How to Promote Your Blog: We Asked the Experts

You’ve spent time and energy writing that perfect blog post. Both engaging and informative, the piece is a shining example of what good blog writing is all about and you consequently can’t wait until your audience reads and engages with your post. And therein lies what is perhaps the most important part of your blog writing efforts: getting people to read them. 

Promoting your blog is just as important as writing a good post to begin with. In fact, you might even say it is more important in some ways as lackluster blog promotion is going to lead to zero engagement which means people aren’t reading the fruits of your brilliant wordsmithing labor. 

We consulted several experts regarding their best advice for promoting a blog and getting those posts in front of the right audiences to attract more visits and generate more leads.

Dave Schneider

Shortlist is a full service digital marketing agency providing services such as Search Engine Optimization, Content Marketing & Strategy, and more. Through experience of being a business analyst and co- founding other companies such as Ninja Outreach, Dave has great advice about working with other people to help your blog reach its full potential.

 

Website: https://shortlist.io/

Social Media Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-schneider-8a693115/

 

When it comes to promoting a blog, my best advice is: Don’t try to do everything by yourself. There are other people who can help you promote your content and boost your traffic. And by other people, I’m talking about influencers.

 

Influencer marketing involves establishing relationships with individuals whose opinion matters to your target audience. You can use their influence to help promote your blog content, and there are several ways to achieve this: 

 

1. Include influencers in your blog posts. What better way to let an influencer know how much you appreciate their work than by linking it in your content? If the content is high quality, which it always should be, it will practically promote itself, as people are naturally inclined to promote things they’re featured in. 
2. Interview an influencer. Another way to include an influential blogger in your post is by asking them for a quote. This is an excellent way to add some unique, valuable content that will set you apart from competitors. 
3. Invite influencers to contribute to your blog. Writing an expert roundup is a widely used blog promotion tactic. The idea is great, you just need to be careful with the execution. Don’t focus on quantity. Trying to cram as many influencers as possible in a single post in order to get more shares might be considered as spammy and unprofessional. You should focus on quality and select just a handful of influencers to achieve the desired impact.

Rick Ramos

HealthJoy is a mobile app that aims to guide members to affordable and high quality health care. Rick started the company before pre-seed funding and built the marketing from the ground up as well as heavy involvement in early product development. His two decades of expertise in digital marketing is a great addition to help the promotion of blogs.

 

Website: https://healthjoy.com/

Social Media Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/healthjoy/

 

Most bloggers start their blogs not understanding their target audience, their problems, and interests. Promoting your blog gets easier once you figure out who’s your typical reader and where they spend their time on the web. Once you figure it out, promoting your blog gets easier. 

 

Google Analytics is an excellent place to start when trying to compile this data. You can figure out the demographics and psychographics of your average visitor. To take it a step further, surveying your audience will give you valuable insight. After doing this foundational work, bringing it to the next level by creating personas is easy. Understanding your audience, wants, and needs will allow you to create amazing content and help you figure out where to spend your time and resources to market your blog. 

Esther Turón

Esther’s works with companies on consulting, marketing direction and management, online strategy, social media management and more. Her work also includes creating and hosting training programmes for professionals, companies, organisations, institutions and business schools. These structured points of her advice will improve the promotion of your blogs.

 

Website: https://www.estherturon.com/

Social Media Profile: https://twitter.com/huhuzgz

 

For a blog to be successful it is not enough to write and publish a post. If you want your blog to attract more visits and leads, you should take care of the following points:

 

