, and includes several techniques that fully fall within the parameters imposed by search engine algorithms.

How can you optimize your articles to make them visible on Google? First of all, create them based on specific keywords: after choosing the main topic, study which keyword is related to it is searched the most and try to position yourself for that. This will be possible by inserting the keyword in the title of the article and repeating it several times during the post, to make Google understand exactly what you are talking about.

During publication, remember to enter Meta Title and Meta Description, which must not only contain the keyword but also make the user fully understand the content of the article. These are just some of the techniques of SEO, which represents a much more complex strategy.

SEO is a medium to long-term strategy. This means that you will have to wait a few months before seeing concrete results in increasing organic visits to your blog. If you are not in a hurry and want to lay the foundation for a solid presence on search engines, SEO is definitely for you.

Start Google Ads campaigns

Online advertising is another method to promote your blog that should not be underestimated: in particular, the Google Advertising service allows you to reach exactly the audience that is looking for a topic that we cover in our post, ensuring the best content. This process is part of SEM, an acronym that stands for Search Engine Marketing: in practice, search engines are paid to obtain a high ranking.

The tool that Google makes available to create paid campaigns is Google AdWords, which recently changed its name to “Google Ads”. To make effective announcements, it will be advisable to thoroughly study which keywords to use if you want to get a high ranking. You will therefore have to dig deep into your articles to understand what kind of user you can become a support for.

This should not be too difficult a process to do, if before you start writing you have a clear idea of ​​the goal and the audience you are targeting, perhaps creating the identikit of your Buyer Persona, the ideal customer for your company.

Once you understand which audience you want to target, you should make sure that your ad has a quality landing page: whether it’s an article or the first page of the blog – the one in which the categories and previews of the posts are concentrated. -, it will be appropriate that they contain excellent images and, above all, that they are relevant to the text of the ad. In fact, it is not enough just to attract new visitors: you also need to know how to keep them.

When to campaign to promote your blog? If the goal of increasing the number of readers of your articles is in the short or very short term, Google Ads is undoubtedly one of the best solutions. By studying specific keywords, you will be able to appear in the top 4 positions of the results page and this will put your blog in the spotlight.

Create a free ebook with your best articles

Have you already written quite a few articles and have you noticed that some have been particularly successful, overshadowing others? You don’t have to get angry: you can take advantage of the popularity of some of your posts to create a free ebook, which can highlight not only your best content but also those that have not received the right visibility for the moment.

How can you create an effective ebook and where can you insert it? It might seem like a feat, but it’s all easier than you think: thanks to Google Analytics, you can have a complete overview of all the pages on your site that have generated an excellent number of visitors. Take those that refer to the blog and copy your articles into the writing program you usually use.

When you have acquired enough articles (twenty might be enough), divide them by macro-topic (for example, SEO and Inbound Marketing) and give some graphic input to the document. Next, convert the document to PDF and that’s it. At this point, within your articles, you can insert a Call to Action that refers to an effective Landing Page, which will allow your users to download the PDF. How will this allow you to advertise your articles? First of all, if someone wants to learn more about a specific topic, they will know which topics they can find within the blog and how to find them.

Not only. In the document you can also add a section entitled “other readings”, with titles and links that also refer to posts that are not having success, so as to increase their visibility as well.

Creating “premium content” for your site visitors can be the ideal way to promote your blog. It would be advisable to have a good number of articles on the platform and see which ones actually perform better and have a particularly high number of readers: it would be useless to create an ebook with articles that, at this moment, are not attracting an audience.

Take advantage of the potential of the newsletter

One of the main ways to promote your blog is to send customized and segmented emails to your customer database, based on the topic in which the various potential customers have shown interest. Let’s take an example to make everything clearer.

We are running a jewelry store. We have found that our Contact “X” in recent times has viewed the section relating to necklaces with precious stones over and over again. We could send you a newsletter by email informing you of our new article entitled: “The ruby: let’s discover one of the most beautiful precious stones”.

In this way you will obtain a double benefit: not only will you drive traffic to your site and promote your blog, but you will capture the user’s attention precisely on the topic on which he has shown particular interest. All this will lead to an increase in the conversion rate and steady business growth.

Here are some tips you can take advantage of to make email marketing a truly effective tool for promoting your business blog:

• Segment your audience. It is important to be able to reach the user’s deepest need. Since we don’t all have the same tastes and needs – otherwise all companies would focus on the same products – you need to make your blog an answer to every one of your leads. This is why at Contact “X” you will present the article on ruby ​​and at Contact “Y”, for example, the article on white gold jewelry.
  
• Use attractive language. Summarize in the content of the email what you are talking about in the article, entering into the merits of the benefits that the recipient can access by deciding to read it. Similarly, use a communication style that can capture attention and add fun images or drawings.
  
• Send the email at the best time. What can it be? You can find out for yourself: send the first newsletters at different times of the day and note when the open rate is highest. When you have enough data available, you will understand what can be the best time to send the email and make sure it is read by the greatest number of contacts.

There are cases in which email becomes the cornerstone of a strategy to promote your blog. This happens when you already have a particularly large database of contacts and, above all, when you decide to take advantage of marketing automation. This strategy allows you to automate the process of sending personalized and customized emails according to the need demonstrated by the user. All this is essential to reach and whet his need, pushing him to enter our articles to find the ideal solution.

Make sure you write better articles than your competitors

Before you go about promoting your blog, you need to make sure you’ve written better content than what’s already on the Web. Think about who runs a clothing store, showcasing their best items. This is exactly what must happen with the blog: you must write perfect articles from every point of view, to avoid wasting time and money by showcasing content that does not attract the curiosity of users.

Here are what elements to pay attention to to write better articles than the competition:

• To the topic. It is difficult to think of achieving excellent results by advertising a blog that deals with topics that do not capture the public’s attention. Nowadays everything is based on fashions and trends and it is for this reason that we must take them into account. Several tools can help you find the “perfect topics” for your blog. In this case, we mention Google Trends, a service made available for free by Google to find out what users in different areas of the world are interested in. Just enter the topic that we would like to discuss in the search bar to understand how many are searching for it on Google right now.
  
• To the content. The text is the most important thing in a business blog article and it is for this reason that it must be particularly taken care of. According to some statistics taken and adapted by getcodeless.com, most companies do not write more than 750 words in their articles: it is a low value compared to the average of Google’s top-ranking results, which is higher than 1,200. In addition to the length, attention must be paid to the form and the communicative style, which should not bore the audience to which it refers, but rather offer new ideas for interaction.
  
• To constancy. Publishing an article every 2 months will certainly not allow you to better promote your business blog. For this reason, you will have to create an editorial plan that allows you to better organize your blogging activity and, above all, to make it constant and effective for your business.

Periodically update your posts to make them current

We conclude this article by remembering that, over time, even your blog can age. Especially if you often write articles containing statistical data or trends from year to year, you cannot expect them to always be current.

What is the ideal solution in this case? Periodically re-checking your articles and updating them is a good practice to keep in mind. This allows you to consistently offer quality content to your readers and increase the credibility of your brand in their eyes.

So, if you have a post that talks about statistics for 2019, look for more recent data and start the “restyling” of your article. Likewise, if your post talks about 2020 trends, completely renew the content to include 2021 trends. This way you will always be on track and have a better chance of being successful with your articles and attracting new users.

There is no expiration date to renew your content, also because it depends on the regularity with which they are published and, therefore, on the number of articles on the blog. Nevertheless, this process must be carried out with a certain consistency, which could go from a minimum of once every 3 months to a maximum of once a year.