Setting up a blog and feeding it with content is simply not enough. You should not wait for people to come and find you. It won’t happen.
Given the number of blogs that exist on the internet and the vast amount of information that is easily available upon few clicks, your blog is nothing but a needle in the ocean.
You should tell the world that you exist.
Bring up the orange smoke. But only do it once your blog has at least 10 quality posts, and a clean converting design.
Blog promotion is not an overnight process. You cannot successfully promote your articles without having a community.
Build an online community
Feeding your Twitter and Facebook accounts with your blog updates will look like blog promotion but it simply isn’t. You need an active and supporting community. You need to build one.
There should be interactions, criticism, appreciations, positive feedback, support and many other things in an online community.
Make as many friends as possible, not only for the purpose of promoting your blog but in a genuine manner. You will need people. Blogging is not a standalone job.
Join blogging communities like DoSplash and interact with like-minded people.
If you are thinking about starting a blog or have just started one, register accounts in social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and a few others that interest you or suit your kind of blog. Build up a neat profile of yours.
Do not leave out default values without filling any columns in your profile since that will look un-professional. Brand your profile with your blog.
Use one picture of yours in all your social networks as your profile picture (just get a free account at Gravatar.com and you’ll be set).
Use a consistent name and detail your expertise and interests in your profile. Make your profile interesting so that people take a decision to follow your updates.
After setting up your profile, find people of relevant interest and follow them or add them as contacts. Follow them and see if they follow you.
Even if they don’t follow you back, stay as their follower for a while to see if they take any action. Do not start following 150 people on one day.
Build your community slowly and steadily.
Comment on other blogs
This is an excellent way to build your community, especially at initial times. Set aside 30 minutes every day to read other blogs in your niche.
Don’t have blog promotion in your mind while doing this. Just do this to build real friends.
I stress this again because posting your blog updates and making people to click on them is not your goal.
Building a strong relationship is your only goal and everything else will automatically follow.
Do a Google blog search to find out blogs in your niche. I monitor submissions to my blogging community DoSplash to identify new blogs with interesting things to read.
Once you get a handful of them, add them to your reading list. I used Feedly so I get notifications every time a new piece of content is published on those blogs. Read those blogs closely.
This is not just for building community but to improve your knowledge on current trending topics in your niche. After following closely for a week, start leaving valuable comments in those blogs.
Don’t just say ‘thanks for the great post’, instead add value by giving your opinion, or asking a question or quoting a particular point in the blog post.
If you do this consistently, depending upon the value you add you can attract both the blog owner and the audience of that blog to yours.
You should create the curiosity to make people click your name without you leaving your blog’s link in the comment.
Guest blogging as a blog marketing strategy!
It would be incomplete if I don’t talk about guest posting. It is one of the most powerful techniques to get people’s attention to your blog.
Find out blogs that have a good community, in your niche. It will be profitable for you if the readership of the blog is quite very big.
It may take a while to find out the right blogs, be patient.
Closely read those well-established blogs, leave valuable comments and develop a relationship with the blog’s owner if possible.
During this time, learn about the style of content in the blog, get to know the community and if possible cast in your voice with valuable comments or intriguing questions.
Once you are comfortable with the information you know about a handful of blogs come up with a killer article for submission as guest post.
It should be a killer article literally and your best article. Put extra care and effort to write one. Do extensive research if needed.
I highly recommend you to take up my content creation course to help you create great content for your guest blogging campaigns and as well as to create content for your own blog.
Once you feel that your guest article is ready, shoot out an email to the blog owner, starting from the top of your list of blogs you have found to guest post.
If the blog has a ‘Write for us’ page read it carefully and check if your article complies with the guidelines. If you are not sure if the blog owner accepts guest posts or not you can contact them via the contact page to find out.
Format your guest post carefully so that you make it easy for the blog owner to publish. Let him/her just copy paste it. Give them no more work.
Don’t forget to leave an intro line with a link to your main page like ‘This is a guest post by [your name] of [your blog name hyperlinked]’. Attach the necessary images and credits to images.
Your author bio at the end of your guest post is your magic spot. Make it interesting, intuitive and attractive.
Don’t just leave a link to the main page; rather leave a link to one of your killer contents on your blog or your RSS subscription link or link to your FREE Ebook page (mine is linked here) if you are offering one.
Don’t use affiliate links, your guest post will most likely be rejected.
Don’t feel bad if your guest posts get rejected, it happens. Just switch to the next blog in the list and send the same guest post to that blog. Do a re-formatting if necessary, to suit this blog.
Rinse and repeat.
If your guest post proved itself to be a worthwhile stuff, you will certainly reap the results. You will find a hike in the number of visitors to your blog once your guest post goes live on a ‘big’ blog.
Don’t get flattered by it. People will just pay a visit to see who you are.
Converting those visitors into regular readers depend upon the content on your landing page.
Your landing page should either have killer content or provide the readers with something useful and call them to take an action.
If you manage to impress those visitors you can get about 1% of regular readers. Sounds too low? Yes, but that’s how it works.
So you need to really aim at blogs with thousands of visitors per day to guest post.
These 3 simple tips are highly effective and help you with marketing your blog. Try them out to see the results.
