How to Promote Your Blog: 7 Fundamental Strategies
How to Promote Your Blog: 7 Fundamental Strategies
1. Run Facebook ads
Please don’t tell me that you don’t have the budget for content promotion. If you’re not paying with your money, you’re paying with your time.
Let me clarify my point with an example:
Imagine that you’ve chosen “Quora marketing” as the blog promotion strategy you want to test. You now need to:
Find some relevant Quora threads where you can pitch your articles;
Write some quality answers (so that they don’t get deleted by moderators);
Add links to your blog posts from within your answers.
Here’s what I want you to do: Go and leave at least ten useful answers on Quora, and include a link to one of your blog posts in each of them. I’ll wait while you finish.
…
And how many clicks do you think those 10 Quora answers will bring you?
It’s a gamble. Maybe 10? Maybe 500? Maybe zero.
From my personal experience, you need to spend at least 5 hours on Quora every week to get ~100 clicks at the end of the month.
Now it’s up to you to decide: do you want to spend your time trying to get traffic from Quora (or using any other promising “free” content promotion method), or would you prefer to invest a bit of money into Facebook ads and spend those precious work hours on something else?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to dissuade you from using Quora to promote your blog posts.
2. Promote to your existing audience
It’s a trap!
I see too many bloggers (businesses?) limiting their content promotion activities to their existing audience.
If that’s all you’re doing to promote your content, you won’t get far.
Now, with Facebook Ads, you can easily create a “negative audience” of people who have already visited your website and only pay for clicks from people who have never heard about you.
This way you can effectively enlarge your audience and expose your content to more and more people over time.
But what happens when you only share your article to a list of your existing email subscribers, or with people who follow you on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn?
You’re bringing the same people back to your website again and again (and again)!
But what’s the problem with this? After all, your existing audience will help with initial traction by eagerly distributing your content to more people (via tweets, shares, direct messages, etc.), right? Not quite.
First of all — if you already had a large audience, then you wouldn’t be reading my article on promoting your blog right now.
Second — the number of email subscribers—or Twitter followers, Facebook fans, etc.—is arbitrary. That’s because you’re very unlikely to reach even 30% of these people with your newly‐published article.
Third — most people who check out your article won’t read the whole thing, let alone tweet it out or send it to a friend. Your post will have to be genuinely exceptional to make them want to do that.
In other words, getting a substantial amount of traffic solely via word of mouth is incredibly hard.
Tim, are you seriously talking me out of sending an email update to my hard‐earned list of email subscribers? Are you even in your right mind?
I’m 100% with you here. You should always promote every new blog post to your existing audience. Some of your fans will indeed amplify your content by tweeting it and sharing it with their friends.
But don’t delude yourself. Not all of your fans will do so—in fact, most of them won’t.
Let me show you some hard cold numbers behind Ahrefs’ audience so that you understand what to hope for (realistically) as you grow yours:
Email list
We have over 53k people on our email list. Here are the open and click‐through rates for one of our best‐performing campaigns:
3. Create share‐worthy content
I wanted to start my post with this strategy, but I was afraid that you’d roll your eyes and close it immediately. I do not doubt that you’re fed up with the same old “create great content” advice.
But now that you’ve read the two previous strategies, I hope that you’ll give me a chance to expand on this one:
Creating great share‐worthy content is essential for the success of your blog.
Impress your readers,
Overwhelm them with value,
Spark an emotion in them…
…and they will talk about your blog everywhere!
4. Get traffic from Google
More often than not, the traffic to your newly‐published blog post will look like this:
Let me break this down:
You send that new article to your email list and share it on social to get that initial influx of visits;
Then your audience of fans spread the word a bit further by sharing your article with their peers;
Then you pour some money into Facebook ads to reach some new people.
But then what?
Your existing audience has seen the article already;
Their friends have seen it too;
And you’re out of budget for Facebook ads.
Does this mean that no‐one else will ever read that article of yours?
Well, not if it ranks in Google:
This screenshot shows real traffic to our keyword research guide published back in 2016.
You can see that traffic to this article didn’t fade after the initial spike. It kept growing. Then we completely rewrote and relaunched this article in April 2017, which helped to increase traffic further.
And that is the power of SEO.
But where do you even start with SEO?
Well, at a basic level it comes down to three simple steps:
Figure out what your ideal blog readers are interested in (i.e., searching for in Google)
Write an article on that topic and make sure it’s better than what’s already out there
Get links to that article from other websites.
It’s as simple as that.
Some bloggers know their audience so well that they don’t even have to do keyword research to figure out what to blog about. Nor do they need to do link building because they have plenty of fans in the industry who’ll happily link to their newly‐published articles.
But if you’re not one of the lucky few for whom SEO is a doddle, you’ll have to spend some time studying SEO and content marketing.
