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Starting a blog, and writing your first blog post are one of the easiest things to do when you start your blogging career.
According to WordPress statistics, users produce more than 70 million new posts each month, which shows that almost 2.3 million posts per day are getting published on WordPress alone
With so much crowd in online space, many bloggers struggle to get their blogs noticed.
According to a survey, most of the bloggers quit their blogging journey within the first 90 days.
Do you know what is the main reason?
It’s Traffic.
Most of the bloggers don’t know how to promote their blog and build a loyal audience around their blog.
When I started my blogging career in 2011, I struggled a lot and read so many blogs to learn how to promote my blog and very soon I cracked the code in 2012.
I started promoting my blogs in forums, Facebook groups, and so many other places.
But this was just the beginning.
Very soon I mastered the art of SEO and started making my blog more SEO optimized.
If you are one of the bloggers who don’t know how to promote your blog, this article is going to be a game-changer for you.
In this roundup post, we have interviewed some of the best experts in the industry who have cracked the code to attract a lot of traffic on their blogs. Make sure you read the answer of each expert because this blog post can be an eye-opener blog post for you to start your 2020 with a bang.
Adam Connell
There are a lot of ways you can promote your blog, but most tactics will have varying degrees of success depending on your niche.
Regardless of your niche, there are several tips/tactics you should consider:
#1. Create a blog promotion checklist – There are a bunch of these checklists floating around the web but it's worth creating a checklist tailored to your niche. For example, there are niche-specific platforms you can promote your content to, such as N4G.com for video games and ManageWP.org for WordPress.
#2. Blog post promotion starts at the content planning phase – Most people wait till there article is live and then consider how to promote it. Instead, consider what promotional strategy fits best with your content as you write it. Which leads me nicely onto my third point.
#3. Feature influencers in your content – Reach out to influencers directly or use a platform like HARO to source quotes. You'll add credibility to your content and the influencer might share it.
#4. Sharing on a few social networks once is not enough – While an extensive promotion for short-form content may not make sense, it's critical for long-form content. Consider recycling social media posts with a scheduling tool if your content is evergreen. Consider influencer marketing, outreach, social bookmarking platforms, niche social bookmarking platforms, Quora, and paid channels.
Janice Wald
#1. After creating stellar content, I promote my blog all over. I believe in the shotgun effect—promote your post everywhere and see where you generate interest.
WordPress bloggers can check their WordPress blogs to see where they generate the most traction. All bloggers can use Google Analytics to see where they generate the most traction from social media sites.
#2. The most important places you can promote your posts are places with high Domain Authority Rankings. If these websites allow self-promotion, you’ll get a link to your blog from a site with a high DA. This will boost your search engine visibility resulting in higher search engine traffic.
Following both steps will enable you to boost your traffic in 2020.
Initially, I only promoted on social media sites. Now I follow both techniques. Search engine traffic accounts for most of my daily traffic, so it’s good I discovered these SEO tips that result in traffic generation in addition to social media promotion.
David Leonhardt
I still think that getting amplified by others on social media makes all the difference. I didn’t do that so much at the beginning, not having had a network, but I built up a network. And there are platforms to help fast-forward that network.
Both ViralContentBee and Triberr help me get in front of a lot of eyes, both potential clients and bloggers who might like my posts and refer to them in their posts.
I also reach like-minded social media sharers through private Skype groups and other networking groups. In other words, it’s not how many followers you have – they are amazing, of course – but how many followers your network has.
Having highly sharable images helps them share much easier, too. To build a big network and use tools to help them amplify your content.
Mandy McEwen
If you really want to increase exposure for your blog posts, include industry influencers and micro-influencers in your posts.
You can quote them. You can link to a relevant blog or another content piece that will add value to your piece. Or you can simply give them props and link to their website. Then, reach out to them on social media and email.
Provide the link to your blog, tell them that you mentioned them, then ask if they can share it with their social media audience.
Tip: It works better if you ask them to share it on a specific social media platform like Twitter. Chances are they will share it across multiple platforms but you'll get a better response if you simply ask for one.
Of course, you should ALWAYS ensure your blogs are SEO-friendly so you can maximize your exposure in search engines like Google.
Steve Wiideman
Though blogs, in general, are becoming less prevalent, they still do attract traffic from web searches, especially if marked up and designed for new ways users are searching for content. For example, one way to extend the reach of a post in 2020 will be to leverage Structured Markup, such as those found at schema.org.