1. Write valuable content for the user.
2. Set a posting schedule, and try to be regular with your posts.
3. Set an objective for each post: capture leads, recognition, generate traffic, promote a product or service …
4. Make your content visual. Includes images, videos, highlighted texts, brand colors …
5. Includes subscription forms on the blog.
6. Get more subscribers by offering at least one lead magnet or exclusive content only for subscribers.
7. Optimize your blog, speed is a very important point to improve its positioning and offer a good user experience.
8. Optimize your content for SEO, but remember that you write for the user. You must integrate the keywords in a natural way in the texts. You have free SEO extensions for CMS, which will help you in this task. If you manage to position your post in the top search engine positions, you will attract more traffic to your blog.
9. Send email to your subscribers every time you publish a new post.
10. Share your post on social networks and social aggregators to have more reach.
11. Don’t forget to publish your post in communities and social media groups. You have many groups on Linkedin and Facebook, for example, that can help you to publicize your blog and attract more visits. Look for groups with themes related to your blog and join them.
12. Get other blogs to recommend you and include links to your content. A good strategy is to propose to other blogs on the same topic to write a guest post on their blog.
13. If you want to increase your reach further, promote your blog with ads on social media or Google Ads.
14. Schedule lists with your content to publish on your social networks on a regular basis. There are tools like Hootsuite or Metricool that allow you to add lists with publications so that they are published successively. Don’t let your post die after the first few days of publication, keep sharing them to attract readers to your blog.

 

You’ve got this! Good luck with your next blog promotion tactics.

I hope my advice is useful to you, now it’s your turn to kick-start your blog.

Tom Pick

Tom is an independent consultant who works in collaboration with marketing agencies to help B2B clients increase their visibility and business success online. His own work on the Webbiquity blog, which covers B2B lead generation, web presence optimisation, social media, SEO and more, gives him great experience that he can pass on for your blogs!

 

Website: https://webbiquity.com/

Social Media Profile: https://twitter.com/tompick

 

Short answer: build relationships.

 

Longer answer: 

 

Success in blog promotion today requires a strategy for getting around the “paradox of search.”

 

Ultimately, the top traffic source for any successful blog is organic search. Ranking high in search results requires both high-quality content and backlinks.

 

Here’s the paradox: content that has a lot of backlinks tends to rank highly in search. Content that ranks highly in search tends to attract a lot of backlinks, because it’s the first thing other bloggers find when they are looking for sources to support one of their points.

 

So, when you’ve just created a fresh, awesome piece of content, and properly done your on-page SEO—which of course has no backlinks pointing to it yet because you’ve just created it—how do you get that process started?

 

Building some internal text links from other relevant posts on your blog is the starting point. It won’t zoom you to the top of the rankings, but it will at least make Google aware that post exists.

 

Next, you need to build external links—or, more accurately, to earn those links. There are many established, productive, above-board tactics available. There have been entire books written on link building. 

 

But the single best, long-term sustainable strategy for building backlinks is to start by building relationships: partner with local and national organizations in your field, specialty media outlets, consultants, non-competitive bloggers and vendors…anyone who can expand your reach. 

 

Then trade value. Support them with backlinks and social media engagement, and your network (at least the best people in it) will reciprocate.

 

The worst tactics—or, put another way, the best tactics to avoid using—are high-volume, spammy, “spray and pray” guest post outreach and (worst of all) Googling “cheap link building services.” While either of these approaches can actually produce results in the short term, over the long run they will destroy your brand and ultimately your search or social blog traffic.

Shane Barker

Shane and his team have gathered an extensive list of A- List clientele over their 25+ years of experience. He has helped businesses accelerate their growth with customised digital marketing consultation and services. His E-Book, Podcast and most importantly, blog work will provide you with great information on how to promote.

 

Website: https://shanebarker.com/

Social Media Profile: http://instagram.com/shanebarker

 

 

Promoting a blog requires you to dip your fingers into a lot of different pies. From email marketing to social media marketing and influencer marketing, there is a lot you can try. 

 

While these are tactics that are widely discussed, I think content syndication is the secret weapon here. It is very underrated but has the potential to give your blog a lot of traction.

 

I am saying this because I have tried it and can definitely vouch for its effectiveness. 

 

For the uninitiated, content syndication is about getting your content republished via a third-party site. It’s like a barter system. While you get free publicity, exposure, and boosted reach, the third-party site also gets relevant content to publish. You can get quality backlinks and boost organic traffic on your website.

 

For content syndication to be effective, you need to pick high-authority websites that are relevant to your niche. So, invest some time into finding relevant partners. Some of the most established networks that you should definitely leverage include Medium, LinkedIn, Facebook Business, Reddit, Quora, and StumbleUpon.

