If you are a beginner blogger, you know the importance of how to promote your blog posts.
If so, what is the best way how to promote your blog posts?
How can you ensure that as many people see your post as possible?
Here is a secret cheat sheet to help you to promote blog posts like a pro. Follow these simple steps, and you will see a noticeable increase in traffic to your blog.
Here’s a rough summary of what we’ll cover: Feel free to use the “Table of Contents” to jump from where you are reading to where you want to read.
- Step 1: How To Prepare To Promote Blog Posts
- 1.1 Site optimization (Technical SEO): hosting, speed, security, indexing & crawling, managing links, analytics tools, SEO audit tools
- 1.2 Content planning and research: Choose your niche, Research keywords & topics, Research your audience, Decide on your brand voice, Consider the content type
- 1.3 Content optimization (OnPage SEO): Add meta tags to your title, URL, and Snippet, Include keywords on your page, Optimize your images, Start building your list, Encourage social sharing, Content presentation
- Step 2: How To Promote Blog Posts
- 2.1 Social media marketing
- 2.2 Content leverage
- 2.3 Email marketing
- 2.4 Relationship marketing
- 2.5 Paid marketing
- Step 3: How To Measure To Promote Blog Posts
- 3.1 Web analytics
- 3.2 Social media monitoring
- Takeaways
Step 1: How To Prepare To Promote Blog Posts
1.1 Site optimization (Technical SEO)
Technical SEO is the cornerstone that must be done before bloggers promote blog posts.
Site optimization sets up all the technical optimization to rank in search engines. To achieve successful site optimization, you must have the technical elements to ensure your WordPress site runs smoothly.
The purpose of site optimization when you promote blog posts is the following:
- Your site visitors will have a pleasant experience navigating your website: Hosting Speed: Page Loading Speed
- Your website will be easily found and indexed by search engines: Hosting Security
Hosting Speed
Choosing a reliable web hosting service and WordPress theme has much to do with web page loading speed which impacts user experience.
People don’t wait for a site that doesn’t unfold quickly.
If your web pages are slow when visitors open them, your site’s basic vitals will attract fewer visitors. People prefer to avoid hanging around for a slow-loading website.
Your visitors will be redirected to another site because your blog post is not loading. If you want to avoid this trouble, you should consider the speed of the hosting service.
Plus, the biggest search engine, Google, favors fast-loading sites. Google includes the user’s experience as a search engine optimization factor. If users who visit your site leave quickly, they won’t score you high as a bad experience case due to speed.
Choosing a hosting service for its low price is not a smart idea. Page loading speed is vital to rank on Google rather than a low-price hosting fee. This is the reason why experienced bloggers say, “Consider speed and security when you select a hosting service.”
I strongly recommend you test the“page loading speed” out enough. Even if you have good hosting, you need to adjust specifications depending on your site’s data and visitor volume.
This is one of the essential preparations you need to make to promote blog posts, so if you’ve chosen a crappy web host, you’ll need to move on to another hosting service platform.
Hosting Security
WordPress is the most commonly used CMS (Content Management System), which makes it a significant target for hackers. Without security measures, you WILL get attacked and excluded from organic search results in search engines.
Depending on your hosting service, robust security measures might already exist.
So, knowing what should be considered for choosing a reliable hosting service is important.
To promote blog posts, hosting service reliability is the fundamental factor in creating a secure website.
When selecting a web host, it is essential to compare your options based on their server-handling capabilities and the tools they provide to protect your projects. Utilizing these attributes will help guarantee success when securing a reliable hosting service provider.
A reliable web hosting provider will normally provide the following:
- Secure Operating System (OS) and software
- Reliable backups and restore functionality
- Support for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol
- Industry-standard uptime
- Malware scanning and protection
- Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack mitigation
- Firewall implementation
Web hosts usually provide SSL certificates as part of their packages. It’s essential to secure the connection between your website’s server and visitors’ browsers, so this feature is essential. Your web host must be able to scan malicious software for your website’s protection.
If your blog has e-commerce, ensuring they comply with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) security standard for optimal protection is paramount.
This provides the ultimate security for customers’ payment information, regardless of the type of card used. If your web hosting service does not offer direct support for PCI-compliant shopping cart APIs, then you should make sure it is compatible with other third-party providers.