A simple FAQ or recipe may land your post that coveted the “Position Zero” spot and a mention from Google Assistant on voice searches if marked up appropriately.
If you did your keyword research and selected highly-searched questions for your posts that solve common problems, setting up Google Alerts could be the catalyst to acquiring short answer citations as you drop your summary in as a response to those alerts (when appropriate).
We found that Featured Answers were more likely when there appears to be a health velocity of new short answer mentions or quotes (even without backlinks).
Organizing content into themes can be super helpful as well. We put a Content Tracking template together for our clients to draw inspiration from. The URL is https://bit.ly/content-marketing-template and includes sample content themes, names, publishing tasks, and even tracking capabilities.
Raelyn Tan
Write high-quality content that is useful and shareable. Do a google search and look at the top articles on your topic. Make sure that your article is at least 2x better than the best one.
Then, add additional elements to increase the chances of your content being linked to. My go-to ideas that will increase the chances of webmasters linking to you are to create an accompanying infographic and to include useful research, statistics, or surveys that you've conducted inside your article.
Such elements will increase the quality of your article, leading to a better user experience that serves your readers better. Also, these elements will help you to build links a lot faster!
When I first started out, I was very focused on optimizing my blog posts, ensuring that relevant keywords are included, and employing other tactics that my articles get ranked for low competition keywords.
Today, it is still important to keyword optimize your articles for search engines like Google, but all the optimization in the world will not fix a poor quality blog post.
I find that many bloggers are still caught in the endless cycle of churning out article after article with no personality or edge to them. This will hopefully improve in 2020!
Ankit Singla
Although there are several proven ways to promote a blog post like sharing blog posts on Social Media, outreaching influencers to share our content, etc., but these things give results for a very short time.
I am a big fan of building digital assets that I can leverage again and again.
That’s why in 2020, I’ll be purely focusing on these methods to promote my blog:
#1. Facebook Group: I have been consistently working on growing my Facebook group as it gives me the best ROI when it comes to traffic and sales. Not only this, it instantly builds my authority when new members join the group and see the total number of existing members in my group.
And if you don’t know, Facebook promotes super engaging groups. So it is one of the best sources of FREE and consistent new traffic for me.
#2. YouTube Channel: The demand of video content is booming and if you are not leveraging YouTube to build your audience, then you are missing a ton of opportunities. This year I’ll be focusing a lot on growing my YouTube channel as it is super easy to drive traffic from YouTube videos back to my blog.
#3. Email list: You would like to drive instant targeted traffic whenever you publish a new blog post, right? (who doesn’t). When you have a list of a super targeted audience, you just need to send a broadcast and traffic would start rolling.
#4. Messenger Bot Subscribers: Studies say that the open rate for messenger messages is way higher than emails. We may not read all the emails that we receive, but the chances are higher that we check all our messenger messages. I tested this with a few campaigns and my open rate was above 90%. I am definitely going to focus on it a lot this year.
Bonus Tip: Build an ecosystem. All the above 4 methods work extremely well together. Once you have an engaging Facebook group, YouTube channel, email list, and bot subscribers, you can leverage all of them together and cross-promote all your different traffic channels and grow all of them even further.
Remember: Build an ecosystem.
Steven Macdonald
In the early days, we relied heavily on social media to promote new content that was published on the SuperOffice Blog. Back in 2012, it was much easier to get our content in front of a new audience on social.
That's no longer the case. If you want to get your content shared on Facebook, Twitter and/or LinkedIn, you need to pay for it. And once you start paying, it's difficult to stop as it becomes a reliable traffic source.
Rather than pay for distribution, we decided to promote new content to existing traffic on our website using a site-wide CTA. The SuperOffice website attracts more than 3 million visitors per year including new prospects, existing customers and partners.
The content we create is for this audience, so there's no better way to distribute our content and to this kind of volume (for free) than using a site-wide CTA at the top of every page of the website.
Manish Chauhan
PODCASTS – I think the best way in the next year is to work on PODCASTS. Podcasts are not something new, but a lot of bloggers even if established don't to enough of it.
Times are changing now and people have less and less time to READ things. They want audio/video content. To create video content, it takes a lot of resources, time and effort to edit.
However considering the fact that the hero of the video content is always the AUDIO part and the conversation, podcasts are the new medium to spread your content and your views.
Here are 4 major benefits of podcasts compared to Video content
#1. Easy to create – As I said, podcasts need less time and resources and very manageable if you want to do interviews or discussions. While you can always go for fancy tools, one can start with interviews or recordings on their smartphone itself.
