Blogging is a mainstay in the digital marketing landscape. But even if you’ve mastered the art of blogging, your work is not yet done.
On the WordPress platform alone, users publish 83.6 million new posts each month. That’s a lot of competition, whether you’re managing the blog for a major brand, a solo blogger who writes about a niche you’re passionate about, or a blogging newbie just getting your feet wet.
What comes next? Sadly, the if you build it, they will come approach doesn’t hold up in the blogging world. It’s up to you to promote your blog content to drive more traffic to your site, and there are dozens of ways to do so, from placing social media share buttons on your website to participating in online communities and forums.
To find out what blog promotion strategies are worth your time, we reached out to a panel of top bloggers and digital marketers and asked them to answer this question:
“How do you promote your blog content to drive more traffic?”
Meet Our Panel of Blogging Experts and Digital Marketers:
Sydney Liu
Sydney Liu is the Co-founder of Commaful, a popular storytelling site featuring fanfiction, short stories, and poetry.
“The best ways to promote blog content to drive more traffic are…
“Create Shareable Images, Quotes, and Video Previews To Share
“Quotes and visuals do a lot better than pure links on pretty much every social platform for a number of reasons. In the case of Facebook, the algorithm favors images and videos over links. In the case of other sites, the visuals are far more eye-catching and thus catch people’s interest. With Commaful stories, we generate videos out of each story to help catch people’s eyes and attract more readers.
“Look at Communities and Niche Social Networks
“Look for sites that are more targeted to your audience for places to engage and eventually share your work. Everybody focuses on the biggest platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Those tend to be very noisy and hard to compete in. Some of the niche and smaller networks often have more opportunity. Just engage and be part of the communities and then drop a link to your blog. Make sure the blog posts are relevant and valuable to the community.”
Alex Birkett
Alex Birkett is a Growth Marketing Manager at HubSpot. He works on user acquisition and is based in sunny Austin, Texas.
“In reality, you should bake content promotion into your creation process and upfront strategy…
“How? First, fill an informational need for those who will likely link to your or share your article. This is something Rand Fishkin talks about in a recent SparkToro blog post.
“Second, bake linkable assets into your post. These are things like original research and charts, quotes from smart and influential people, bespoke images, and frameworks. Use tools that make it easier to share your content. Make sure the content user experience is commendable.
“Finally, seek to build communities and avoid the transactional. Sending 30 influencers an email that begs for a social share isn’t the best (or most fun) way to do promo.”
David James
David James is the Founder of Business Growth Digital Marketing.
“There are several good ways to promote your blog content to drive more traffic…
“SEO rankings “This is the main way we attract our visitors. We focus on specific long-tail keywords that we can write content for and rank in the search engines. The search engine then sends organic traffic to the post. This tactic usually takes 3-6 months to really get working.
“Publish pins on Pinterest
“It depends on the niche, but publishing a pin on Pinterest and optimizing it to rank can send visitors to the post. We manage one site where Pinterest is the second highest traffic source.
“Share the post on LinkedIn
“This works if you have a network of influencers on LinkedIn. You can share a snippet of the post in an article on LinkedIn and send traffic back to your own website. Alternatively, you can share the post on LinkedIn in your personal feed or in LinkedIn Groups.
“Email database
“You will need to have developed an email database to begin with. These people will be interested in your content, so all you need to do is email them the new post.
“Facebook promoted posts
“These work well depending on the niche that we are targeting. But promoted posts on Facebook can work very well. If it is supported by a video that is like an infomercial, that is even better.
“These are the most effective tactics that we use for our campaigns.”
Ryan Scollon
Ryan Scollon is a freelance PPC consultant. He has worked in the industry for over 5 years now and has been featured on the likes of Search Engine Land, Moz, and Matthew Woodward.
“A great way to promote your blog content is using Facebook ads or boosted posts…
“You don’t need to apply a huge budget to it, but it gives it that extra push and gets it in front of people who are not already aware of you. A normal organic post on your Facebook page is ok, but it only gets seen by the same old people that follow you. You can also use the ad targeting features to define the demographics and interests of the audience, increasing your chances of clicks and traffic. Sharing your post out to the whole world won’t do much, as it won’t be useful or interesting to everyone.”