Indexing and Crawling
The starting point for a blog is to make your blog searchable. Ensuring your website will be indexed and crawled by Googlebot is the primary step to promoting blog posts.
For example, Google needs to prove that the blog belongs to you by registering it in Google Search Console. This is the first thing you need to do to ensure that it not only proves ownership, but also makes it to Google search results.
Next, you must make your site crawlable and indexable by submitting your Robots.txt file and sitemap.
You can write your own Robots.txt file or use a plugin to help you submit XML sitemap. Doing so allows Google bots to scan or render your content.
It may seem challenging because it is technical, but it may be a straightforward task when you know it, but Rank Mat or Yost has made it easier to handle.
Manage Links
External links are what allow us to move around the internet. In contrast, internal links are what visitors move to other pages from one page to another. To promote blog posts, it definitely necessary to manage links efficiently.
To manage links efficiently, follow these tips:
- Internal links – Always consider linking your new blog content to other old posts and pages, as this will help promote the recent article and increase traffic on your site. Furthermore, try to see if any existing articles or pages could link back to what you just published. The method is known as reciprocal linking and can be highly beneficial for SEO.
- External links – When you finish writing your post, make sure to insert links to other high-quality pages that would complement your readers’ understanding. Not only is it good for them, but the site owner will also appreciate the notice. (It is one of the influencer marketing methods – more on that later.)
- Broken links – internal and external links do not last forever. Over time, URLs get changed, content gets relocated, and websites get removed, so finding and fixing your broken links regularly is crucial for maintaining your blog. Through this process, you can find out competitors’ broken links will be a good chance for you to have backlinks by sending emails.
- Redirects – If you need to change the permalink of your pages URL, or domain, WordPress might automatically create a redirect. Unfortunately, these aren’t always guaranteed. Redirection is a free plugin that does the same job as .htaccess. Or SEO tools such as Yoast or RankMath come with a redirection function.
Analytics Tools
There is no denying that analytics tools are essential for any blogger to promote blog posts. By understanding which content resonates with your audience and seeing where they are coming from, you can make better decisions about future content creation and promotion.
They will aid you in comprehending how people are connecting with your website. If you want to ensure your content creation and promotion are well-spent, track which pieces are most successful and identify how visitors found your site.
Although Google Analytics is the most popular tool for tracking website data, other platforms are much more manageable.
SEO Audit Tools
Running an SEO audit is important to promote blog posts if you want your website to rank because it uncovers technical issues. The later in developing your site, the more likely it will have these types of problems.
1.2 – Content planning and research
When you promote blog posts, Content researching and planning are the primary processes for creating compelling and exciting content for your audience. This involves understanding your audience’s wants and using analytics tools to track the most successful content.
Niche Content
To promote blog posts, you must have a focused area of expertise or main topic for your blog and 4-5 additional categories related to your chosen niche. Otherwise, producing content will be more complicated than it has to be.
Unless you choose a popular topic, your content will be very difficult to promote.
You can determine how popular a topic is by checking Google Trends.
Here is an example of the term AI Software:
Research Keywords and Topics
Keyword research is finding popular search queries that match your blog’s subject matter. Sort your keywords into topics that align with the categories you researched earlier. Once you have determined your niche, it is time to start thinking about the content you want to produce to promote blog posts later.
Research Target Audience
Before creating content, it is important to think about your audience. Create “Personas” (a fictional character of the target audience) who you are writing for, and then adjust your content to appeal to them.
Branding
Once you know your target audience, start thinking about how you want to present your content to promote blog posts. This will include things like whether you want to be serious or funny, casual or formal, and irreverent or respectful.
Content-Type
Once your niche and keyword topics are selected, you should consider what type of content you will create to promote blog posts.
For example, most people are mainly interested in infographics that consist of lists and data-driven graphics. This is especially true on Pinterest since users can easily backlink to the content source.
1.3 Content optimization (OnPage SEO)
Optimizing your content on every page for the best results before publication is the most important protocol for promoting blog posts.
The SEO Plugin for WordPress will automatically prompt you to complete the following three fields:
- Title – use your keyword at the beginning of your title. H1 Tag.
- URL – use short URLs that consist of your target keyword.