 

Many marketers are worried about duplication issues and the impact of content syndication on SEO. I’d say it’s not dangerous territory as long as you are careful. Make sure you add canonical tags to make sure you are attributed as the original source of a post published online. 

 

Even if you don’t have the time to write a long blog post, submit an infographic, GIF, or a video to a content syndication network. You can also repurpose some of your existing content for syndication. 

 

Content syndication is a very scalable strategy. So if you want your content to go further without having to invest too much time or resources, you should make the most of this strategy.

Jose Fermoso

America’s top Resume Builder – Get the job twice as fast. From students or entry-level job seekers to experienced executives, the Resume Builder offers job seekers a fast and easy way to create a resume. With pre-written, industry-specific phrases and recruiter-approved templates, Resume-Now enables users to download a polished and professional resume in minutes.

 

Website: https://www.resume-now.com/

Social Media Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/company/resume-now/about/

 

 

Short answer: Find partners within your industry.

Finding the right partners can be very helpful to promote your blog, and there are many ways to ensure you and your partner benefit from working together. For starters, you can exchange content, such as articles, reports, studies, or guest posts that might be of interest to your readers. This is a great way to expand the content in your blog, promote your work on your partner’s site and potentially gain new subscribers.

 

The cherry on top of the cake is that by exchanging content with industry partners, you are also building links to your site and increasing your site’s EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). At the same time, it helps your site rank higher on Google’s SERPs, which translates to higher traffic.

Luciana Nițu

Planable is a platform that allows agencies, social media managers, freelancers, and more to create social media campaigns and exchange feedback worldwide. Luciana’s interest in SEO and experience in social media marketing allows for great advice for writing blogs and how you can interact with others to promote effectively.

 

Website: https://planable.io/

Social Media Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luciananitu/

 

A thing we do with most of our blog posts at Planable is to ask for other people’s opinions. Once the outline is done, we get an overview of what the post is going to look like. We identify up to 3 sections where we can insert some quotes and then proceed to the pitching part.

 

I usually go on LinkedIn and search for people who may know a thing or two about my topic based on their job title. So for example, when I had to write about Instagram grids, I went for Marketing Managers. They have an overview of the way content is planned in a grid and that helped me a lot. One expert even shared some really nice examples of her work.

 

Besides the fact that I added 200 more words to my blog post, I got the chance to connect with a reputable expert that shared some unique insights with my audience.

 

What does all that have to do with promoting blog posts? Once the article is published, I always follow up with the experts and ask them to share it on their social media. Most of the time, they do it without batting an eye. Sometimes, they even add it to their newsletters.

 

My advice here is if you go only for the promoting part, reach out to experts that have a well-established follower base. If you’re looking for more than this, go for the quality of their know-how.

Oliver Westrup

Rd Design offers everything a business needs in a digital world: website design & development, content & campaign strategy, just to name a few. With skills in management, graphic design, branding and more, Oliver has clear points on how to promote your blog and reach your future readers.

 

Website: www.rd.design

Social Media Profile: https://www.instagram.com/rddesignagency/

 

 

SEO (search engine optimisation)

The performance of your website and the structure of your content impacts its success on search engines. Plan your content with keyword research using tools like Google Ad’s Keyword Planner. Not only will this help you to create content your audience cares about, but it will also make it easier to find. If you include images and video in your content (which you should), make sure these are optimised as failing to do so will harm your page load times. 

 

Finally, optimise your blog for mobile. More than 50% of all website traffic is now from a handheld device. I’ve frequently seen websites that look great on a desktop but quickly fall over when viewed on mobile.

 

E-mail marketing

A subscriber list is essential to the success of your blog. Make sure to have multiple signup forms across your site, making it as easy as possible for readers to subscribe. Social media posts are easy to scroll past, SEO takes time and effort (still absolutely worth it), but e-mails go directly to your reader’s inbox. How you get readers to sign up is the tricky part, you may need to incentivise people with free content like workbooks, templates or checklists.