Tracy Nguyen
Tracy Nguyen is an Online Media Relations Associate for TINYpulse.
“An obstacle almost any SaaS company will face is…
“Promoting the blog content which associates with the brand’s message. The challenge is growing the number of an inbound links to drive more traffic to a specific page while maintaining a high quality of links.
“In 2018, we can rely on Google Ranking to continue to engage with our target audience. This means catering to the growing number of searches being performed on mobile devices and providing smarter results that lend more context and not just keywords.
“At TINYpulse, we use multiple channels to find our target journalists such as Meltwater, Mention, HARO, and Google Alerts. When it comes to pitching out, we consider building a connection on a personal level rather than promoting our name. We are working with reporters and editors as a fantastic resource by sharing relevant news and proactive story angles that create value for the audience. We spend time on researching the beats of journalists in their industry, then build relationships with those journalists, finding opportunities to help them write great stories.
“Also, we typically avoid acquiring backlinks through forums, blog comments, and social media sites. To maintain high quality, we seek out influential journalists or website content coordinators via tools such as BuzzSumo and Ahrefs. They are a fantastic resource for relevant news and story angles that provide the most value to their readers, simply by filtering by the most popular content.”
Pierre de Braux
Pierre is a content strategist at Spiralytics, a full-service performance marketing company. He helps brands build content assets that help drive brand awareness, loyalty, and sales. When he’s not at work, he pines for a faster internet connection so he can watch cat videos in high definition.
“We use a variety of promotions strategies to drive traffic to our clients’ blog posts…
“But nothing gets results quicker or is as predictable as paid social ads or post boosting.
“For some of our clients, every new blog post that gets published gets boosted either on Facebook or LinkedIn. This is incredibly effective when it comes to generating initial traffic and driving social signals early on. Only once the content drives significant social proof and natural links can we start to see organic engagement (because it won’t rank well until it performs well).
“These days, with more stringent privacy laws emerging (GDPR) and Facebook being called to court, engagement rates for organic social media promotions content are drastically falling, which is encouraging more marketers to shift towards paid social promotions. And although this trend will drive social PPC prices up, it’ll also mean that users get a better experience.
“So, if I were to advocate a single promotion tactic for driving traffic to blog posts, it’d have to be paid social. It may be relatively expensive, but the level of awareness and engagement it can bring is virtually unmatched.”
Whitney Meers
Whitney Meers is a strategist at Concrete Blonde Consulting. Since 2011, she’s developed and executed on strategic marketing and publicity plans for a number of startups and agency partners. Her efforts have improved clients’ lead generation efforts by up to 300% and have directly lead to revenue-boosting opportunities. She’s also a Top Writer in the Startup and Satire categories on Medium.
“One tip I give most people…
“Particularly those who have blogs dedicated to business-related subject matter, is to cross-post on Medium and LinkedIn. There’s been so much debate about whether you should be driving views away from your personal blog, but the truth is that it’s not likely that the same people who will read your work on LinkedIn or Medium are people who would have come to your blog otherwise. It’s even better if you can publish on Medium through a publication like Hackernoon or Thrive Global, but they have higher standards of content, and you typically must be invited to submit.
“Medium’s tools already have canonical linking built in, so you don’t have to worry about Google tagging it as duplicate content and penalizing either piece or your site as a whole. LinkedIn’s tools don’t have the canonical linking, but Google is smart enough to know that posting on both LinkedIn and a blog doesn’t indicate spam.
“Just make sure to add a note somewhere on your blog that says, ‘This piece originally appeared on…’ That way, people who want to learn more about you and your work can easily find the original source.”
Shreedhan Vaidya
Shree is an avid drummer and musician, spending most of his time online over at his blog Ghostnotes.
“I wrote a guide on how to setup a piece of equipment that proved quite popular…
“To promote it, I found forums and subreddits where people were asking specific questions about the topic. Then I simply registered accounts and provided and replied to their questions.
“I think an important thing to keep in mind is that you shouldn’t simply say, ‘I have a post about this you might like…’ It’s preferable to answer the question as much as possible on the forum itself, and then suggest your post as a detailed breakdown.
“I also use this strategy on Twitter. Where people might be asking questions or sharing their frustrations, I’ll aim to reply to their tweets with helpful answers as well as a link to the blog post. This way, when other people looking for the same solution on Twitter find that particular tweet, your blog link is already there, ready to get clicked.”
