What are the best ways of promoting your business’s blog? How can you enable more people to find and share your carefully crafted content?
Here are 30 tips and tricks that you can use to light up the internet and help more people find your blog:
- Update your forum signatures: If you are a member of a popular forum, update your signature with your blog URL. This link-building strategy improves the visibility of your blog and encourages forum members to visit your website.
- Update your email signatures: Add your blog URL to your email signature. Now, when someone forwards your emails, they’re also forwarding your blog.
- Add your blog link to your LinkedIn profile: People in your professional network are more likely to comment and share your blog posts.
- Answer questions on Quora related to your niche: Provide valuable answers to users’ questions and give a link to your blog. This improves your authority.
- Use a responsive, mobile friendly design: Mobile is the future of online content. Your blog theme should be responsive and it should look good on devices of all sizes.
- Get your blog reviewed on SitePoint: Feedback can be brutal but it’s also a chance to learn and grow. Take note, typically you have to review three other sites before a person will look at yours.
- Syndicate your content: Submitting your site to All Top, Stumble Upon and Digg and Technorati is a great way of getting content discovered by more people.
- Interview people in your niche who are more successful than you: When you publish the interview, ask the interviewees to share your link. This way, you learn from your interviewees and attract some of their traffic.
- Finish every blog post with a call-to-action: Ask readers to engage with your blog posts. If you’ve got CSS skills, you could even design a call-to-action (CTA) button.
- Enable people to comment on your blog via their social media profiles: This means your customers or readers have one less step to go through or password to remember.
- Link to blogs of a similar size: These blogs are more likely notice and more likely to return the favour.
- Comment on blogs you admire: If you comment on another blog, give a link to your site. Just remember, to write a comment of value.
- Offer to write guest blog posts: If you really like a blog, offer to write a guest blog post for them. This exposes your writing to a whole new audience.
- Steal: Take the best bits from the websites of your competitors and peers, remix it with your voice and add your take. Great art is stealing; if anyone tells you otherwise, tell them Steve Jobs sent you.
- Add an RSS feed using FeedBurner: Now, people can read your content in their newsreader even if they forget to visit your site.
- Bundle up your best posts into an eBook and give it away for free on Amazon. You also use this free eBook as a way of encouraging more people to sign up to your mailing list.
- Add an email subscription form to your blog: Place this prominently on your homepage and test it by changing the colour schemes and font sizes.
- Ask your readers for feedback: If you have developed a mailing list, send an email asking for feedback. Now, act on it.
- Post links to new blog posts on Twitter three times a day, eight hours apart: This enables people in different time zones to find your posts. You can use apps like Buffer to do this.
- Set up a board on Pinterest: Pin your content and other peoples’ content to this board. This is great for bloggers who rely on images.
- Post on business sites like ExploreB2B or Tweak Your Biz: If you write business related content, recycle some of your posts and post them on ExploreB2B or here. There’s a large and active audience ready for your content.
- Add social sharing icons: The web is social. Install Flare or Digg Digg and make it easier for visitors to share your content.
- Run a competition: If your blog is aimed at selling products to consumers, run a competition on Facebook and encourage entrants to share your page.
- Give away AdWords vouchers: If your goal is to reach businesses, and you have a budget, consider giving away Google AdWords vouchers through a competition. (OK, this trick isn’t free, but it will pay dividends down the road.)
- Create recipes in IFTTT: These recipes can automate the sharing of blog post on relevant social media channels.
- Install WordPress SEO by Yoast: This will help WordPress users optimise their content for search engines.
- Get a professional headshot and sign up to Google Authorship: Now, your headshot will appear next to your blog posts in Google’s search results. This increases the chances of people clicking through to your site.
- Use URL shorteners like Goo.gl or Bit.ly: These make it easier to create shortened links and track how and where your URLs are shared.
- Use analytics to determine where your followers are coming from and what they’re clicking: Now, use this insight to inform future content and to improve your existing content.
- Tell people about your blog: The next time you attend a conference, talk or networking event, tell people about your blog. Afterwards, tweet a link or send an email thanking those you met and letting them know where you live online.
What are your tips and tricks for promoting your blog? Did you find this post helpful? Please let me know in the comments section below.
Images: ” Tablet PC with cloud of alphabet characters icons isolated on white background / Shutterstock.com“
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