There are tons of different ways to promote your blog. What you ultimately decide is best for you depends on the reasons you want to promote your blog in the first place.
1. Focus on search engine optimized (SEO) content
Growing a blog and SEO content go hand in hand. SEO content is basically content that has the goal of ranking on search engines for popular queries (keywords) in order to attract organic traffic to your blog from search engine users.
SEO advice can range from the very logical (use your target keyword in the title of your post, write a clear meta description) to the technical (proper use of coding, mobile-friendly design) so if you’re unfamiliar I’d suggest checking out some industry blogs to learn the basics. Some suggestions are:
2. Write “Evergreen” Content
One tip for adding SEO content to your blog would be to target topics in your niche that can be evergreen content. What do I mean by evergreen? Evergreen is a concept in SEO that means the topic of the post will be relevant for years to come, as opposed to a seasonal topic that is only relevant for a short period of time.
This way, as you write your blog posts about “evergreen” topics with SEO in mind you are future-proofing your site to stay relevant for search engine users over and over again in time.
3. Invite guest bloggers
Another easy way to promote your blog is by letting other people write for you! Guest blogging is a way for other bloggers to reach a new audience by contributing a post of theirs to your blog. Usually, a guest post includes a link to the guest author’s website in return for the post to make it a win-win for both parties. The more loyal followers your guest author has, the better. When the guest author goes to share their new post on your blog, it attracts their audience to your site and makes your blog look more authoritative. SEMrush takes guest authors all the time, so much so that we even publish a ”best-of” wrap up with all of our favorite posts from guest contributors!
You are the backbone of our blog and your willingness to share your strategies and insights are truly awe-inspiring to our entire team. We thank you all and are honored to work with you
4. Mention influencers in your blog posts (and let them know)
Another strategy to getting more people in your industry aware of your blog is by mentioning influencers in your post. You can include a quote of theirs that you like, share one of their related posts, or just mention how helpful their website is for what you’re talking about.
After name-dropping them in your post, reach out to them over email or social media to let them know. Most people will be flattered that you thought of them and included them as a part of your post. Who knows, they could be interested in your blog and share the post with their followers, ask to contribute a guest post in the future, or offer you guidance!
5. Build an Email Marketing List
Are you trying to grow your blog without an email list? You may need to rethink your strategy.
Building an email list from your blog readers is one of the most time-tested ways to build loyalty with your fanbase and keep your readers engaged again and again. However, as this post explains, you need to offer clear value when asking people to sign up. No one wants more random emails in their inbox. Offer special deals, insider tips and secrets, or early access to a new product. Basically, users want a clear incentive for signing up for another list.
Not to mention, it’s a great way to measure your growth over time - how fast is your email list growing in tandem with your number of posts? Do certain blog posts encourage people to sign up for your email list more than others?
6. Contribute to Upvote Communities
Upvote communities (such as reddit, quora, or http://inbound.org) are websites where users submit content and vote on the submissions that they like the most. This way, when you enter the site, the most valued information is at the top of the feed. It’s a democratic way of doing things, and a great opportunity to promote your blog when you have something worth sharing.
But before you just spam upvote communities with your blog posts, you should find the right communities for you and participate as a commenter and have conversations with other users. If you don’t think there is a subreddit for your niche, you’re probably wrong.
And if there isn’t, you can always apply to create your own subreddit. SEMrush has its own subreddit that we moderate to field our customers’ top questions to learn what we should be writing about.
Other than reddit, there are communities such as ProductHunt (for promoting a new product), private Slack groups (such as Online Geniuses and Traffic Think Tank) and of course, Quora! :)
7. Write Answers on Quora
Quora is technically an upvote community but its unique for its popularity and strict question-answer format. If you have a tool like SEMrush, you can look for new ways to promote your blog by entering http://Quora.com in Organic Research and checking out all of the keywords that Quora ranks for.
Add a filter to look for search terms relevant to your blog. Once you identify some keywords that are relevant to your blog, you can write an answer to the question Quora and mention your blog within the answer.
You probably won’t see a huge impact from one answer, but if you make a habit of answering Quora questions somewhat frequently, you can start to build your authority on the site as a trusted source in your industry. Eventually, you’ll gain traffic to your blog from Quora.
Once you have plenty of answers on Quora, your profile could be a good place to write more about your blog in your bio.
8. Social Media
Making use of social media - both unpaid and paid posts can be huge for getting a blog off the ground. If you’re serious about using social media to make an impact for you, it would be wise to invest in social media tools to help you schedule your posts in advance and track engagement. Twitter and Facebook are great places to grow an audience and find like-minded people online.
This point could be an entire article on its own, but for brevity’s sake I’ll instead leave a couple of links to helpful articles about promoting a blog on social media:
9. Bonus Tip - Use Google Analytics and Google Search Console
These tools won’t promote your blog, per se, but they are great for showing you your growth over time. Both are free tools from Google that tell you how people get to your website, what they do on your site, and what content is most engaging. If you are serious about growing your blog, you will need to rely on these tools for a lot of basic insights.
Google Analytics will tell you your average user’s time on page, sessions, bounce rate, and much more. Google Search Console, meanwhile, will help you understand how Google crawls your website and, if your site is getting organic traffic from search engines, what keywords they’re searching that trigger your blog posts.
Now that you have some tips to promote your blog and track its growth, good luck! And don’t underestimate a tool like SEMrush for extra insights on your competition that will help you build a strategy to grow!