Nate Masterson
Nate Masterson is the Marketing Manager for Maple Holistics.
“There are two key factors to consider when building up blog traffic…
“Visitors to your blog can be generated via three different ways: social media, organic search, and website funneling.
“Social Media
“The most active websites on the internet in terms of blog content creation get most of their heavy lifting done on social media. Due to the nature of the incredibly quick content turnover – many websites produce dozens of pieces of content daily – there is no need to attempt to rank for particular keywords on Google. It is expected that legions of social media followers will see stories being shared, and thus click on them to read the blog content. This is the slowest and most tedious method to build up. Gaining real, organic social media followers for a new website is not easy.
“Organic Search
“SEO is something that even the smallest of websites can focus on and find success with in spurts. In order to drive traffic to your blog, you need to make sure your website is search engine optimized so that when consumers search for subjects relevant to your business, your website will rank highly in the search results. This means making sure your on-site SEO is on point (use headers and meta tags, produce quality and useful content, make sure your load speed is up to par) as well as performing outreach in order to have other websites build links to your website, thus feeding your website search engine authority.
“Website Funneling
“Make sure your blog is easily found and discover-able through your main website. If someone visits your website and a blog section isn’t immediately apparent in the header of your website, you’re doing it wrong.”
Cristian Rennella
Cristian Rennella is the CEO & CoFounder of oMelhorTrato.com.
“After 9 years of hard work to go from 0 to more than 21.5 million users, 45.7% coming from the content of our blog…
“I can assure you that the BEST strategy to drive more traffic has been to share the new articles in LinkedIn groups.
“For example, if we write an article, ‘How to Improve the Conversion of your Landing Pages with Explainer Videos in 2018,’ then we will share this link in LinkedIn groups related to marketing where we participate frequently.
“Thanks to this strategy, we have been able to increase our traffic by 24.1%. The people who participate in these LinkedIn groups are professionals from other companies that will share it internally with their team and perhaps share it on their Twitter (as has already happened to us many times in the past) where the effect is further enhanced because this person is usually followed by other professionals in the same sector.”
James Nuttall
James Nuttall is a Content and Outreach Specialist for The London School of Make-Up.
“Outreaching your blog articles to experts for quotes is a sure-fire way to get more eyes on your content…
“If you have created a blog article about a specific topic, get in touch with someone who could provide an insightful quote to your piece. If it is related to their business or knowledge, most people are only too happy to be quoted as an expert in their field, so are happy to oblige you with a quote.
“If they have a website, ask them to link the piece, and you can reciprocate by providing a link to their site in the article. Mutual social media promotion is another benefit of guest quotes – you can tag them, they can tag you – this leads to more exposure on social and, ultimately, more followers and link clicks.”
Merridew Smith
Merridew Smith is the Managing Editor at Vendasta, a white-label digital marketing solution provider for agencies. When she’s not juggling content and dreaming up new promotional strategies, Dew spends her time taste-testing local restaurants and binge-watching Netflix shows.
“In the first half of 2017, our pre-writing research process and post-publish promotion strategy was very hit-and-miss, and our traffic displayed that…
“Usually, most of the manual effort of the post was put into actually publishing the post rather than thinking SEO, shareability, collaboration, and value from the ideation through to the promotion of each piece. Our traffic suffered, and our blog relied on a couple unicorns from 2016.
“In later 2017, we adopted a new structured SEO strategy and introduced a blog post promotion checklist that helped guide our strategists in their writing, research, and post-promotion strategy for every blog piece. This checklist paired with a strategic SEO approach helped us start ranking most of our posts within a week of publication.
“That post-promotion checklist includes:
- Posting on branded social media
- Sharing/posting on personal social media
- Reaching out to people quoted in the post for a share
- Posting to relevant bookmarking and discussion sites such as Inbound.org, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Digg, etc.
- Answer relevant Quora questions and link back to the post
- Tweak the content and post articles natively on LinkedIn and Medium
“Those are just a few of the steps we take to ensure proper traffic growth of our pieces.