 

Paid Marketing

Paid marketing can be an immensely successful method to drive traffic to your blog. The most cost-effective platform for promoting your blog is Facebook. Their tools allow you to target a very specific niche of people, meaning your ad is more likely to be shown to the right people. Before diving in, I would highly recommend reading ‘How to advertise on Facebook’ by Hootsuite. It will save you a real headache and a bit of money!

 

Social Media Marketing

Avoid simply posting a headline and a link to your latest article. Most major platforms provide you with the ability to submit multiple images in a single post, so why not get creative and turn your blog into a slideshow with links to the full article on your site. I know from experience these often get reshared, especially if the information you’re providing is useful or entertaining (ideally both.)

Mandy Edwards

Mandy can help businesses connect with current and potential customers. While focusing on social media, she continually keeps her business up to date with what is going on, from the latest apps a business should use to the latest terms of service changes. Her expertise in social media is perfect for advice on promoting blogs.

 

Website: memarketingservices.com

Social Media Profile: https://www.instagram.com/memarketingservices/

 

In promoting a blog successfully, there are several elements to have in place: consistency, a content distribution plan, a willingness to repurpose.

 

When having a blog, first, you have to be consistent in publishing. It could mean only publishing once per month – or one per week. The more consistent you are, the more opportunities for people to read your content. 

 

Having a content distribution plan in place for your blog is key to its success. Know where you are going to distribute your content. Popular content sites to do this are Triberr, Medium, and Substack. Most allow you to use the article link and import, or you can manually copy and paste the content. Publishing posts on social media does well for your brand. Share the articles on Twitter or create pins for them and pin it to board on Pinterest. Give people as many touch points as possible – as long as it aligns with your purpose in your marketing and content efforts.

 

Repurposing your blog post as an article on LinkedIn is a way to put your content in front of a completely different audience. Having a wealth of LinkedIn articles can help show your expertise in the field your business is in.

Jordie van Rijn

An independent Online marketing consultant with over 13 years of experience working with companies like Roche, KLM, Heineken and more. With this wide range of experience and his own blog work, he has a great example to help your blog reach its full potential.

 

Website: www.emailmonday.com

Social Media Profile: www.twitter.com/jvanrijn

Here is another post I did at the beginning of the year after spending way too much time crafting the cover for the yearly email marketing trends roundup. I say it was one hour per cover, but it was way worse – for example there was a crowd and traffic of people on the street in Times Square picture…

 

You know you are on the right path when you think “Oh people are going to love this” or “This is just too painful to throw this away” or “I put in waaay too much time”.

Share your process, bloopers, outtakes or questions you have, turn that into content for social, email and other blogs… or even into a piece for roundup like this.

Nicole Borens

Nicole has expertise in email marketing, working with B2Bs, B2Cs, agencies, and non-profits across a variety of projects, platforms, and media. Nicole has over a decade of experience as a contract designer and worked for brands like LinkedIn, Harvard, and UNICEF. These points will give you clear advice on your blog work.

 

Website: https://nicoleborens.com/

Social Media Profile: https://www.instagram.com/nicoleborens/

 

1. Start off on the right foot by finding a niche. Contribute something to the internet that few others can. Because the world doesn’t need another food blog. 
2. Repurpose your blog articles into email marketing campaigns.
3. Join and actively use Disqus. Contribute useful comments to other peoples blogs using Disqus. Some of those people will return the favor. But never use other people’s blogs in order to promote yourself — everyone hates it. 
4. Connect with other bloggers. Trade blog articles with them, using one another as featured guest writers.
5. Invest in good design — whether that’s spending extra time on it, or hiring a professional.
6. Incorporate video, then share it on YouTube and social media. 
7. Use Google Ads.
8. Network with others often, even if it’s only via Zoom. Participate in meetups that are related to your blog topic. 
9. Be consistent with how often you post so readers know what to expect from you, and you will retain those readers.
10. Benchmark your competition. How are they promoting themselves? Take note of what works and what doesn’t.

Pam Neely

Pam has written extensively about marketing topics like marketing automation, email marketing, e-commerce, social media, and search engine optimisation for dozens of B2B marketing companies. Along with this, she has won numerous awards for her writing, started multiple businesses and specialises in long-form blog posts. This extensive experience is perfect to help your blog.

