What do you do after you’ve completed your first blog post and hit the ‘Publish’ button? Well, you probably want to know how to promote your blog content so that many readers can read your content and have enough traffic to your blog. In fact, for a successful blogging career, you have to spend more time promoting your content than you are spending creating it. Right?
How to Promote Your Blog to Get Readers?
Well, marketing your blog content is not an easy task and it takes a lot to implement a strong content marketing strategy. Here are some of the best ways to start sharing your blog posts and make them available to new readers.
Step #1: Using social media to promote your blog content
It is social media that comes first to our mind when we think of promoting our blog content without opting for paid ads. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube are some of the popular platforms that are widely used among bloggers for this purpose. You can easily choose the one that best suits the niche and interests of your audience and there is no need to promote your blog posts on every social media platform. You need to share your blog content on the social media networks where your audience spends the most time.
How to choose a social media network to promote your blog content?
Each social media platform has its own importance and is inherently suitable for a specific niche and a certain type of readership. Here’s what works best on each social platform:
- Facebook: Best suited for video and curated content
- Instagram: For quality images, quotes and stories
- Twitter: For news, quotes and GIFs
- YouTube: For Quality Video Content
- LinkedIn: For professional content and career news
- Pinterest: For infographics and visual content
- Reddit: for comments about topics in your niche
The main point here is that you have to experiment with it thoroughly on your behalf to see which network will best suit your needs.
Using YouTube to Grow Your Audience
YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world after its parent company Google, which means it has one of the absolute best content search networks at your disposal to promote your blog and grow your audience. From the day you start a blog, it is recommended that you publish videos on YouTube with the goal of gaining subscribers and driving viewers directly to your blog if you want to rapidly grow your community of subscribers.
There are also some free or paid online tools with which you can better promote your content on social media as per your budget and needs. These are-
Buffer – for beginners or small-scale users
Hootsuite – for medium-scale and
Gainapp – for advanced users
Step #2: Guest blogging on other relevant sites
One of the best things about starting a blog is that you are always free to join a community of other bloggers who love helping each other. Guest blogging on other relevant sites gives you the opportunity to connect with an already established audience where you can share and promote your content.
How to publish your content on other blogs
If you are not implementing a big guest blogging campaign, try posting your content on relevant sites like Quora, Medium, Tumblr or many similar sites. Quora being a question-and-answer site has helped many bloggers to answer the queries of the users. You need to search for relevant topics in your niche and then answer the questions about which you have already written on your blog.
If your blog has business-oriented posts, you might consider posting them on LinkedIn. The key point here is that you need to find the places where your audience is, be it other blogs, communities, social platforms or other relevant sites.
Step #3: Joining Forums and Message Boards
Although using social media is an important strategy for marketing your blog content, relying heavily on it is not always effective. Instead, being part of targeted forums and online communities can give you a better return for your invested time if you do it the right way. I would recommend you join some relevant groups on Facebook to see if there is an opportunity to connect with your audience.
Step #4: Using Email Newsletters to Increase Your Blog’s Audience
Everyone knows that the best way to blog promotion is with your own audience. An email newsletter is the most powerful way to get existing readers to stay engaged with what you’re doing and to keep them trusting you. Building your email list can be relatively simple these days. All you have to do is put a signup form within your posts and on the major pages of your site.
You can also use some paid tools like ConvertKit to manage over 100,000 email clients, but Mailchimp is the best free email marketing tool to get started. Apart from promoting your blog content through the methods mentioned above, here are some of the most effective and creative ways by which you can grow your blog audience rapidly.
Step #5: Interview people in your niche:
There is nothing better than learning from people who you feel are more experienced and knowledgeable than you in your niche. So always try to satisfy your queries directly by online chatting, emailing or interviewing with them. Not only will this help you answer your own questions and build relationships with them, but other bloggers who read your blog can learn a lot from them as well.
Step #6: Network with other bloggers:
You can pick one or two from a list of other bloggers who have already garnered a good audience and link their content to your relevant posts or articles. This way you will be able to build a relationship with them and easily get on their radar. You can email them by saying- “Hey! I mentioned you in my most recent article. I would really appreciate it if you link me otherwise I will be more than happy to keep sharing with you.” With the procedure, you can get unexpected results.
To sum up
Always try to know what other bloggers are doing in your niche. Try to imitate people who are good at what you are doing, see what works for them and think about how you can use it in your own way.
Remember- you are the most important factor in building a successful blogging career and you must know how to make the best use of whatever opportunities are in your hands.
It will take some ingenuity and willingness to experiment, but it is well worth the effort. Trust me, I have gained some experience over the years but I am still learning and the process does not stop.
