If you have a blog and are eager to be discovered by the rest of the world, then a roadmap on how to promote your blog is probably what you are looking for. And not just any roadmap, a detailed and descriptive roadmap, so you know exactly what to do, right? Here’s an easy-to-follow plan just for you…
Actually, focusing more on the topic of how to promote your blog effectively is an even better plan. Because effectiveness is key when looking for the best ways to promote your blogging efforts.
You work hard on your blog, so you want to implement promotion strategies that give you the most bang for your buck, right?
But exactly what to do and how to promote your blog can be a daunting task. Believe me, I know, I’ve tried almost all of them.
I’ve paid hundreds of dollars on all kinds of bookmarking, directory submissions, not to mention social media and extensive “google search”.
But what I found out is that there are a handful of proven methods that can attract lots of visitors to your blog. And you don’t have to pay money to promote your blog, it’s all FREE!
You can learn how to promote your blog very quickly and easily with these 5 easy steps.
Don’t worry if they seem long, they are really very easy and will bring you more readers than you ever imagined.
Step 1 – When looking at how to promote your blog, the first step is to identify what your goals are for your promotional efforts.
Imagine a business: Businesses don’t just buy advertising space or hire sales staff without a clearly defined plan. They have a goal in mind and everything they do is related to that goal.
The same goes for your blog. Write down some goals you want to achieve with your promotional efforts: do you want to hit the 100, 500, or 1,000 visitor/day mark, or get 500 new subscribers to your newsletter, or sell $x amount of dollars in your Amazon store? Why are you promoting your blog? This is a crucial step, one that cannot be ignored. Having a goal guides you in deciding where to send all of your blog visitors.
You wouldn’t want to send readers to your blog without having it structured to receive those visitors. Imagine getting a bunch of new readers, new leads for your blog, only to leave within minutes of arriving (check this percentage on how to use Google Analytics) or get sent to a page that isn’t relevant to what they were expecting. . All your promotional strategies went out the window! Setting goals and clearly defining what the customer needs to do next is critical to any promotion strategy. Key question here: Why are you promoting your blog?
Step 2 – After you’ve reached a concrete goal, then it’s time to put the wheels in motion. I’ll use the well-known example of dog training to help explain this step. Dog training is a very broad niche, imagine that your niche is more specialized: dog training in a laboratory.
Your blog, Dog Training a Lab, is up and running and you’ve been posting quality content for a few weeks now. You want to promote your blog with the goal of selling items from your Amazon links. That is your ultimate goal: to sell items that you will refer your readers to, through the Amazon links in your posts.
Now that we have defined a goal, we can move on to putting a plan into action.
And as with any marketing or promotional effort, the question to ask is how do I present myself to people interested in what I have to offer? Where are all these people hanging out? Where do people meet who want to talk about dog training…
Well, they meet on the forums…
People who want to know about dog training are found in the community forums discussing dog training with other people.
I googled dog training forums and several websites came up, then I googled lab dog training forums and came up with some forums that are geared just for labs.
Shiny!
Go where the people are: There are people interested in training dogs in a lab on the community forums. Go there and participate. Contribute and you’ll get visitors to your blog to buy your latest and greatest dog leash or some other item you’re blogging about.
Step 3 – Next it’s time to get on Twitter and start tweeting, notice I said start tweeting. Just being on Twitter doesn’t do anything for your business, you have to say something.
If tweeting is too far out of your comfort zone, try tweeting someone else’s posts or retweeting what someone else has said to begin with. You still gain popularity because your name is in the tweet. Keep using it and you will gain followers. Take a big leap of faith and tweet something: spread the word on a new dog training video you just watched. You’ll start tweeting, which will send people to your blog, leading to sales in no time.
Stage 4 – Configure Facebook for your business. Tell your friends about a dog toy sale or mention a new blog post you just published. The point is to be as exposed as possible so visitors can find you anywhere and everywhere. Generating friends on Facebook will be covered in another post, but for now put a button on your blog to encourage others to find you on Facebook.
At the bottom of your blog posts, place a social connect button with a Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, and Google+ button so readers can simply click a button to post to Twitter or any of the others; again, this makes it easy. for visitors to share a great post with others and it will drive more traffic to your blog. If you use WordPress there is a plugin for this, Blogger will also have an option in its settings.
step 5 – Comments make the world go round. You may have heard this from me before, but feedback really is like gold. Find other blogs in your niche or slightly outside of it. Let’s look at the dog training a lab example. I would jump to other dog training blogs in a lab and read their posts and make a smart comment. Then he would climb and jump to some general dog training blogs and read his posts and comment there. Do you see where this is heading?
Treat the comments you receive with care – they do much more than just take up space on your post’s page. Comments show interaction: Visitors like to see and read comments. Comments build your report with search engines. They provide links that lead to your website; They build links outside of your website. The comments mean that you have an interactive and attentive blog and that is what makes the difference between a successful blog and a failed blog.
Five easy steps on how to promote your blog, right?
In fact, these steps are very easy to implement: take a night and set up these accounts and you’ll be amazed at the difference it makes.
Finding out how to promote your blog is made even easier in my latest book, Profitable Blogging Made Easy. Get your copy today!