- Snippet – create curious meta descriptions, causing people’s click.
- PAA – add “People Also Asked”
The snippet preview shows how the post will look in the actual SERPs:
To present your blog posts on the SERPs, you can use WordPress plugins like Rank Math or Yoast if you don’t want to deal with how to control meta descriptions with complex coding. The following images show how to edit a snippet, add a title, and permalink with Rank Math.
OnPage Keywords
Try to include your target keywords in the following places:
- URL
- Page Title
- Main Heading (H1)
- First paragraph of the page
- Page subheadings (H2/H3 etc.)
- You don’t need to force your keyword into every aspect of your page, but having it in a few strategic locations will help optimize your page.
Image Optimization
There are three things for optimizing your images:
- Dimensions – Images that are the perfect size for your blog page can increase viewer appeal and ensure your site is cohesive.
- File size – You can improve your blog’s speed by compressing your image files with TinyPNG or Kraken. These programs can decrease file sizes by up to 65%, making your blog load faster and run smoother. However, if you use cloud hosting like Rocket.net, you don’t need to optimize file size or type without a separate CDN.
- Alt text – Always add a clear and concise description to the Alt Text of your images. Not only will this help visually impaired readers understand what is going on in the image, but it also helps search engines index your pictures more effectively. The alt text should be a brief, accurate description of the photo that includes your target keywords and a variety of related keywords in your alt text to help improve your SEO.
Email List: Subscription
As you’ll learn in Part 2, email marketing is one of the most commonly used to promote blog posts because it gives you a direct connection with your fans.
First, you’ll need to construct a list of email subscribers.
To ensure success in promoting blog posts, you’ll need two key components:
- A way for people to easily sign up for your list.
- A lead magnet is a powerful reason to sign up for someone’s contact list.
Encourage Social Sharing
When other people share your content on social media, it benefits you to promote blog posts. Not only should your content be great, but you must encourage users to share it.
You can use social sharing plugins to optimize promotion by placing Click To Tweet Widgets and visually appealing Social Sharing Buttons on your blog.
- Social Sharing Buttons – Only include social media networks on your blog that are appropriate. For example, the buttons we use on Digital Topical are to the left.
- Click To Tweet Widgets – By highlighting a quote or phrase, you make it more likely that readers will want to share it with others. For example, we added the following live quote using Social Warfare.
We’ve gone ahead and narrowed the social sharing options for WordPress down to a select few.
Content Presentation
In order to make your content easier to promote, you’ll need to write higher-quality material:
Headlines
Because the headline is the reader’s first impression, it needs to be striking to promote blog-posts. Your headline needs to be intriguing, and then your content must meet the expectations you set. Don’t rush to create your headline. Instead, take the time necessary to make it great.
Content Length
Higher search engine ranking:
Though you may think that more content is better, always remember that only high-quality writing matters – not just adding words to reach a certain count. Your content will be more effective if it is long enough to convey your point to promote blog posts.
Content Layout
Your content should be easy to read and understand to promote blog posts. Because most readers only scan web pages, you need to use subheadings and bullet points to give them markers that will stop their scroll and draw attention to important information.
To make your content more interesting and engaging visually, accompany it with images, videos, screenshots, or diagrams that are relevant to the topic.
Research says:
Articles with relevant images get 94% more views, on average, compared to articles without images.
Part 2: How To Promote Blog Posts
Examples of many successful bloggers to promote blog posts:
- URL – set up with your standard blog post URL
- Headline variations – explore a couple of headline variations for your posting.
- Short social messages – post a couple of short social messages for use on Twitter: quotes, questions, or based on headline variations.
- Longer social messages – post a couple of medium long-tail keywords as social messages for use on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Popular copywriting formulas work well here.
- Contact information – post the person or brand, including their contact info – Twitter account, email address, etc.
- UTM tracking URL’s: you can use Google’s Campaign URL Builder to generate tracking links for each platform you promote your content on. This will help you gain a more concrete understanding of your website’s traffic.
- Short-links (optional) – manage tracking links with a URL shortener to tidy them up.
2.1 Social Media Marketing
To promote blog posts, sharing your content across social media platforms is an effective way to increase visibility, which will lead to more traffic and shares.
A social media marketing strategy can be used like the following:
- only focus on the social media platforms that are most applicable to your blog.
