9 Ways to promote your blog posts and get more traffic to your blog for free
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“Google only loves your website or your blog when everyone else loves you first.”
What do I mean about that?
I simply mean that if people love you, they will come to visit your blog. And if people come to visit your blog, this will give a positive signal to Google which will in return reward your blog, and give it a better ranking on their search engine.
At this point, if you don’t have your own blog yet and would like to start one as soon as today, go here to start your blog with Bluehost.
Ranking higher on Google will result in getting more people to visit your blog. The more people visit your blog, the more Google will send you traffic because they will consider your blog as a blog of good quality
So, if you want everyone else to love you, they must know about you in the first place. And if you want everyone else to know about you, you, or at least your blog, must be everywhere.
But how can you get your blog and your articles to be everywhere?
This is a good question. And this is precisely what we are going to talk about here.
You came here because you want to know how to promote your posts and get more traffic to your blog, right?
Driving traffic to their blog is one of the most concerning issues for the people who are running blogs or planning to have one. As you probably already know, without a significant amount of traffic hitting your blog on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, your blog has no chance of surviving, and you can’t achieve the goal behind it.
People who own a blog know that blog traffic is as relevant as blood is essential for the human body. The primary purpose of having a blog is to earn money or promote your product or services and without traffic, you can’t make any money.
Some people set up blogs just to give information to the general public or to share their passions with their audience. Whatever your primary purpose is, the main reason why people start their blog is always to earn money through it. The more traffic you have on your blog, then the more chances you have to make money through it.
According to the data of the New York Times, 95% of bloggers started blogging with enthusiasm, but they had to terminate due to insufficient traffic. Bloggers told that they were facing the problem of less readability; that’s why they had to stop blogging.
Traffic and readability are like life for a blog, and without these two things, your blog would be dead. So, to enhance the human traffic, we should follow specific techniques that are vital for the survival and the growth of our blog.
In a nutshell, we just need to know how to give more exposure to our blog.
So, how can we give more exposure to our blog posts?
Answer: by promoting it!
As I mentioned earlier, it is not an easy task to gain more traffic for your blog. These days the competition becomes more fierce and there are many technicalities involved in it. Some people think wrongly that if they write good content, then it is the only thing that they need to increase the traffic on their blog.
But things don’t work like that anymore. Even if “content is still king” in the eyes of Google, if you want to get more traffic, you need to do more than just publishing good content.
Although good content is also a key to the success of your blog, you need to go beyond and apply the strategies that work today to see significant results. This means that on top of publishing good quality content that will give value to your audience and help them overcome their problems, you will also need to give a boost to your content.
That little boost you give to your content is called “promoting” or, “repurposing”.
Promoting your content is the most common and best practice to give more visibility to your blog. This means that once you publish your content on your blog, you must make sure that this same content is shared on various other different sites out there.
Promoting your content on other sites will help you to build credibility, have better rankings on Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
There are specific ways and places through which you can promote your posts to drive more traffic to your blog.
If you are worried about this because you don’t know how to get started, then you do not need to as in this article, I’m going to show you exactly how and where to promote your blog posts so that you can build high-quality backlinks that will then help your blog get better rankings on the search engines.
But before we discover these ways and places you can use to start growing your blog though, here’s what I want you to know first: “All backlinks are not created equally”.
“Having only 10 quality backlinks from 10 quality websites is still much better than having 1000 irrelevant backlinks from junk websites that may damage your ranking.”
In this informative piece of writing, I’m going to provide you 9 places or ways through which you can promote your blog so that it can be seen by as many people as possible.
A well-known blogger Joseph Jaffe said you should spend 90% of your time developing and promoting your blog and 10% to write the content. This statement is enough to show the importance of promoting your blog the right way for massive success.
So, without further ado, here are 9 ways to promote your blog posts and get more traffic to your blog.
1. Use Pinterest to promote your content
In this modern age of technology, social media have taken the world by storm. No one can’t even think of getting success without using these platforms. Around 2 billion small business owners are using these platforms to promote their businesses and products and if you’re not doing it yet, you should too.
Among the platforms you can use to promote your content, below are the most popular ones:
- Tumbler
Include the link of your blog to your profile
There’s no point in using social media if these platforms can’t send you traffic. While getting people from these platforms to your blog becomes more and more difficult, you can’t ignore them. Once you have an audience on these platforms and once you know how to take your audience on your own blog, you can start getting massive traffic for free.
