How to promote your blog for maximum exposure. Unless you’re famous or have a lot of influential friends, gone are the days where you can simply write a post and expect it to pull it’s weight in terms of attracting visitors TO your website.
Are You Relying on Luck?
Sure, you might get lucky every now and then when somebody with some influence stumbles across one of your best articles and decides to share it, but are you really going to hope for “luck” to find you? Not if you seriously want your blog to gain traction and start performing anytime soon. The bottom line is, you NEED to promote every one of your best posts—not just your blog’s homepage.
The good news is, there is a simple, step-by-step “strategy” you can follow with each of your pillar (aka “evergreen”) articles that will help transform each one of them into “workers” that’ll serve to improve your website in a multitude of ways (e.g. better search engine rankings, high quality traffic, more comments… just to name a few).
Step One: Ping Your Blog Post
A “ping” is simply a way of letting specific search engines and other websites know that you’ve updated your blog. This doesn’t cause a noticeable difference right off the bat, but it will attract search engine spiders to your website and will help get your new blog post quickly indexed. It also takes about 30 seconds so it’s well worth the effort. Some popular pinging services are Ping-o-Matic! and Pingoat (both free and easy).
Step Two: Twitter, Facebook, or Both
If you’re active in some of the popular social media websites such as Twitter or Facebook, be sure to announce your post, and do it multiple times a day. For example, in twitter, your followers may be on at different times of the day and a large majority might miss your updates, so it’ll help your post out tremendously if you announce it at different times throughout the day. For a free service that allows you to schedule tweets to be posted at a later date or time, visit SocialOomph.
Step Three: IMAutomator
Social bookmarks don’t have a huge impact on their own, and frankly, are annoying to submit. Thankfully, there is a free service called IMAutomator that will allow you to fill out ONE form, submit it ONCE, and have your post sent to 15 different social bookmarking websites over the course of a month (drip-feed submissions look more natural to the search engines, and therefore help your post out even more). It takes about one minute to use, so there’s no excuse NOT to use it for every one of your pillar articles you publish to your blog. Visit the IMAutomator website to sign up for a free account.
Step Four: More Social Bookmarks
The above service will only submit to 15 social bookmarking websites, so it helps if you manually submit your post to another 9-10 social bookmarking websites to give it that extra edge. Once again, social bookmarks don’t do a whole lot on their own, but they do provide your post with some initial back-links and an opportunity to get voted up and ranked highly (which could theoretically result in an avalanche of traffic if you’re lucky).
Also, think of how many people publish posts to their blog and DON’T submit them to a handful of social bookmarks. By taking ten minutes of your time (or less), you’re putting YOUR post ahead of the curve. To make the process of submitting your new blog post to 9-10 more social bookmarking websites easier, visit Shareaholic (also free).
Step Five: Online Niche Communities
Do a search on the internet to see if there are popular communities that are specific to your niche. Usually these websites allow you to submit a new link, much like a social bookmarking website, but more targeted to your niche. For example, if you are in the blogging, internet marketing, or make money online niche, some communities you should consider submitting your posts to are: Blogengage.com and MMOSocialNetwork.com. Quick Tip: Make friends and build professional relationships in these communities and you’ll get even more traffic from your submissions.
Step Six: Blog Carnival Submission
A blog carnival is a scheduled blog posts that groups links to other blog posts about a specific topic. Those who are running blog carnivals submit their website to Blogcarnival.com to be listed. Likewise, you can go to that same website and find upcoming relevant blog carnivals to submit your posts to.
It can be a somewhat time consuming process, but if you “bite the bullet” and submit every one of your pillar posts to relevant blog carnivals, it can result in not only some good back-links to your articles, but often a spike in traffic on the day the blog carnival goes live. Imagine if you submitted and got each one of your best articles approved at ten different blog carnivals?
Step Seven: Blog Commenting
You should already have a list of other blogs in your niche that you post comments to regularly, and if you don’t, you should definitely start now. Immediately after you publish your new pillar article and go through the above steps (1-6), you should go through your list of “blogs to comment” and post a comment on each one (especially on the more recent posts).
What this will do is drive some traffic from your comment to your blog where your brand new post is sitting at the top position on your homepage. This helps to increase your new post’s comment count, and can result in some new readers and subscribers as well.
Conclusion
The above process, though somewhat of a hassle and moderately time-consuming, should be the bare minimum effort you put into promoting all of your best posts. It is the exact strategy that I personally apply with the pillar articles I publish to my blog, and has resulted in growing an active, loyal community in a relatively short period of time.
You put a tremendous effort in writing amazing articles to publish to your blog, wouldn’t be a shame if your effort was wasted and that article gets pushed further and further down your archives without ever seeing the light of day? Go the extra mile and promote all of your blog posts using the simple 7-step strategy I described above and the blood, sweat, and tears you put into writing your pillar articles will be well worth it.
Jonathan Beebe is an online entrepreneur who writes at MMO Work. Visit his blog to learn more about how to make money online, and to get a FREE eBook that takes you step-by-step through the EXACT easy method he used to quit his day job… FOR GOOD.