- Get involved with people on social media, including well-known figures and brands.
- Joining social groups will help expand your social media presence.
Popular Social Networks
To promote blog posts, staying active on social media is key to maintaining relationships with your followers.
If you’re a content creator and want to be successful on social media, don’t only post your own content. Instead, engage with others by liking and sharing their posts too.
The message you share on social media should be adapted to specific networks.
For example, you can use a long or short message, add relevant hashtags and mentions, and choose between a portrait or landscape image with the tools like Blog2Social and Sendible that help you personalize your posts for every social media platform.
Sendible’s content recycling feature lets you continuously promote your content, and their social inbox helps you manage replies and engage with your audience.
Reciprocal Sharing Sites
The social sites below all operate on reciprocal sharing. You earn points for sharing other people’s content, which in turn lets you post your own content to be shared by others. It is a great way to promote blog posts.
- Triberr is an easy and powerful way to promote your blog. Your posts will be automatically imported (via RSS). However, you can edit the import if you need to. For example, to make it more visible in the stream, you can add featured images to your blog posts. Be active with your fellow tribe members by sharing their content.
- Viral Content Bee lets bloggers quickly and easily share their content on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. By sharing other people’s content, you can earn credits that allow you to promote your own content. For creating the best results, connect and share content with other bloggers who are in the same niche.
Popular Social Bookmarking Sites
To promote blog posts, social bookmarking sites allow users to post and organize their favorite stories, images, and videos. Other users can then access these bookmarks. You can also add them to your collection or share them with more people. Most sites also have a voting system where members can vote for their favorite posts. The posts with the most votes then rise to the top, becoming more exposed.
- Reddit Subreddits are smaller interest-based communities on Reddit. Unlike other bookmarking sites, content on Reddit is not limited to links. Some subreddits don’t allow link sharing at all, so original content is a must if you want to participate in those particular communities.
- Flipboard is more like a social magazine where you can bookmark articles and images than a traditional site that only lets you bookmark websites. By selecting “flip it,” you can republish posts and share them with your followers, essentially creating your own magazines.
Niche Social Bookmarking Sites
By sharing your content on sites specific to your niche to promote blog posts, you can generate more traffic with people who are interested in your niche.
Below are a few examples of niche social bookmarking sites:
- BizSugar – Small Business
- Zest – Marketing
- GrowthHackers – Business & Growth Hacking
- Hacker News – Startups, Programming, Technology
- Film watch – Films
- N4G – Gaming
- Techspy – Technology
- 11×2 – Sport
- DesignFloat – Graphic Design
- ManageWP – WordPress
Social Groups, Communities, and Forums
Communities online provide you with chances to grow connections, create content, and become an expert. Just as with Reddit, simply dropping links will not suffice. To promote blog posts, you need to go a step further and get involved in various discussions to succeed on the platform.
Established, active groups with good moderation are ideal. Furthermore, use the platforms that pertain to your niche.
- Facebook groups
- Pinterest groups
- LinkedIn groups
- Web forums
- Quora
Note: Developing your online presence to promote blog posts can be further accomplished by creating groups on social media platforms. The most common website for this is Facebook.
2.2 Content leverage
If you’re not syndicating your content to promote blog posts, then you’re only reaching a small audience. But by publishing on other platforms, you can get in front of more potential customers.
Here are four ways you can try:
Content Curation
Curation sites allow you to organize your content into lists and collections.
A few content curation sites are:
Content Aggregators
Websites that aggregate content collect information from other sources and provide it in one concise location. As long as the source is identified and linked to the original website, this practice does not qualify as copyright theft unless the aggregating site clearly cites and links to the source and republishes the content in its entirety.
- This is a win-win solution:
- visitors can access content easily
- creators get their articles in front of more people.
There are many popular content aggregators available, including:
Content Syndication
When you promote blog posts, content syndication(a.k.a. blog republishing) is a great way to see your content by more people. By publishing your content on other sites, you can reach a wider audience and increase traffic to your own site.
The optimal method is to first publish on your blog, wait a few days for Google to index your post, and then republish on other platforms such as Medium and LinkedIn.
Instead of posting your entire article, try syndication sites that only allow snippets or teasers of your content with a link to the full version.