5. Reach out to relevant people
Let’s say your blog is brand new. You registered a domain name around a week ago, and you’re about to write your very first article there.
I’m afraid to say that the following blog promotion strategies likely won’t work for you:
Strategy #1 — Your budget for Facebook ads is small at the beginning, so you’ll probably run out of money very quickly.
Strategy #2 — You don’t have an existing audience to whom you can promote your content. There’s nobody to amplify it.
Strategy #4 — You can’t hope to get search traffic anytime soon because you first need to earn links from other websites. That takes quite a bit of time and effort.
That’s the bad news.
The good news is that there’s nothing to stop you putting all your efforts and resources into strategy #3—creating share‐worthy content.
And once you publish that amazing piece of content, why not show it to people in your industry who DO have a large audience and who DO get tons of consistent search traffic to their websites?
In digital marketing, we call this “outreach.”
The key to successful outreach is to ask yourself the following question each time you’re about to send a new email:
Why would that person care about whatever I say?
If you have a compelling reason for them to care, everything should go smoothly. Otherwise, your emails will only serve to annoy and alienate people.
6. Be active in relevant communities
Notice what I did there?
Most guides on promoting your blog would frame this strategy as “promote your blog in relevant communities.”
I hope the difference is clear.
Online communities exist for people to have meaningful conversations about a particular topic and to help one another with relevant issues. The moment that community members start selfishly promoting their own stuff is the moment that the community ceases to exist.
You can’t just join our Facebook community and start dropping links to your blog. But what you CAN do is become an active member of the group and plug your links in relevant conversations (as long as doing so benefits other members).
So instead of advising you to find all relevant online communities (Facebook groups, online forums, Slack channels, etc) in your space and bomb them with links to your blog, I can only advise you to join them.
Notice that I didn’t even advise you to “be an active member” there? That’s because you either enjoy being a part of that community and helping other people or you don’t.
Here’s some advice on where to look for relevant communities to join:
Search Facebook. This could be fan groups of the leading bloggers in your space, customer groups of brands in your space, or simply relevant interest groups.
Find relevant subreddits. If there’s a subreddit for people who want to photoshop arms onto birds, I’m sure there’s one for whatever you’re blogging about.
Find relevant forums. Just search Google for “your_niche forum” and there’s a good chance you’ll find some.
7. Re‐purpose for different platforms
Here’s our post that explains how to perform an SEO website audit in 16 simple steps.
1. Run Facebook ads
Please don’t tell me that you don’t have the budget for content promotion. If you’re not paying with your money, you’re paying with your time.
Let me clarify my point with an example:
Imagine that you’ve chosen “Quora marketing” as the blog promotion strategy you want to test. You now need to:
Find some relevant Quora threads where you can pitch your articles;
Write some quality answers (so that they don’t get deleted by moderators);
Add links to your blog posts from within your answers.
Here’s what I want you to do: Go and leave at least ten useful answers on Quora, and include a link to one of your blog posts in each of them. I’ll wait while you finish.
…
And how many clicks do you think those 10 Quora answers will bring you?
It’s a gamble. Maybe 10? Maybe 500? Maybe zero.
From my personal experience, you need to spend at least 5 hours on Quora every week to get ~100 clicks at the end of the month.
Now it’s up to you to decide: do you want to spend your time trying to get traffic from Quora (or using any other promising “free” content promotion method), or would you prefer to invest a bit of money into Facebook ads and spend those precious work hours on something else?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to dissuade you from using Quora to promote your blog posts.
2. Promote to your existing audience
It’s a trap!
I see too many bloggers (businesses?) limiting their content promotion activities to their existing audience.
If that’s all you’re doing to promote your content, you won’t get far.
Now, with Facebook Ads, you can easily create a “negative audience” of people who have already visited your website and only pay for clicks from people who have never heard about you.
This way you can effectively enlarge your audience and expose your content to more and more people over time.
But what happens when you only share your article to a list of your existing email subscribers, or with people who follow you on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn?
You’re bringing the same people back to your website again and again (and again)!
But what’s the problem with this? After all, your existing audience will help with initial traction by eagerly distributing your content to more people (via tweets, shares, direct messages, etc.), right? Not quite.
First of all — if you already had a large audience, then you wouldn’t be reading my article on promoting your blog right now.
Second — the number of email subscribers—or Twitter followers, Facebook fans, etc.—is arbitrary. That’s because you’re very unlikely to reach even 30% of these people with your newly‐published article.
Third — most people who check out your article won’t read the whole thing, let alone tweet it out or send it to a friend. Your post will have to be genuinely exceptional to make them want to do that.
In other words, getting a substantial amount of traffic solely via word of mouth is incredibly hard.