“We’ve seen an 86% increase in organic blog traffic since implementing this checklist and SEO strategy (which I talk about briefly in this ShareThis post). Many of our blog posts generate new organic traffic within the month that they were published, which made us reconsider our previous estimate that it takes content 3 months to start ranking.
“Here are a few tips to make your content go as far as possible:
- Do your keyword research first (obviously) to make sure it’s a valuable investment (look at traffic type and content type as well as volume)
- Make collaboration on the piece a priority to have other industries voices backing up your insights and introducing built-in share networks
- Have some kind of process for post-publication promotion with a list of the sites to be active on, social bookmarking sites to add to, relevant online communities to engage in conversation and provide the info, etc.
- Be consistent and watch/track your data!”
Gary Morris
Gary Morris is an inventive and strategically minded digital marketing expert and mentor. Gary has helped create a successful marketing agency, Grafted-In LLC, located in the heart of Flint, Michigan. Currently their team is managing content creation and link building for their clients that has collectively brought in a million plus users per year in 2017.
“Here are 4 ways to promote your blog for more traffic…
“1. Take a shortcut: find who already has your audience.
“I believe this is one of the most overlooked and underutilized methods for increasing your blog traffic. Find someone who already has captured your audience. By that, I don’t mean it has to be a competitor. Think more strategically. For instance, if your blog is about healthy recipes – you may find someone who is in the fitness niche that is already promoting your health niche. If your blog is about local birds, find someone promoting local parks and write a piece for their site on birds in the park. It’s your online strategic networking opportunity that will give you some quick wins.
“2. Sponsorships: a holistic approach.
“The world is full of sponsorship opportunities. This is like the first point except instead of an organic approach this is a directly paid approach. Find organizations you believe in and get involved in their sponsorship opportunities. You are looking for logo placements on their website, tables at events, social media mentions, and email blast inclusion. This really is a hidden gem.
“3. Be involved online.
“One mistake a lot of bloggers make is simply creating to dump information. They are not involved in the online communities. Comment on other people’s posts, blogs, and related issues to your blog. Simply add value without asking for anything in return. Obviously, have your link in the bio if folks want more information. But focus on being involved and adding value.
“4. Create content that is shareable.
“When you write the content, make sure it’s something that speaks to someone. Talking about world hunger is great, but your competitive landscape is so vast it will be hard to be heard. Focus. Focus. Focus. Ending hunger in Flint, Michigan or New Wales is at least focused. People can relate. Speak to someone, not everyone.”
Nedelina Payaneva
Nedelina Payaneva is a Marketing Specialist at Asian Absolute, a translation and interpreting company focusing on East Asian languages services and expanding to Middle Eastern and Indic languages.
“Share your blog across your social media profiles…
“You are probably already doing this, as it’s not rocket science. There are certain things you can do if readers are not coming directly to your site – go to them instead. Sharing your blog posts on as many social media sites as possible will help your efforts. Remember to share posts with a consistent frequency. Do not share them all at once for a week or two and then disappear for the following week. Make sure you maintain consistency in sharing your blog posts on social media sites.
“When sharing the post, say on Facebook, write a message in your own words about the post to motivate users to read it. Always remember to share a photo with the post, as most platforms automatically display a thumbnail image for the post. Facebook displays the post images and allows you to choose a different display photo than the one Facebook grabbed.
“You can also cross-post your blog updates from one social media platform to another. For example, you share a post on Facebook and the post has a nice graphic, maybe even with a quote. You can share a link to the location of that image on Pinterest (you should definitely have a Pinterest account if your blogs have lots of graphical elements). This will encourage your Facebook followers who also own a Pinterest account to easily pin the image.”
Dayne Shuda
Dayne Shuda is the Founder of Ghost Blog Writers.
“A big mindset shift with promoting blog content is to…
“Take a long-term view. Lots of focus on blogging is on the short-term, such as promoting it for a short time to get as many views in the first day, few days, or maybe the first month. It’s kind of the same approach studios take with movies and that publishers take with books.
“But some of the biggest movies and books of all time are perennial sellers. They may not have made the biggest splash, but people continued to buy for a long time.
“When you write a post, you want to focus on the long-term. Does it have a chance to be just as useful in five years as it does today? This approach changes the focus of your titles, which doesn’t seem like promotion, but it very much is.