Warning: A rel=”canonical ” tag is best practice to add to the republished content.
A canonical tag is a type of code or metadata that points to the original source of content. Google uses this information to figure out the original source of the content.
If you publish content on someone else’s website, it’s best to include a link back to your original piece, so Google understands that you are the source. If that’s not an option, try linking back to your original content from the republished version.
Adding a canonical tag is a way of telling Google which is the original version of your content. It can be helpful if you have duplicated content on your website, as it will help Google only to index the original version. Adding a canonical tag is also beneficial if you’ve republished a post from another website – it will tell Google that this is a republished post and not an original piece of content.
Canonical tags are HTML code that appears in a web page’s <head> section.
A backlink is an HTML element that hyperlinks one page to other pages, either on the same website (self-referencing) or to a different URL altogether. A backlink consolidates link signals and helps improve your website’s SEO ranking.
Although Google usually ranks the website that first published a piece of content, they don’t always do so. They mostly rank the website based on what visitors would prefer to read or, in some cases, base it on the more authoritative site.
Content Repurposing
Content repurposing is the transformation of your initial blog post into another format, such as an infographic, video, podcast, or Slideshare presentation.
Not only are there several ways to position your infographic, but also many other types of content which you can explore. Some examples include graphs, flow charts, tables, timelines, and more.
2.3 Email marketing
Email Marketing is more powerful and cost-effective than any other marketing methodology to promote blog posts.
According to studies, email provides an ROI of around 4200%.
Email is still one of the most commonly used means of communication for many people. In fact, every account you sign up for usually requires an email address.
Email List
In our last segment, we discussed list building to promote blog posts. Now it’s time to utilize that list.
To increase traffic to your latest blog post, emailing your list of subscribers is an excellent strategy. But if you want to reach an even wider audience, ask them to leave comments, press like button, and share your content with their social media.
Email Signature
If you want to promote blog posts subtly, include a link to your latest post in your email signature. You can’t predict which recipient will click on your email and read it.
Make a great first impression with WiseStamp – create a professional email signature with links to your social media profiles and the latest blog post.
2.4 Relationship marketing
Any blog will fail if only one person is trying to manage everything. If you want your blog to succeed, you need to connect with the other blogs and bloggers out there. Just remember that all relationships take effort to maintain, so be prepared to put in the work.
Influencer Marketing
Rather than promoting your content to your target audience by yourself, influencer marketing involves connecting and asking people with their ear for help.
There are three ways to get influencers to promote blog posts:
- Mention influencers in your posts
When you feature other influencers in your blog posts, it shows them that you value their work. This is a great way to build relationships with other industry leaders. Most influencers will happily share the content with their much larger audience if it is high quality.
You don’t need to request that they share your content. Instead, let them know you value their work and include a link to your own content.
- Interview an influential blogger
Interviews with popular bloggers are a terrific way to help promote your blog for several reasons:
- 1. You get access to their audience.
- 2. They’re likely to share the interview with their followers.
- 3. It helps you build a relationship with them.
- 4. You can learn from them.
- 5. It adds credibility to your blog.
Blogger Outreach
Blogger outreach is a way of building relationships with influential people in your niche who can help promote blog posts.
The point of influencer marketing is not to get somebody with a big following to mention your product. It’s about building content partnerships, writing guest blog posts, or getting backlinks from high-authority websites.
Although conducting blogger outreach is a useful way to promote your content, it’s crucial that you do so efficiently.
Guest Blogging
Though some debate its efficacy, guest blogging is still an effective way to promote blog posts.
The key to successful guest blogging is writing your best content and posting it on blogs relevant to your niche with a high volume of followers and subscribers.
By including a landing page link in your author bio, you give visitors a chance to get an exclusive download or learn more about what you have to include.
Blog Commenting
If you leave insightful comments on well-known blogs in your niche, you’ll capture not only the attention of other commenters but also the blog’s owner.
Your comment is insightful and appreciated. It will help readers and encourage them to explore your blog for more informative content. With enough valuable content, the blog owner might let you write a guest post!
2.5 Paid marketing
To promote blog posts, some of the tactics require paid memberships, but they may be worth your while. Let’s explore a few alternatives.