For this strategy to work for you, you will need to grow your social circle on your favorite social media first. If you have tons of followers on Facebook, Instagram or on Pinterest for example, then you’ll have more chances to grow your blog traffic for free because once these people know, love and trust you, taking them to your blog will become easy.
As I mentioned above, there many social media platforms out there you can use to promote your content. But in my opinion, not all these platforms will work for you. So you don’t have to use them all. Depending on your niche, you can choose only two or three platforms and go all in. You don’t need to be everywhere and you don’t need to jump from a platform to another.
As you can see on the screenshot above, I made the choice to use Pinterest because I noticed that Facebook was not working very well for me. Even though I have a Facebook Page for my blog, Pinterest sends me much more traffic. So for now, I’m only focussing on Pinterest in combination with Tailwind to schedule and promote my content.
Just to give you an idea of the amount of traffic I’m getting from Pinterest right now, here is a Pin I shared on Pinterest to promote one of my articles:
As you can see, with this Pin alone, I got:
- 3.67K impressions,
- 2 Saves
- 8 Link clicks
With this other Pin below, I got another:
- 3,67K Impressions
- 3 Saves
- 5 Link clicks
This means that 13 people have visited my blog from Pinterest for free. Now, while this may not sound impressive for some of you, don’t forget that this is free traffic Pinterest is sending you.
Can you just imagine how much traffic you could be getting if you had hundreds of Pins like these one working for you 24/7 and 365 days per year?
2. Share your content on your Facebook Page
Just because I told you that Facebook was not working very well for me that it will not work for you. The only way to know if Facebook can help you achieve your goal and give more visibility to your blog is to try it out.
Using Facebook has many advantages. Even if according to many experts the organic traffic is dead on Facebook, you should not ignore this platform because it’s still one of the biggest platforms out there in terms of audience and traffic potentials.
So, my second suggestion to promote your content and get more traffic to your blog is to share your content on your Facebook Pages, Facebook Groups and Facebook Profile.
Here is a Page I created to share my content on Facebook:
Promoting your content on Facebook is one of the best ways to boost the traffic of your blog. You just need to share the link of your recent posts right after publishing it on your blog. If you do this, then there are fair chances to grow traffic and readability in such minimum time.
3. Share your content on LinkedIn/Twitter or Instagram to promote your blog
LinkedIn has emerged as the most successful and powerful social tool in recent times. In such a minimum time, this platform has managed to get around 645 million users.
Despite these crazy numbers, many people miss this critical yet exciting platform to use in their promotion strategy. You can use this fantastic platform, just like Facebook and other social media platforms, for blog promotion as well.
Twitter has been around for many years now. Just like with Facebook, I tried to use Twitter to grow my blog traffic but so far Twitter has never worked well for me. Maybe I should buy a few courses to learn how to use this platform properly.
I don’t use Linkedin to promote my posts either. But once again, this doesn’t mean that you should not use it on your side because as you know if you want to elevate yourself above the competition, success is just a game of testing.
On the other hand, I have had great success with Instagram in the past. In just a few months after getting started on Instagram, I managed to build an audience of more than 40,000 followers on Instagram.
This success has allowed me to write a book Instagram Marketing Excellence (currently only available in French) and create a course on how to succeed on Instagram.
Today, my engagement rate has dropped dramatically on Instagram due to many changes in their algorithm. I don’t get as much traffic as before. But since I already have a large audience on Instagram, I continue to use this platform to promote my blog.
As you can see below, on this Instagram account I have more than 22K subscribers. So I put the link of my blog on my profile so that I can redirect my subscribers to my blog directly from Instagram.
Instagram is another source for getting free traffic so I don’t overlook it. And you should not ignore it too because we never know.
If tomorrow things change and Instagram becomes a powerful source of free traffic again as it used to be, then if you’re not present on this platform you might lose a lot.
Using social media to promote your content only works if you make it work for you. In order to get as many results as possible, you must always play by the rules. Give them what they want and they will reward you sooner or later.
Don’t just spam. Instead, build trust and give real value to your audience.
Whether you use LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram, you can apply the same rules as you do in other social platforms cases. Now, since every platform has its own rules, there are simple tricks that you need to consider before using these platforms properly for promotion:
- As we discussed in the Facebook promotion strategy, share your blog right after publishing it on your own blog first, do not forget to share it again and again at across your different profiles.
- After successfully practicing the above stuff, you can promote your old yet most successful content to get more clicks and backlinks.