Also, you don't need to do lots of setup like an expensive camera, lighting, or you don't need to buy any expensive editing software. Another good point is that speakers are never conscious about how they are looking or how their background looks like in the video. All that matters is your voice.
#2. Easy to Consume by readers/viewers – People spend enough time these days driving, walking or exercising and may want a medium that they can consume without looking at it. I myself listen to a lot of youtube content myself and I don't need the video part of it. If your content is valuable enough, it's not that tough to communicate things by audio format.
#3. Faster to Create – Podcasts are also faster to create, as you have very little to edit. Just think of the last video you created, and imagine how much time you would have saved if you just needed to record the audio part.
#4. Great way to interview and get access to others network – If you want to target other bloggers network and market yourself, it becomes a big barrier to get their time for interviews if you do video format. In case of Audio, the commitment is quite less and all they have to do is give you 30 min to 60 min. Once they have invested so much time in contributing, they will surely share the podcasts to their own network or readers and it's sure shot way to get visibility and market your self.
Make the first 5 podcasts as an experiment I would say that rather than making big plans, just try to recreate your last 5 content (written or video) in audio format and see how it goes. There are also so many platforms like PodBean which are free platforms to get started and which can host your podcasts and also help you to distribute it to other platforms.
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Jitendra Vaswani
In 2020 my strategy for blog traffic through would be focused on strong on-page and then go after link building because in past I made tons of mistakes in on-page SEO, it costs me lot of dollars so my suggestion is to learn from experts like Neil Patel, Brian Dea, Kyle Roof & Matt Diggity.
For more traffic for your blog choose topics that are trending on Google Trends and also which are being talked on social media. Trending topics tend to get more attention & use IGTV which is a new Instagram platform.
If you get attention on IGTV you can capture a big amount of audience there for your blog. Don't completely depend on SEO go for combo SEO & Social media & I bet it will work for you.
Bonus tip: Start doing podcast & interview real influencers in your niche & ask them to share that interview, you will see your blog will get noticed and they will be happy to share on their social channels.
Robert Ryan
Graft, hustle, hunger, and focus. You've got to be willing to put in the long hours and hard yards to give your blog or business site a chance to survive and thrive online.
One of the key things I did to help my site succeed was to get involved in online communities, to expand my social circle and continue to influence the influencers.
Initially, that approach was a slow burner that didn't yield much but with continued graft and focus is started to pay off, influencers started to share my content sending more traffic to my site which in turn gave rise to more opportunities to create more content to keep the cycle going.
With more shares and backlinks from influencers, the focused hustle started to pay off, the site started to rank higher and the traffic that was coming to the site via shares from influencers was the type of traffic that had a positive disposition to what I was offering which in turn gave rise to more leads and business.
The other important factor for this tactic of online promotion was to ensure that the site had its SEO ducks in a row so that as more backlinks and positive SEO signals were received the site then had a lift in organic search, yielding even more leads and business.
As for how I promote my site now, honestly, I don't do all that much. The site generates a steady flow of qualified leads, largely as a result of the hustle, hunger, and focus of the early days but also dovetailed with an understanding of SEO.
I could continue to focus on promoting to the site but it's also key to know when it's time to focus on clients and at present that is where my site and business is – it generates enough on an ongoing basis without too much TLC and so I can focus on keeping clients happy and onboard.
Chris Makara
While there are many great ways to promote your blog post, I find that a few approaches yield better results than others. Here they are:
- Email it to your list
- Email outreach
- Social media automation
The best way to promote your new blog post is by telling those who already enjoy your content. This can easily be done by emailing your list whenever you publish something new. And because they typically love your content, chances are they will tell others about it. Here's everything you need to know about building an email list.
Besides emailing your own list, I've found good success in doing cold email outreach to sites who have previously linked to similar content.
I never email asking for them to replace an existing link with my own, but rather nudge them that this content would make a great addition to their blog post. Not only have I secured great links this way, but there have been occasions where the same site will share on social media or even send it out in their newsletter.
The last way I like to get more traffic for blog posts is to leverage social media automation. There are a number of ways you can do this, but some of my favorite ways are scaling content promotion and promoting expert roundups. I find that spending just a few minutes setting this up, I can automate the process for months to come.
Krystian Szastok
Obviously, as we all know content is the key part, so the real question is ‘what content'. This is where I see most blogs failing and most blogposts never seeing the light of day or getting in front of readers.
As bloggers, we constantly either miss the topicality and interest or we completely underestimate how much effort is required to create good content.