“And then with actual promotion, the big key is to continue sharing old posts. Make it a regular habit to share all of your old posts. I actually have a spreadsheet of all the posts I’ve ever written, and each week I randomize the list and share about 100 and even focus on a handful to really promote that week by not only sharing the title and link, but also pulling out content and sharing it natively on social media or including it in an email newsletter.”
Ron Stefanski
Ron Stefanski is an internet marketing consultant, college marketing professor, and runs a portfolio of successful websites focused on helping people and building communities. He spent 8+ years in the corporate marketing space until he became self-employed in 2014. He teaches internet marketing and business courses at five different colleges. He owns a media company which consists of a portfolio of websites ranging from 100,000 visitors to a couple thousand visitors monthly, including JobsForTeensHQ.com, which is focused on helping teenagers find jobs.
“In the last few years, I’ve found a source of traffic that most people aren’t talking about…
“This source is Facebook groups, and more importantly, starting a Facebook group around your niche and sharing your blog posts in that group while asking questions to the community to
encourage discussion.
“I’ve never really been a fan of social media because it took up too much time and can’t be automated in a way that doesn’t seem too promotional. But, by creating a group in my own niche and encouraging discussions, I’m able to tie my own website visitors into a community, and I get the bonus of regular Facebook members finding the group.
“Because I share my blog posts and ask questions, people engage with a topic that they’re already interested in. I’ve also noticed that Facebook groups still have great reach on the Facebook platform.
“Due to this, my traffic growth from Facebook in the last two years is up just over 214% and continues to climb as I think of more creative ways to get my community involved.”
Katie Derrick
Katie Derrick is a Content Marketer for Anglo Liners.
“Feature your blog on your home page…
“You can even embed your blog into your home page so it’s widely accessible to customers/clients visiting your website. Often, blog content can be hard to find on a company’s website, or it’s in a place where customers wouldn’t expect to look, named ‘inspiration’ or hidden among other tabs in the top home page bar.
“Preview a short snippet of your blog content so that it stands out on your home page; you want whoever is visiting your website to feel engaged during their customer journey and enticed enough to go on your blog and read your content.
“What’s equally as important is optimizing content to maximize your visibility online. The more you optimize content, the more organic traffic you are going achieve from online users.”
Joel Widmer
Joel Widmer is the Founder and CEO of Fluxe Digital Marketing. He helps experts create content in an extremely efficient way so they can leverage it online to build authority and generate leads.
“Once you’ve published your post, use this checklist below to promote your content…
“You don’t have to use every strategy. Use the ones that fit your brand the most, and test new methods to continue to increase traffic to your blog posts.
- Schedule five to ten tweets about the article with different angles spread out over time.
- Schedule three to five Facebook posts about the article with different angles spread out over time.
- Submit your new page to any social websites where you would find your audience (Reddit, Stumbleupon, Pinterest, Google+, Slashdot, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.).
- Share your post in relevant Facebook and LinkedIn groups. Don’t forget to write a line about why it’s relevant for those people.
- Reach out to any person or company you mentioned in the post. Let them know you featured them and/or linked to them.
- Send a brief introduction to the post with a link to your email list.
- Post on any related forums where you would find your audience.
- Respond to any questions related to your post on Quora. Leave your link at the end as an opportunity for readers to learn more.
- Use Google ads to drive traffic from people searching specific terms around your post, and use Facebook ads to show your content to people with similar interests.
- Use BuzzSumo to find people who have shared similar content in the past. Send them an email asking for their opinion of your new piece.
- Use Ahrefs to find competing content. Look at their backlink profile and reach out to those websites for links.”
Greg Bullock
Greg Bullock is passionate about supporting people who have light sensitivity associated with chronic conditions such as migraine, post-concussion syndrome, and TBI. He is currently the Marketing Manager at TheraSpecs, which creates precision-tinted glasses for people with light sensitivity.
“Even with the onslaught of Facebook news feed changes…
“The social media network remains a juggernaut that can drive significant traffic to your website. Our process is to start by posting our new blog content organically and measure the initial results: number of clicks, session-level data, other engagement metrics, etc. If it out-performs our baseline, then we will promote it with a little bit of advertising budget – optimizing for website clicks of course – in order to give it even more legs. For some our best content, I have been able to get hundreds of website visits for mere pennies per click. And then I regularly resurface past articles to re-share on social media and further extend the life of our content long after it was initially published.”
