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How to Promote Your Blog

How to Promote Your Blog

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How to Promote Your Blog

Learn what works and what doesn't work to promote your blog to attract the most readers who will be interested in your blog topics and what you are selling/offering. 

Tip

How to Promote Your Blog

We've divided the marketing tasks for promoting your blog into three phases so you can roll them out over time as your blog "matures."

Phase 1:  Blog Launch - 3 month

Phase 2:  3 - 12 months

Phase 3: 1 year +

 

Know this
Know this: A blogger should have at least five posts in each category before beginning a marketing effort. Short, keyword-optimized posts suffice at this point. Once a sufficient amount of blog "content" or writing is posted, marketing and posting can be done at the same time.  
TIP:  Writing a blog takes a lot of time.  Then there's more time involved to market and promote the blog.  Consider hiring a freelancer to handle the marketing of your blog. 
  • Best Sources for Marketing Freelancers

 

Tip

Promoting Your Blog from launch to 3 months

 

From our experience
From our experience:  Give people an incentive to sign up for your blog.  Get ideas for how to do this without offering something free: 

Promotional Offers that Attract Profitable New Business


Tell your customers about your blog

  1. Put the “subscribe to blog feed” button at the top of your website

  2. Send an email to your customer list announcing your blog and asking them to subscribe. Learn more: Email marketing

  3. Ask current customers to sign up for your RSS feed.  Start with current customers. More than simply announcing a new blog, offer an incentive for visiting, commenting and signing up for the RSS feed. Customers simply need to click on the orange RSS icon on your blog in order to receive a new post the instant it is created. Your developer and many website software manufacturers will guide you through this process. 

  4. If you have a physical storefront: Create a glossy print out of a blog post and put it in a plastic frame somewhere where people will see it.  Beside it, have a sign up sheet asking for the person's name and email address. You can also create "business cards" for your blog with the key information where people can find it and why they want to read it.  Think of these like "mini ads".  Business cards.

  5. If you have an online store: Send a special email announcing your blog launch. Offering a gift certificate drawing, an eBook, a white paper or a webinar as an incentive will improve response.

  6. Put your blog address on your business cards, letterhead and your LinkedIn profile.

  7. Send out a press release about your blog's launch. Learn more: PR Public Relations

 

Optimize your blog posts for what people are searching for

  1. Put sharing buttons on each post: Facebook "Like" buttons in particular can help your blog spread. Also consider Digg and Stumble Upon.

  2. Do keyword research to find the words and phrases customers type into search engines that are related to your business.  Craft each blog post around the most trafficked but also the most targeted phrases. Learn more: Keyword Research

  3. Create posts with attention-grabbing headlines like:

    35 Tips for  . . . 

    10 Secrets of . . .

    The 5 Best Habits of Successful . . .

    Do You Make these 6 Typical Mistakes?

TIP: Online readers interpret "lists" as scannable and easy to read and so are more likely to read them.
 

TIP:  No matter how much great technology goes into monitors, research tells us that readers still prefer to scan headlines, sub-headlines and short chunks of information on the web. They save their reading of long magazine articles, novels and reports that are printed. In fact, if there is a long article on a website, readers often print it out to read later.  Learn more: Writing for Websites


Leverage online exposure to promote your blog

Submit your blog to directories: A blog directory arranges blogs in categories and subcategories. Because they link to your site, blog directories provide “backlinks,” a URL leading back to your site.  Search engines look at the number of backlinks when deciding where to rank a site. The more “backlinks” a site has, the more credibility search engines give it.  Submitting a website to established directories can be a low-cost way to promote your blog.

The top blog directories based on visitor traffic are:

  1. Blog Catalog
  2. Technorati
  3. Blogs.com
  4. Blog TopList
  5. Blogged
  6. Best of the Web Blogs
  7. Top Blog Area
  8. Top of Blogs
  9. Loaded Web

 

Know this
Know this:  reviewers disagree about the best sites.  We cross referenced the most up-to-date lists from reliable sources like SEO.com and TopRank.com to come up with a top 10 and then looked on compete.com for visitor numbers. The sites listed above the most trafficked.

Start reading and commenting on blogs and online forums in related industries for a month or so, commenting here and there regularly. Use Google Blog Search to find relevant blog posts.

Use social media outlets to let others know when you have a new post up. Because Facebook and Twitter currently have the most traffic, focus on those first. Announce the blog post title and include a shortened link.

  • Learn more: Facebook Marketing, Twitter Marketing.

Because Twitter allows only 140 characters or about 20 words on each short post, it's wise to shorten blog URLs (links) to make room for other comments you may want to make. Shorten links here: www.bitly.com. Simply copy the URL on the blog page, go to bitly, enter it into the "shorten" box and click the "shorten" button. The shorter link appears in the box below.  WordPress has an easy way to get the short link right from their tool. 

Know this
Know this: Those who follow blogs and forums know that tight communities are formed. When a newcomer comes on the scene, talking too much and asking for too much (e.g. to guest post), that newcomer is frozen out quickly. A blogging etiquette exists in the "blogosphere."  That etiquette states: Be polite. Listen. Talk little at first. Engage others in conversations. Then ask for something.  
 
Tip

Promoting Your Blog beyond launch

Know this
Know this:  The first three months of blogging can be the most difficult. Once you are regularly crafting posts and informing current customers about a new blog, then increase your marketing efforts.

  • Promote Blog - specific advice for how to promote a blog after you've launched it with tips for what to do during months 3-12 and after the first year.

  • See all how-to guides on Blogs & Blogging

 

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