- Always try to provide value and build relationships with your audience. It will help to engage your readers and make them want to know more about you and about your blog.
- You could add visuals in your social media posts (photos, videos) to attract more people towards your blog. It is the best practice to gain the attention of readers.
- You can use automation tools whenever possible to automate your post sharing process so you can better focus on the other parts of your business.
- Share, promote your content multiple times per day if possible to reach your audience wherever they are in the world due to the many different time zones.
- Don’t be a spammer.
- Whether you are using Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn, try to connect with the influencers who operate in the same niche as you.
- It is a critical practice to use relevant hashtags in your social media posts because they can increase engagement by 21%.
- Do not forget to follow the trends while choosing the hashtags and the type of content you would like to share.
Using social media to promote your content is the most significant thing to do these days because your target audience is already hanging out on these platforms. Always add the link of your blog to your profiles to help people go and visit your blog.
Share your new post more than one time
If you have a large social following and that you share your content only once in a while, then it is not enough and you will probably not get the kind of results you want. You need to go a bit beyond and to see any significant results, make sure to share your new post more than one time.
You can share the post with regular intervals, like the same day, the next day, three days later, a week later, two weeks later, and later. The simple practice of sharing your post, again and again, has the chance to increase your blog traffic by 3150%.
4. Use Image/infographic and PDF sharing sites to promote your content
From Slideshare to Pixabay or Flicker, there are many places on the Web where you can upload your content for free to gain more exposure.
The main purpose of using these platforms once again is to get as many links as we can. So, image or infographic sharing sites are one of the easiest ways to enhance the credibility of your blog by building backlinks.
In this practice, you simply need to prepare an image or an infographic, which represents all the basic information related to your blog.
After preparing the image/infographic, you just need to post it on different sites with the link of your blog so people can come to visit your blog once they click on the image/infographic or when they see the name of your blog written on the content.
Many image/infographic sites allow sharing the images free of charge. To create your images or infographics, you can use a free tool like canva.com.
Here is an example of a great infographic you can create on canva for free:
What do you think about this infographic? It looks awesome, doesn’t it?
Guess what! If you want to create the same thing to promote your blog, it will take you less than 10 minutes if you already have the information you want to put on it.
The benefits of using images/Infographics and PDF sharing sites
Backlinks are vital for the growth of your blog so you can’t ignore these platforms if you want your content to be seen everywhere. So, if you have been asking yourself if there are any benefits in sharing your content on these sites, then my answer is “YES”
You see, as I mentioned earlier, the more you share your content, the more backlinks this content builds for you. Using document sharing sites and other Social bookmarking sites will help you boost your ranking with SEO thanks to the many links they will redirect to your blog.
Along with the methods of on-page SEO, these are some categories that fall under the off-page/backlinks category. If you do 100% on-page SEO and do not give attention to Off-page SEO, then you cannot gain more traffic for your site. Here are the following categories that fall under this;
- Directory submission
- Social bookmarking websites
- Web 2.0
- Article submission at different sites
- Blog outreach or guest posts are critical to growing blog traffic.
- Slide sharing sites
Certain websites allow you to share the link of your blog for free, but if you want to go for the guest posts, then it can be a little tougher. You will have to work hard to earn a link from the guest post.
5. Use email marketing to promote your content
Despite all of the social media outrage and other media, email is still at the top of the list when it comes to promoting your content and driving traffic back to your blog. If we talk about the facts and results of email marketing, then they are enough to give us a shock.
According to some statistics, the average ROI for email campaigns in the USA is 44$ for every 1$ spent. Most people still like this medium, and by the end of 2020, email marketing is expected to reach the number of around 2 billion users. Email service providers like Convertkit or Kartra have made it easy for every blogger to automate their email marketing campaigns.
So, here are some techniques you can use to grow your blog traffic.
- At first step, you need to gather the list of your subscribers; it is one of the best ways to grow the blog traffic. Ask your loyal readers and subscribers to comment, engage, and share it with your community.
- If you are going for the email marketing, then use the email signature in it. You can add the link of your latest blog in the email signature and one of the best ways to promote your content. It will give easiness to your readers to read the content just by clicking on the link from their email box.
- You can email your contact list, friends, and family, ask them to promote and share your content with their circle.
- You can also ask your colleagues or other social circles to share their email list with you, and you can add those people to your promotion list.