Social Media Advertising
The demographics and advertising formats vary among social media platforms. For example,
- Video Ads on Facebook
- Carousel Ads on Instagram
- Promoted Pins on Pinterest
- Promoted Tweets on Twitter
- Sponsored Content on LinkedIn
So you need to consider:
- The social network that will work best for your campaign is the one where your target audience hangs out.
- the most effective advertising format; for example, images, video, or text
- The costs of networking can add up, so it’s important to consider your budget when deciding whether or not to join a professional organization.
In addition to the popular social networks mentioned above, you could explore the following platforms:
- Quuu Promote: a curation system is available for any content creator who wants their work to be seen by a larger audience. After the submission is approved, other business owners can share it on social media platforms, and the promotion fee varies depending on which category the content falls under.
- Reddit With approximately 17 million monthly users, Redditt is one of the biggest online communities. Additionally, When compared to other social media sites, its advertising costs are cheaper.
Content Discovery Platforms
Another way to promote blog posts is using a content discovery platform, Native Advertising. Some examples of these platforms are Outbrain and Taboola.
The native ads match the look and feel of the publisher’s website. At the end of most articles, you’ll see a section called “You May Like,” “Promoted Stories,” or “Recommended For You.”
Here’s how a post looks via Outbrain:
Search Advertising
Advertisements shown in search engine results are called search advertising. It’s commonly called PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising because you pay a tiny amount each time people click on your ads. Promoting blog posts, can be one of the methods to generate more traffics while you try to generate organic traffics.
Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) from Google and Bing will feature ads at the top, which are denoted by an ‘Ad’ label:
Part 3: How To Measure To Promote Blog Posts
3.1 Web analytics
In order to promote blog posts, earlier in Part 1, we discussed installing and utilizing web analytics tools. It’s time to see what data they have on you. No matter which web analytics tool you use to promote blog posts, there will be tons of data to sift through.
The ‘Acquisition’ section and ‘Channels’ under Google Analytics let you see where your blog traffic is coming from:
The various channels you are likely to encounter while using Google Analytics include:
- Organic Search: visitors who find your website through search engines are called organic searches. This means they typed something into a search engine, like Google or Bing, and your website came up as one of the results.
- Direct: visitors who visit your website from an untrackable referral source by typing your URL into their search bar or using a bookmark on the browser.
- Social: visitors who come to your website after clicking on a link from a social media site.
- Referral: Traffic from other websites clicking on links to your website.
- Other: visitors coming to your website from traffic sources where the UTM_Medium parameter is not set correctly.
- Paid Search: Visitors who clicked on a paid advertisement, such as those found on Google AdWords.
- Email: visitors who come from clicking email marketing links.
3.2 – Social media monitoring
In order to promote blog posts, not only are web analytic tools useful for measuring your blog’s performance, but social media monitoring tools can provide insights as well.
Google Analytics could be a more user-friendly jat tracking social media. But there are other tools that exist to help you to find which platform is the best to promote blog posts.
Check out the best social media monitoring tools.
- Agorapulse – Best all-in-one social media tool with built-in social monitoring.
- Brand24 – Best social media listening tool overall. Also monitors for mentions across the web.
- Awario – Best social media listening tool with social selling features.
- BuzzSumo – Best for content marketing teams.
- Semrush – Best all-in-one marketing tool with social media listening capabilities.
- Sendible – Another all-in-one social media management tool with social listening.
- Iconosquare – Best for social media analytics and Instagram monitoring.
- Sprout Social – Enterprise social media tool with powerful social listening features.
- Socialinsider – Best social media competitor research tool with Twitter monitoring functions.
- Mention – Another useful social listening tool.
- TweetDeck – Free Twitter marketing tool that includes limited social listening features.
- Talk Walker – Best social media monitoring tool with video and image monitoring.
Takeaways
While there are many blog promotion tactics, it’s not feasible to use all of them simultaneously.
Try out one or two different ways to promote blog posts, and stick with the methods that work best. Keep adding variations until you find one that works for you.
The strategy that promotes one blog post might not work as well for another, and this could be due to various factors such as your content or target audience.
Try to be cautious when eliminating a strategy, since some might take longer to work than others.
After some trial and error, you can put all of the winning strategies together to create a content promotion process. Then, use this system to draw more people to every post published on your website.