Marina Pilipenko
Marina Pilipenko is the marketing manager at actiTIME, the software company, providing a time-tracking solution to companies all over the world. She is passionate about productivity and work-life balance and loves giving tips on how to achieve more.
“We are using multichannel strategy to promote the content of actiTIME Productivity Blog…
“Here’s our routine for new posts.
“First of all, our new content is shared through our social media accounts. It helps to get the new post indexed faster and to attract the first readers.
“Then we use a crowd-marketing strategy. We search for relevant discussions on the forums and relevant articles on other websites and leave a comment with the link to the post. It is important to provide a valuable opinion or a tip together with the link. It helps to build both reputation and the personal brand.
“After the article is indexed by Google, I post its full content on various placements. Some of them (like Medium or Dev.to) offer an option to place a canonical tag and link it back to the original. It helps to secure our post as an original one. The article syndication brings the post to a broader audience and helps to drive new users to the blog. Just make sure to place relevant links to your website in the post.
“And last but not least is influencer outreach. I contact the influencers who might be interested in this type of content and try to find some common ground and establish a partnership.”
Vicky Llerena
Vicky Llerena is the Founder of Social Vibes Media.
“Initially, I struggled in driving traffic into my site to build an organic audience…
“I didn’t want to ‘buy’ traffic or drive traffic from trashy websites – that’s not the audience I was trying to attract. And of course, it also defeats the whole purpose of raising an awareness stage for my prospects. So how does a small business build an organic audience?
“The first trick I use is LinkedIn article posting. What I started to do – and I noticed it worked based on the analytics – was post my entire article on LinkedIn. I would then share the article on my LinkedIn profile. In the article, I would include hyperlinks that link back to the original blog post OR would connect back to my business page, hence, the back links.
“The second method I apply are social posts. By creating social media posts that engage and connect with my audience, I organically drive traffic into my site. My social posts are neither a sales pitch nor do they promote discounts or promotion. Rather, they focus on sharing client stories, event pictures, and blog content – almost always accompanied by a video or pic (or in marketing terms: a multimedia asset). I attach a bit.ly link to my post – at the end of the text post, which I noticed does prompt people to click (I verified with Google Analytics).
“If article posting is not your thing, I also love to apply this little trick of mine: include a visually creative signature box and include a link that connects back to your homepage or an article. For example, you can include in your signature box, ‘LATEST POST: HOW TO INCREASE YOUR LEADS ON SOCIAL.’ You don’t ever have to sell yourself in an email pitch; the signature box will do that work for you. I also include a variation of bold letters and graphics – hyperlinked to my website – in my signature box, and I noticed this also prompts people to click to my site.
“These are three of my best-kept secrets for building an organic audience for your website.”
Meg Marrs
Meg Marrs is a veteran digital marketer and senior editor at K9 of Mine, a dog care website dedicated to helping owners better care for their furry four-legged companions!
“There are tons of ways you can promote your blog content in order to get more traffic…
“The first thing, of course, is to promote new articles on social media. While most folks know to share new content on Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest is another social site I always make sure to promote new content on.
“Pinterest content is actually more evergreen than most social posts – users may easily come across your pins days or weeks after your article goes live. Simply make an eye-catching cover image for your article using a tool like Canva, and then upload it as a pin and link back to the original content. If your pins look good, this can be a huge traffic driver!
Kim Kohatsu
Kim Kohatsu is the founder of Charles Ave Marketing, where she specializes in content marketing, branding, PPC, and video.
“I’ve used both paid and organic approaches to drive more traffic to blogs…
“On the paid side, I’ve run successful campaigns on AdWords, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, Outbrain, and Taboola. Organically, the obvious first step is to share your content on your own social media channels. To take it a step further, look for places where your posts will provide helpful additional information. These can include internal links on your own website, questions on Quora, or in relevant forums. Whatever the approach, audience targeting is critical – a spray and pray approach will never work. Choose outlets and avenues to promote your content where you can target people who are interested in what you have to say.”
Cécilien Dambon
Cécilien Dambon is the SEO & Growth Lead at Venngage Infographics. From Venngage’s website to their office garden, he is driven by anything he could optimize. He also runs growth experiments – sometimes on plants – but mostly to help businesses unlock their full potential.
