Looking for ways on how to promote your blog? Chances are you just created/ published a great blog and you have little to no idea on how to promote it- I am here to help you with that.
When it comes to marketing my blogs, I try to follow Joseph Jaffe’s words of spending 10% of my time creating great blogs and 90% of my time promoting them.
As someone relatively new to the blogging world and as blogging being a part-time gig, I need to focus more on free promotion strategy. With my expertise in SEO, I naturally dedicating my blog promotion strategy to SEO. Over time, I tried quite a few content promotion strategies. While some did deliver results, most of them were a waste of time and energy.
In this blog, I am sharing 9 strategies to effectively promote your blog for free that I have personally tried and has worked like a charm.
Let’s get started
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Is it even a surprise anymore that on-page SEO and technical SEO are my go-to moves for promoting my blog? I rely on SEO best practices to ensure that my blog performs well in the search engine race. SEO helps you rank higher in search engines bringing more traffic to your website. The higher the rankings, the more number of people will visit your blog and convert easily.
Search Engine Optimization involves the task of optimizing your website for better user experience, better speed, integrate keywords in content, backlinks and more.
Any blogger needs to understand that, in the long run, SEO is very important for your blog promotion as it brings you targeted organic traffic. Without having to put a lot of your time and efforts to do so.
If you want to learn more about SEO check out my SEO learning hub and find everything you need to learn about SEO
Answering on Quora, Reddit and other same industry forums
We bloggers and marketers love solving business problems and connect with our audience. What better place to do that than public forums like Quora, Reddit and others that are dedicated to creating a community of people asking questions and experts answering them.
Being an expert in your niche, you can answer questions about your industry and promote your blog by adding a link to it for further explanation.
This way, you can not only promote your blog for free but also establish your position in your industry as a subject expert.
Promoting on Social Media Platforms
Social media marketing is still one of the best ways to connect with your target audience and attract them to your blog. Especially, when you have put in so much effort in creating a great blog, then you must share it, re-share it and reuse it on social media to make sure your blog reaches maximum people.
When it comes to social media marketing, there are a few big ones that you definitely can’t miss sharing your content on, including the big Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Depending on your industry, you can also promote your blogs on Pinterest, and Tumblr as well.
On the other hand, simply sharing your blog on your social media is not going to get you a lot of traction. You need to have a detailed and well thought out social media marketing strategy as well. Your strategy should include a study on what platforms work best to connect with your audience, brand voice, and brand message, engagement with your audience, influencers and other brands too.
A secret that works well on social media to get organic traffic(non-paid) is to use the latest released features on each social media platform. For example, Instagram recently released the feature of a carousel of 10 images. So if you use 10 photos with post with right hashtags, you are sure to get higher organic reach. The same goes for LinkedIn, if you use document upload (like a slideshow) it will get you more reach.
Guest Blogging
Another great way to promote your blog for free is guest blogging. The way to go about it is simple- all you have to do write your best content and relevant content of your industry and publish it on blogs with a huge follower base. This will not only build your authority in your niche and help you get more recognized amongst your peers but also allow you to promote your blog by adding a link to your site in your bio.
Create Free Resources
While promoting your blog, you can offer your visitors some additional gifts like eBook, infographics, guides and more. These lead magnets will help you get more leads when you promote them efficiently on different channels. Additionally, because your audience is searching for your offerings, your lead magnets also help you get more traffic to your blog, impact your search engine rankings and build a stronger relationship with your readers.
Create Free Tools
Who doesn’t like a freebie? Offering free tools that add value to your user’s life often is directly related to increasing leads. You can offer tools like EMI calculators, Tax Calculator if you belong to the finance industry. In the SEO industry, freebies like keyword ranking tools or SEO audit tools are used to entice the audience. Additionally, these tools help you build authority and while Google search engines also rank you higher as your audience is looking for these tools.
Build Email List
Regardless if you feel that email marketing is dead or not, it is still one of the best ways to connect with your readers and promote your blog for free. Up to 68% of your blog post traffic can be driven by email marketing.
However, before you start promoting your blog through email, you need to first build your email list, and for that, you need two things in place –
- A hassle-free process for your viewers to subscribe to your blog email list
- An enticing lead magnet like a detailed study or an ebook to trade for their email ID
If your content is truly great, people don’t mind getting it in their inbox. And because you aim to promote your blog with emails, you don’t need to go crazy with the email graphics either.
The onus of email open is mostly carried out by email subject lines. So, to increase more email open, you can change the subject line and resend the same email to contacts who didn’t open your email originally.
Outreach Strategy
Outreach programs like influencer marketing and Blogger outreach is a way to promote your blog by connecting with people that are already connected with your target audience. Here are a few ways you can use them to your advantage to promote your blog rather than trying to take the long way of connecting with your audience yourself.
- You can mention the name and work of influencers of your industry and appreciate their work by adding links to their work in your blog. If your content is shareworthy, chances are the influencers with thousands of followers will share your content with their audience.
- You can interview a famous influencer and integrate their quote in your blog. Once again, as they benefit from this exercise well, they could share your blog on their channels, exposing your work to a wide range of audiences.
- Unlike influencer marketing, blogger outreach is more than just requesting an influencer to plug in your product or service. It is more focused on building long term content partnerships, opportunities for guest blogging for each other and scoring quality backlinks.
Engage with your audience through comments
Commenting on top-performing blogs from your industry will not only get you known for your insights on the subject matter but also entice other readers to check out your blogs as well. If you are consistent with your commenting and adding value to the existing value, you might even get an invitation to publish a guest blog.
On the other hand, don’t be aggressive with the commenting, don’t be rude and judgmental and don’t add links to your blog in the comment itself. You can add a link to your blog in your bio instead.
When you are opting for free strategies to promote your blog, understand that building relationships with your peers is the key to your success. So do what you can do to build your connections.
To conclude, blog promotions sound like a simple task but it requires quite a lot of hidden efforts. You might not get immediate success but don’t give up after initial small failures. Keep trying and it will work
One piece of advice, don’t start with implementing all the tactics together. Take up one or two methods and gradually work up to more strategies.
We have come to an end to the list of free tactics to promote your blog.
If you are new to the world of blogging, you might not be aware of how to start a blog and these free promotion tactics. Now that you know, which one of these tips are you going to put to practice?