Tim, are you seriously talking me out of sending an email update to my hard‐earned list of email subscribers? Are you even in your right mind?
I’m 100% with you here. You should always promote every new blog post to your existing audience. Some of your fans will indeed amplify your content by tweeting it and sharing it with their friends.
But don’t delude yourself. Not all of your fans will do so—in fact, most of them won’t.
Let me show you some hard cold numbers behind Ahrefs’ audience so that you understand what to hope for (realistically) as you grow yours:
Email list
We have over 53k people on our email list. Here are the open and click‐through rates for one of our best‐performing campaigns:
3. Create share‐worthy content
I wanted to start my post with this strategy, but I was afraid that you’d roll your eyes and close it immediately. I do not doubt that you’re fed up with the same old “create great content” advice.
But now that you’ve read the two previous strategies, I hope that you’ll give me a chance to expand on this one:
Creating great share‐worthy content is essential for the success of your blog.
Impress your readers,
Overwhelm them with value,
Spark an emotion in them…
…and they will talk about your blog everywhere!
4. Get traffic from Google
More often than not, the traffic to your newly‐published blog post will look like this:
Let me break this down:
You send that new article to your email list and share it on social to get that initial influx of visits;
Then your audience of fans spread the word a bit further by sharing your article with their peers;
Then you pour some money into Facebook ads to reach some new people.
But then what?
Your existing audience has seen the article already;
Their friends have seen it too;
And you’re out of budget for Facebook ads.
Does this mean that no‐one else will ever read that article of yours?
Well, not if it ranks in Google:
This screenshot shows real traffic to our keyword research guide published back in 2016.
You can see that traffic to this article didn’t fade after the initial spike. It kept growing. Then we completely rewrote and relaunched this article in April 2017, which helped to increase traffic further.
And that is the power of SEO.
But where do you even start with SEO?
Well, at a basic level it comes down to three simple steps:
Figure out what your ideal blog readers are interested in (i.e., searching for in Google)
Write an article on that topic and make sure it’s better than what’s already out there
Get links to that article from other websites.
It’s as simple as that.
Some bloggers know their audience so well that they don’t even have to do keyword research to figure out what to blog about. Nor do they need to do link building because they have plenty of fans in the industry who’ll happily link to their newly‐published articles.
But if you’re not one of the lucky few for whom SEO is a doddle, you’ll have to spend some time studying SEO and content marketing.
5. Reach out to relevant people
Let’s say your blog is brand new. You registered a domain name around a week ago, and you’re about to write your very first article there.
I’m afraid to say that the following blog promotion strategies likely won’t work for you:
Strategy #1 — Your budget for Facebook ads is small at the beginning, so you’ll probably run out of money very quickly.
Strategy #2 — You don’t have an existing audience to whom you can promote your content. There’s nobody to amplify it.
Strategy #4 — You can’t hope to get search traffic anytime soon because you first need to earn links from other websites. That takes quite a bit of time and effort.
That’s the bad news.
The good news is that there’s nothing to stop you putting all your efforts and resources into strategy #3—creating share‐worthy content.
And once you publish that amazing piece of content, why not show it to people in your industry who DO have a large audience and who DO get tons of consistent search traffic to their websites?
In digital marketing, we call this “outreach.”
The key to successful outreach is to ask yourself the following question each time you’re about to send a new email:
Why would that person care about whatever I say?
If you have a compelling reason for them to care, everything should go smoothly. Otherwise, your emails will only serve to annoy and alienate people.
6. Be active in relevant communities
Notice what I did there?
Most guides on promoting your blog would frame this strategy as “promote your blog in relevant communities.”
I hope the difference is clear.
Online communities exist for people to have meaningful conversations about a particular topic and to help one another with relevant issues. The moment that community members start selfishly promoting their own stuff is the moment that the community ceases to exist.
You can’t just join our Facebook community and start dropping links to your blog. But what you CAN do is become an active member of the group and plug your links in relevant conversations (as long as doing so benefits other members).
So instead of advising you to find all relevant online communities (Facebook groups, online forums, Slack channels, etc) in your space and bomb them with links to your blog, I can only advise you to join them.
Notice that I didn’t even advise you to “be an active member” there? That’s because you either enjoy being a part of that community and helping other people or you don’t.
Here’s some advice on where to look for relevant communities to join:
Search Facebook. This could be fan groups of the leading bloggers in your space, customer groups of brands in your space, or simply relevant interest groups.
Find relevant subreddits. If there’s a subreddit for people who want to photoshop arms onto birds, I’m sure there’s one for whatever you’re blogging about.
Find relevant forums. Just search Google for “your_niche forum” and there’s a good chance you’ll find some.
7. Re‐purpose for different platforms
Here’s our post that explains how to perform an SEO website audit in 16 simple steps.
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