“When it comes to content marketing, you want to follow a two-step process: create great content and then conduct outreach…
“The first thing to remember is that high-quality posts have a higher chance of driving traffic to your site than low-quality ones. Obvious, right? Yet, I see a lot of authors wasting their time with poor articles. The first rule is to make sure that your content is P.E.A.C (Practical value, Entertaining, Awe-Inspiring, and Credible).
“The next step consists in conducting outreach. You’re looking for two end results here: get social shares (that will also drive referral traffic) AND inbound links to your article. This is the perfect combination to get your content to rank to the top of search engine results page (SERPs) and get constant organic traffic to your article.
“What you need to focus on is finding influencers – and authors in general – who will engage with your content and, more importantly, will be keen to share it with their network.
“So do a little bit of research. Find prominent writers, bloggers, and marketers that overlap with your business and get familiar with their content. When you can, and so long as it’s relevant, link to each influencer’s website or article in your own posts. Remember to mention what you learned from each piece of content as you link to it.
“Next, gather a list of those influencers by using tools like BuzzSumo, and hire a virtual assistant to get their email addresses.
“The final step is to then deliver a warm and customized pitch to each influencer. For the influencers whose content you’ve linked to in the past, be sure to let them know. In the email, include links to the posts where you’ve mentioned them. This shows you genuinely see value in their work. Then include the article you’d like them to link back to in their content.
“When conducting outreach, the main thing is to show your contact how the content you present benefits their audience. Make your ask easy by pinning down an existing article they wrote, and indicate where in that post you think a mention of your article would be relevant. You can also ask if they would be willing to include a mention to your article in a future article.
“By increasing your chances to get your article mentioned, you will automatically get more referral and organic traffic to your article. And to make things even easier for your next post, don’t forget to nurture the relationships you’re building with those authors.”
Brett Helling
Brett Helling is the owner of Ridester.com, a complete resource to help Uber and Lyft drivers improve their skills, rating, and income.
“Over the last two years…
“My team and I have grown Ridester from a small blog, with only a few hundred visits per month, to an authority in the rideshare industry, hosting over 550,000 visitors each month. In my time growing the site, I’ve fine-tuned a few effective methods that help me drive content to every new piece of content I produce.
“1. Reach out to influencers in the space.
“One of the most effective ways to drive traffic and links to blog content is to reach out to influencers in your industry. Making influencers aware of your content often leads to a social share, or a backlink from a related article on their site.
“The key to successfully reaching influencers is to provide them with a benefit, which will make them much more likely to share or link to your content. This can be as simple as a quote, an interesting tidbit for their article, or a guest post for their blog. No matter what you’re offering, make it easy for the influencer to just copy and paste it into their blog or social media channels.
“Get people to share your content for you.
“One incredibly effective strategy to drive traffic to a blog post is by asking an influencer to share it. This is a method that is often overlooked, but it works more often than you might think.
“One way of doing this is incredibly easy.
“Facebook business pages have a feature built into them that publicly shows the response rate to messages. Since many page owners want to maintain a high number, they’ll promptly reply to most messages.
“Knowing this, a blog owner can simply submit a message to the page they are interested in and ask the owner/admin to share their link. Since page owners are looking for unique, relatable content for their audiences, it’s a win/win for both parties, and will work a lot of the time.
“The page owner saves the time it takes to find shareable and related content, their audience gets a valuable piece of content they’re already interested in, and you get free promotion.”
Jim Milan
Jim Milan is a Chicago SEO Consultant and his personal website ranks #1 in Google for the keyword search, Chicago SEO Consultant. He is also the Organic Search Manager for Auto Accessories Garage, a fast-growing online retailer of auto parts and accessories. He has been quoted in Huffington Post, CanIRank, and AmplifyBlog.
“I find that one of the most successful ways to promote my blog content is to…
“Mention influencers in my posts and then, once the piece is live, let them know they have been featured. For example, if you are writing a blog post on the best PR software tools, then it would be a good idea to collect opinions from industry experts who have used the tools and present these as quotes in your list. You can use HARO to collect expert opinions, organize these into a list post, and once the piece is live, you can send an email to the contributors to let them know they have been mentioned. This gives them an incentive to share the piece with their audience.