As a general rule of thumb, I try to aim at evergreen topics. Rather than writing ‘Top 5 SEO news from this week' I'd prefer to write ‘Top 5 SEO tips for 2020' or even better ‘Top 15 tips on how to maximize your CTR on Google SERPs with Schema‘ – for example. Being so passionate about this topic, we recently launched a FREE FAQ Schema WordPress plugin to help SEO experts rank for more FAQ terms.
The last suggestion is the most exact, the most useful, the most likely one to remain relevant and interesting.
Then there is the effort. I check what keywords I'm targeting and compare to the top 3-5 pages ranking on Google. You never want to create shorter and worse content as it won't appear on the first page.
This remains the same in 2020 as it always had, Google is looking for depth and authority.
Mike McManus
The fundamentals of attracting traffic to your blog start in the ‘guts' of the idea. Before writing any blog post or article ask yourself ‘do I know that people are searching for answers to this question or topic that I am about to write about?' – if the answer is yes, write the post, however, if the answer is no, take a step back and find another topic to sink your time into.
When working out if there is a demand for a topic or idea use research tools such as Keyword Magic Tool by SEMRUSH or Google Suggest.
Following this blogging approach will keep your posts on-trend but more importantly will help you create evergreen content that keeps attracting visitors from search results day after day, month after month and year after year!
Anastasia
I think for most blogging niches (not for all though!), the fastest and free way to boost your traffic is Pinterest. It’s amazing how this platform can provide you a combination of targeted search traffic and a viral effect that is common on social media.
I recommend Pinterest especially for beginners, for those who are thinking to start their blogs in 2020 because competition on Google is very high and you’ll need to be patient for at least the first year for your site to get out of Google’s “sandbox”.
During this first year of blogging, you could reach all your traffic goals with Pinterest and also give your site an additional boost in Google because a lot of shares on Pinterest help your pages get better rankings in Google too.
Not only that – oftentimes, your pins may rank high in Google image search, and that will bring you additional organic search traffic from Google but thanks to your efforts on Pinterest.
When you are thinking about Pinterest traffic, also keep in mind that it’s high-quality traffic (mostly from the US) that is valued by all the premium ad networks, which will help you make more ad income from your blog.
Minuca Elena
Many bloggers rely massively on social media which is indeed a very useful resource but shouldn't be the only one you use. In 2020, business owners should focus more on building brand awareness.
Get featured in expert roundups, interviews, and podcasts. Use HARO and Source Bottle to land your first media appearances.
Don't reject any invitation, even if it's from a small blog. You need to get your face seen. Even if you think that in a roundup with 60 people few people will read every answer, you should still take part in it. You get backlinks and that helps with your SEO as well. Plus, over time readers will recognize your name and image. So always try to give quality answers.
This way, you will get noticed by readers of other sites that will also come to check your site.
Iftekhar Ahmed
In 2020, your blog should no longer look like a generic one. With so much competition around, getting traffic to your blog can be challenging. Traditional methods of promoting a blog may no longer work. You will need to bring some uniqueness in your promotion strategy.
Here are some suggestions that I feel can help you bring more traffic.
Don’t just publish articles on High search volume or generic keywords. Such articles become really hard to promote as there must be a ton of articles already covered by other blogs.
Start publishing research or something that involves a lot of facts and numbers. You can dig deep into your niche and try to find an interesting topic that you can cover in the form of research full of facts and digits. Here is an example of one such research post: https://detailed.com/google-control/.
Such articles are link magnets and most importantly, other industry experts (or your competitors) may end up sharing your article. Thus, sending you a new set of audience.
Ann Smarty
When I started my blog, I wasn't doing much to promote it except for writing genuinely useful and original content and building industry connections to get seen. I wasn't building links or using social media much but I was very active at niche forums. The traffic wasn't huge but the engagement was awesome. I didn't rank much too as I never even did keyword research.
Last year I decided to really work on my organic positions, so I started using Text Optimizer which is the semantic analysis tool that helps you optimize content for search intent to better match your text with Google's and its users' expectations. Text Optimizer helped me triple my organic search traffic within three months which I thought was awesome. I don't have enough time to use it more but my plan for 2020 is to use Text Optimizer to optimize my old content.
I think the reason why it works so well is that the tool pushes you to both include varied vocabulary and write long-form content. To get a higher score, you are encouraged to choose at least 20-25 related terms, so you have to create the context for them. This works well for extending my copy.
