Blog Basics #2: How to Promote your blog

Promote Blog

Assume you would have followed the previous post ‘Blog Basics #1 – How to start a blog‘ where I had covered different platforms to start your blog. If you’ve taken those steps and have launched yourself as a blogger writing the first post, the next daunting task is ‘How to promote your blog’.

As a blogger, you would indeed want to have more visitors looking at your page and am sure that like many of us, you’ll be watching the Google Analytics or Jetpack stats intently. Let me not discourage you by telling that its quite challenging to get traffic to the post, since you’re on this page, I’ll share some steps to make your blog promotion easier. And I am sure, by following all or few of the steps list here, you will get a fair amount of traffic to get going.

Let’s get started…

Infact, this step would be first and even before you start writing your post. Identify few set of keywords that can be tied to your post, which mean, the high level content topic. Ideally you need to have an editorial calendar, with those keywords specified.

SEO

A dream for every blogger is have his blog ranked at the top and I guess we are no different. There are indeed many tweaks to optimize blogs to achieve better rankings instead of lying down at the bottom so it’s time we talk about it.

1. Title

The title of your blog is one of the most important part since that is the first thing that the search engine scans. It needs to have the keywords that you want your blog to be searched with. Keep your title short & crisp with these keywords.

2. Meta Tags

HTML meta tags were a rage at a time when the industry started to concentrate on SEO, but since then industry experts are debating over its use today. Nevertheless, it would do you good to have the meta tags defined while the pages is being designed, you can though revisit it too. Do have the title, keywords tags defined with information about your blog & the content readers can expect.

3. Interlinking Posts

Once you have multiple posts in your blog, it will be good to have certain keywords link to these posts. That way, you’ll be able to redirect some traffic to your old post thereby keeping them from being stale. Since there are hits on the posts, search engines will assume that the content is valuable thus keeping your page-rank high.

You might as well want to read my previous post specifically on SEO for blog.

 

Social Sharing

Social Media platforms can be one of the best mediums to promote your blog since it has a wider reach and the probability of your post getting viral is high, depend on your network. But you still need to consider, there are certain content strategies for each platform.

1. Social Buttons

One of the first steps as part of site designing or picking up theme is to look at placing the social sharing buttons. Make it easy for the readers to share your post to various social platforms – Twitter, Facebook, RSS, Pinterest, etc. You can also look at Shareaholic which provides widgets that can be placed on your existing site to make sharing easier.

2. Auto-sharing Posts

Having been just like you early on, I know its painful for you to submit your post on each an every social platform manually after you’ve published it on the site. Since, then I have found few services which were effective in sharing the post and the one that I would recommend is Twitterfeed. Don’t go by its name, they submit equally well on Facebook too. Twitterfeed polls your blog at certain intervals & once they find the content, it will share on your twitter account & Facebook account eliminating the need to do it manually.

The other places, which has been useful for me but are not typically auto-sharing are Scoop.it and Stumbleupon. The two can be classified as content curation services and it has been a personal experience that they are a huge source of traffic.

Now, this is interesting. Assuming you are new in the social media world and do not have a fair amount of following, it would limit the extent of the post getting shared. Having understood this dilemma Dino Dogan and Dan Cristo started Triberr, where you can join tribes based on your areas your blog’s focus is. Triberr takes the RSS feed of your blog and will share any updates from your blog to the entire tribe. Other individuals in the tribe will share your post on their Twitter if they find the content interesting, thereby multiplying the reach of your content.

PS. : One thing that I have learnt is, make sure you are  part of lesser but quality tribes. Being part of lesser number of tribes will help you to read others content too, before sharing.

Commenting

Commenting is one of the most commonest ways of generating traffic. Though the biggest challenge here is unlike any of the previous steps, where you could skim the title & go ways, here you’ll have to read through the entire content and leave your comments smartly.

Insightful comments, on blogs which are relevant to your post will entice other readers to also visit your blog. It’s indeed worthwhile to leave a link to your post in the comment so that other readers can easily reach your post, though we have few plugins now like CommentLuv which will identify your most recent post and show under your comment. But, be careful not to spam other’s blog with your content. Keep it simple and healthy.

Guest Posts

I would rate guest posting as one of the toughest way to promote content, but considering the amount of traffic and back links that are generated it is one of the widely used way to promote blog. Guest posting will help you to be reckoned as a knowledge powerhouse in your area of expertise, so choose the place and content to blog wisely. These days, considering the advantage of guest posts, multiple opportunities are available, decide correctly. I particularly like Triberr and MyBlogGuest as two excellent places to either source guest posts or offer guest posts.

PS. : Write on the guest post, what you would like readers to read on your blog.

Your Turn

Hope this techniques will help you to efficiently promote your blog and since they have helped me very well, am sure it’ll help you bring good traffic. Do register with the sites which have been linked in the post and leverage them effectively. Share your tips, feedback about the post or your experience after taking those steps and remember to share this post.

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