7 Easy and Free Ways to Promote your Blog

Many are under the impression that a blog is a “set it and forget it” process. While creating great content is essential to the success of any blog, writing a blog is only half the challenge. The other half is marketing your blog and getting the word out in order to generate the traffic your blog needs. Here are seven easy and free ways to promote your blog.

1. Give Constructive Feedback on Other Blogs

Generic comments followed by a link to your blog are spam. Do this often, and these spammy links will actually hurt your blog’s ranking by search engines. Conversely, constructive feedback on other blogs will get read by other blog readers, while a mention of your blog’s name without the link improves brand recognition by both search engines and a wider audience.
Great bloggers solicit constructive feedback in order to improve as well as deepen their engagement with their audience. HowToCreateABlog.org is a classic example of this, as well as an excellent resource for new bloggers.

2. Contribute to Others Blogs

If you are able to engage with the author of another blog through the comments section, offer to write a blog entry for them as long as it mentions the name of your blog and contains a backlink to your blog. Many content creators will welcome such content so that they don’t have to struggle to come up with new content as often.

3. In the News

News sites rival educational sites like Wikipedia for trust rankings by search engines. Any references to you personally, your business or your blog by news organizations are SEO gold. One way to do this is to volunteer to be interviewed as a subject matter expert in your area of expertise. Another option is reporting stories to news organizations about upcoming events in exchange for a mention in the story.

For example, if you write a blog about a medical condition and are working with others for a charitable fundraiser, you should tell the local newspapers about the fundraiser and be interviewed as part of the story.

If you have video or images of events that other news sites would like to have, contact those news sites and offer to share the content in exchange for attribution, including a link back to your blog. If you can submit guest posts to industry news websites, then you can include a link to your blog as part of your author biography.

4. Blog Contests

Blog contests have several advantages over other forms of blog marketing. First, for the price of whatever you are giving away, you’ll receive an inordinate amount of attention once you get the word out about the contest. Second, you can promote your blog through contest websites and receive a massive number of social media mentions as a result. Third, you may even be able to get the items you give away for free, depending on the giveaway. For example, you may be able to receive a free copy of a new book coming out as a thank you for interviewing the author, and then boost the social media mentions of your blog by holding a contest to give away the brand new book.

5. Participate in Online Forums

Consider creating an account on sites like Quora or Reddit, and link to your blog in the user profile. Online forums give you the opportunity to answer others’ questions and show off your expertise. Questions that have many followers but lack answers are ideal for answering while building up your following. In an ideal case, you could give a short answer to the commonly asked question on the online forum and link back to an in depth answer on your blog.

You can put a link to your blog in your forum signature, as well, though you need to be careful about back and forth conversations that start to look like link spam to search engines.

6. Social Media Outreach

Create social media accounts on a number of platforms. Place a link to your blog along with your other social media accounts in each social media account. Then, use these accounts to promote your content. However, in order to gain followers, you should share quality content created by others regularly. Don’t forget to put social media sharing buttons on your blogs. Your blogs also need clear calls to action asking readers to share the content or follow you on social media.

7. Your Signature Touch

One way to increase recognition of your blog is to put the link to your blog in your email signature. Now everyone you correspond with from friends to professional contacts receives the link to your blog. This move also ensures that everyone you correspond with about guest posting or giveaways has your blog’s URL to check out for themselves.

Conclusion

If you want to get the word out about your blog, give constructive feedback and, where possible, guest write for other blogs. When you can get the word out about events you’re supporting, do so and receive a mention of your blog in the process. Set up giveaways on your blog to generate a massive number of social media mentions. Create several social media accounts that reference each other and your blog before using them to share links to your blog. Put your blog URL in your email signature line, and consider using it as a signature line on every forum comment if it won’t show up so often that it hurts your backlink profile.

Original post: 7 Easy and Free Ways to Promote your Blog

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