 

Website:  https://quuu.co/promote

Social Media Profile:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/pamellaneely/

 

We’ve all done a great job at creating oceans’ worth of content, but most of it never gets seen. That old statistic from BuzzSumo from 2018 – that 50% of all content gets no backlinks and gets four social media shares or less – still gives me chills.

 

And it’s not like content sharing has gone up since then.

 

The trouble is, most bloggers and content marketers are really short on time. This year, they may be short on budget, too, depending on their niche. So honestly, my best no-fail, proven advice for promoting a blog would be Quuu Promote.

Quuu Promote (https://quuu.co/promote) is the sister service of Quuu, which is a content curation service for busy people who don’t have time to find good content to share to their social media feeds.

 

Quuu’s customers use it to get industry-specific, pre-screened content shared to their social media accounts automatically. Quuu Promote is the sister service bloggers or content creators can use to get their content included in the content Quuu pushes out to its customers’ social media feeds.

 

 A lot of paid content promotion services like this are a little spammy, but at least in my experience, Quuu Promote is not. And your content isn’t being promoted by bots – it’s being shared via the accounts of real people who share similar content.

 

Your content does have to be approved by Quuu Promote, and it will need to be good to get through the screening process. But if you’re publishing quality content, this is still a great way to get several hundred social media shares and usually more than 100 clicks to each piece of content you share. You can sign up for a monthly plan that’s $75 for ten posts per month, and if you’re really busy there’s a paid add-on feature where they’ll set up your content on the platform for you.

 

So this is not free, but for $75 and ten well-written posts, you’ll probably get about 1,000 clicks over time from each month’s worth of content. That works out to 7.5 cents per click. You can’t buy advertising clicks that cheap anywhere. So for a reasonable price and very little time, you can get quite a lot of visibility for your content.

Andy Lambert

ContentCal is a content marketing planning tool that allows creating, scheduling and posting to be easier for a business team. Andy is one of the founding members, as well as having over 10 years of general experience creating markets, building profitable businesses and leadership roles in industry-leading SaaS organisations. From this, he has great advice on reaching the right audience with your blog.

 

Website:  https://www.contentcal.io/

Social Media Profile:  https://twitter.com/andy_r_lambert

 

With digital and online activity remaining our only real marketing option for at least the first half of the year, promoting blog content is essential for engagement – but also tougher than it used to be, as there is a lot more digital noise to cut through.

 

Here are my top tips for ensuring your content gets seen by the right audience and has as wide a reach as possible:

1. Lead with value, the first few lines of your blog should communicate what the reader will learn and what it’s relevant. Going directly to the communities you want to target will also help with this. Facebook and Reddit are great spaces to target select communities, however, these are not communities that tolerate self-promotion, so do make sure your blog is informative rather than salesly and include a link for readers to ‘find out more’ 
2. Circle your content back to a destination, such as pinned Twitter threads. This blog is a masterclass on this topic: https://marketingexamples.com/content/sharing 
3. Take a multi-format approach and repurpose your content. If you can use a video intro, create a blogcast, or even extend the content into a full podcast – you capture a wider audience that might prefer to consume content in different ways.
4. Think in terms of a series – how can you get the reader to come back for more. Ideally, each blog you create a readership for should be promoting the next blog that is coming out – or previous blogs on similar topics.
5. Using multi-channel a publishing tool such as ContentCal lets you promote your blog across all social channels – while securing internal engagement at the same time (the quicker you can get likes and shares on your posts, the more successful they will be.)

As you can see, strategies when it comes to blog promotion vary. For some it really is all about the links; what you link to, how you link, and also, getting others to link to your posts. For others trying to promote their blog, social influencing is the name of the game. Creating meaningful online relationships really does seem to be at the heart of any good blog promotion strategy.

Beyond relationship (and by virtue) link building, in order to successfully promote your blog, you do need to take some time to ensure that your posts are optimized. SEO isn’t just a commonly tossed about buzz term, it’s a reality for those who want to have their posts actually show up in search lists. 

Just keep in mind, yours can be the best written blog on the planet but if it’s not getting found, what good is it doing you?