If you want to see an example of how I use emails to drive my readers back to my blog, here is an example of an email I send to the people who subscribe to my mailing list through the lead capture form I put below:
Do you see the blue link that says: If that’s the case, then I have good news for you because today we are going to see how to create your blog on WordPress step by step?
Well, it’s a link that drives people back to one of my articles. When people open my emails and if they click on my links, I can redirect them where I want, including to a product I’m promoting to monetize my blog.
To capture people’s emails then to automate my email marketing campaigns, I use Kartra and the leads capture form below:
Do you like what you’re reading so far? So, please make sure to subscribe to my blog below so we can keep in touch.
6. Use Influencer marketing to promote your content
In this type of promotion, you reach out to the individuals who influence your target audience and ask them to promote your content. It is a fantastic way to promote your content rather than trying and reaching out to the audience on your own.
At this point, if you don’t know what is influencer marketing, this great article will give you an in-depth look at what is influencer marketing.
Here are the following ways through which you can use influencers for promotion.
- There is no better way than acknowledging the efforts of influencers by getting them to include your link in their content, their social media profile or on their website. If you manage to work with influencers and if they accept to promote your content and to share your work with their millions of followers, which will undoubtedly be more extensive than yours, you can be sure that you can skyrocket your blog traffic overnight.
- You can also ask the blogger to add one or two quotes in your blog post; it is an excellent way to give a unique touch to your content. If the influencer is happy with the work, then he will surely share your blog with his followers.
Source: Screenshot influencer MarketingHub
According to Influencer MarketingHub, influencer marketing expected to grow to be worth $9.7 billion this year. There are many platforms out there that help people like you and me to connect with influencers.
Depending on your niche and your budget, you can use these platforms to start working with top influencers in your industry to promote your content for you.
7. Use paid traffic to promote your content
Using paid traffic is one of the most powerful, fast, and reliable sources to promote your blog in such a minimum time. If you do not want to go with the free options, then there are some paid options to help you. Here are the following ways through which you can promote your blog by spending money.
Social media paid advertisement
Researchers predict that the spending amount on social media advertisement will reach up to 31 million dollars. You can use the following demographics and forms to promote your content on social media.
- Video ads on Facebook
- Carousel ads on Instagram
- Promoted pins on Pinterest
- Promotion on tweets
- Sponsored content on LinkedIn
You just need to focus on the social media campaign rightly and do not forget to add compelling images, videos, and text with your blog link.
Content discovery platforms
It is also an exciting way to promote your blog and give the answer to your question, how to grow your blog. The content delivery platform is known as the native advertisement means like Outbrain and Taboola. In this form of promotion, you design ads which look like they belong to the publisher’s website. These types of ads appear at the end of the article to show more reading recommendations for readers.
Google paid advertisement
In this type of advertisement, you can use an excellent ad campaign to get more clicks or to grow blog traffic. These types of ads appear in the search engine and refer to as pay per click. You will have to pay a specific amount whenever any person clicks on the add. You can see your paid ad at the top of the Bing, Google SERP’s, and other search engines, and it always denoted with “Ad icon.”
8. Turn blog content into YouTube videos
YouTube is the top video sharing platform, and when you are planning to promote your blog, then how you can forget this. Every single second, millions of new users join this platform, due to which we can’t ignore the importance of this video sharing site. There are the following techniques to use this technique to learn how to grow your blog.
- You can convert your recent blog into an attractive and catchy video to attract more people.
- While attaching the video, you can use the new quotes or points from your blog to make attractive headings.
- Do not forget to add the link of your blog website and trendy hashtags for better results.
9. Blog comments/Forum comments
There are many forums where you can engage people in discussion with the topic of your blog. You can give little knowledge to them about your item and leave a link of your blog to read further. The same is the case in blog commenting; you do all this just to gain the attention of people who are interested in your niche.
When you start commenting on top blogs, then ultimately, you will get the attention of people. If your comments are useful, then the author can invite you to write a guest post. You can add the link of your blog website in your guest post and gain the maximum benefit out of all this practice. If we see this practice from a broader perspective, then you can build a relationship out of this practice for future use.
Conclusion
After reading this article, now you are familiar with all kinds of ways through which you can promote your blog content to get more traffic to your blog.
I hope you got the answer to the most asked question, “How to grow your blog.”
Some methods I shared here will request money, and some are free, but the decision is always yours. You can choose any of these strategies according to your needs, your budget, your convenience, and your goal. But always keep in mind that promoting your content will pay off big times when your content starts to be seen everywhere.
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Jose Blogger