I also find the tool useful to recommend to blog writers and contributors as it helps in research and writing. Overall, I think this is my best find of 2020!
Swadhin Agarwal
With the rise of Google trying to be a one-stop solution to all things search, my 2020 blog promotion goals are to diversify my traffic sources from just SEO to other routes.
While SEO will still be my #1 focus to drive traffic I’m definitely considering adding podcasts as a strong traffic as well as a community-building platform for my blog.
In addition to seeing an upsurge in usage, Podcasts are also now getting featured as playable podcasts directly in the search engine, so that’s a double benefit.
Other blog promotion methods that are on my main focus are YouTube (needless to say the popularity videos are having these days and the real estate they capture on SERPs) and Facebook groups (perfect way to build a community of raving fans without actually having to meddle with the hassles of a membership site).
Facebook groups have surprisingly been one of the largest sources of referral traffic for my blog and I’m trying to double down on that in 2020.
For BestPaidTools readers, I’d say don’t leave any stone unturned when it comes to traffic acquisition. Email marketing, social media or videos, be everywhere where your audience hangs out. Not only will it help in traffic acquisition but also with brand recall (which also contributes to CTR and organic rankings).
Ileane Smith
I am using a multi-channel approach or what some might call Omni Channel Marketing to attract traffic. I have two podcasts: Ms. Ileane Speaks, and The Anchor Show, and my YouTube channel and I'm also live streaming frequently on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Twitch. This is paying off for me and helping me expand my reach to different audiences through each of these platforms.
Pardeep Goyal
Focus on the Intent of your reader if you want to attract more traffic on your blog in 2020. If your content is aligned with your reader’s intent, it will get love from Google as well as social media.
The more your content is aligned with the user, the better will be the quality of leads. Only quality content can attract more traffic despite the promotional channel. I have written a simple to understand article on the topic of starting stock investment in India, that became the most popular content on my blog within a month.
You must be aware of the pain points of your reader & your content should be capable to resolve them. Such quality content makes a direct connection with your reader & gets more attention.
For example, if you want to post about “home remedies to cure cough & cold in babies” on facebook, a simple video with some slides can grab millions of views if it is aligned with your reader. I have done that when I was working with a startup in the parenting niche. Our video got millions of views in just a few days.
Posting high-quality (user aligned) content is the key to attract more traffic.
Shane Barker
In my experience, one of the quickest ways to drive traffic to your blog is to post an expert roundup featuring industry experts. Ask them to give their insights on a current and relevant topic and that, in itself, will pull in a good amount of traffic.
Additionally, give them a mention and ask them to promote it for you. This way, you can attract their followers to your blog.
However, if you want a long-term, sustainable strategy then nothing works better than guest posting. It helps you earn quality backlinks from other top sites from your industry. I have been posting articles on other websites for a long time now and it has worked really well for me.
Try these two strategies and you’re sure to see an increase in your blog traffic.
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All the experts shared phenomenal tips to help you promote your blogs and drive a lot of traffic by using the right marketing techniques.
Once you start applying these techniques, you can get your blog noticed and do the free website promotion with the right efforts.
Start applying these principles and grow your blog in 2020.
Now your turn!!
Please share this article with your friends, followers, and community to help other bloggers.
The strategies used by these professional bloggers are working strategies and they are applying them to promote their blogs. So let's spread this practical info and make our blogging community a better place.
Thanks Kulwant for this amazing list of bloggers..! Learnt a lot! Glad ???? to see my favourite blogger akshay here.
Thanks @Kulwant Nagi for sharing these great bloggers and their Great round-up of tactics for promoting blog posts here. I love the idea of Robert: You’ve got to be willing to put in the long hours and hard yards to give your blog or business site a chance to survive and thrive online.
Hi Kulwant Nagi!
I am seeing the most of my favourite bloggers here whom I follow every time. You are also one of them!
I learnt many new things from these experts. Many thanks Kulwant Nagi!
Hi Kulwant,
It’s really a greate coverage of “Tips” given by almost all leading bloggers. This would really very helpful for blog promotion in 2020.
Out of them, I will definitely try “PODCASTing” this year, Which I did’nt try yet for my Blog.
Thanks Again,
Surya Shrivastava
Amazing Kulwant Sir, This is one of my favourite articles in your blog because of this I learned a lot of things which I can implement this year to grow my traffic.
Cheers,
Umer Qureshi
This is a great roundup packed with useful tips for us all Kulwant. I’ve been following a few of the names you’ve mentioned but added a few more to the list!