“Properly handling the follow-up email is crucial. You will want to make it effortless for them to share it, so be sure to include social media share links for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Asking them to link to the piece is another important thing to do because links will help the piece rank well in search engines.
“Here is a sample template of a follow up email to your post’s contributors:
“Hi [NAME],
“Thank you so much for contributing to my PR Tools post! The piece is now live and includes your informative tips along with a link. You can check it out here:
“[LINK TO THE POST]
“If you think it’s a valuable resource for your audience, could you help me spread the word?
“I’ve made it super easy for you to share. You can just click to tweet, click to share on Facebook and click to share on LinkedIn.
“If you would do all 3, that would be amazing! And a link to the post would be a much appreciated bonus.
“Thanks again for sharing your expertise!
“Best,
“[YOUR NAME]”
Christel Oerum
@TheRealFitBlog
Christel Oerum is the founder of DiabetesStrong.com, a website about health and exercise for people living with diabetes. In less than three years, she has grown Diabetes Strong to be one of the largest private diabetes websites in the world with almost half a million monthly visitors.
“Here is my process for driving blog traffic…
“1. Make sure your blog post is optimized for Google search. Search is the most reliable long-term traffic driver so time spent on keyword research and on-page optimization before you publish your blog post is time well spent.
“2. Create at least one very shareable image or infographic for your blog post. Posts with shareable images drive much more traffic than posts without.
“3. As soon as you publish your blog post, share it on social media using the images you created. Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn can be traffic drivers depending on your niche, but Facebook and Pinterest are the main traffic drivers for most blogs.
“4. Reach out to influencers in your niche and let them know about the blog post. If you are lucky, they will share it on social media or link to it from their blogs. DO send personal emails where you explain why the post is relevant to them. DON’T send crappy copy-paste emails. If you can’t explain why an influencer should care about your post, don’t send him or her an email about it.
“5. Share the blog post in a newsletter to your email list.
“6. Share the blog post in relevant forums and groups. Be very careful when doing this, as many forums won’t allow self-promotion. Always follow the rules.
“Depending on your business and blog topic, you can also consider paying for views. Boosting posts on Facebook is a very cost-effective way to get visitors and can be worth it if your blog post converts visitors into paying customers effectively.”
Mike Khorev
Mike Khorev is a Growth Lead at Nine Peaks Media, a digital marketing company that helps tech and SaaS businesses generate more leads and grow revenue online. They offer expert advice on marketing your company the right way through performance-based SEO, digital marketing, web design, social media, search engine marketing, and many other online practices
“In my opinion, there are two key components to drive more traffic using content marketing…
“1. Obviously, your content should bring value. It should be long enough (at least 1,000 words long, 1,500 for more technical niche/industry), in-depth, and relevant to your audience. This one is pretty obvious, but it’s the next one that is often forgotten by many.
“2. There should be enough demand for your content. The easiest indicator to look at is keywords that people are actually searching for. You can use tools like Google Trends, Google Keyword Planner Tool, SEMRush, or other similar tools to look for keywords related to your product/niche/industry that have enough search volume. Next, to promote your content, what I usually do is treat my content/blog post as a landing page and build backlinks to it. So, if I’m writing a guest post for other sites, I’ll add links to my blog posts. Arguably, the best and the most natural way to get backlinks is simply publish a high-quality, valuable content. After about 5 – 10 backlinks my post starts to rank on the first page and drive organic traffic without further promotions. While there are other (paid) options to promote your content, SEO is still the most effective way to drive qualified traffic for a long period of time.”
Varda Meyers Epstein
Varda Meyers Epstein is a content and communications writer for the SEO team of a nonprofit car donation program, Kars4Kids. Her major task is providing content for the Kars4Kids Smarter Parenting blog, where, as a mother of 12 and a writer, she is a parenting expert.
“I like to share content midweek (Wednesday) at 3 PM, which is supposed to be the best time to share on Facebook…
“I share to multiple social media networks and on as many groups as possible within those networks. I join groups that have a relationship to the content I share for just this purpose.
“I share my parenting pieces, for instance, to parenting groups, my brain science pieces to neuroscience groups, and social media pieces to social networking groups.
“When I share to many groups on one social media networking site, I vary the accompanying text so I give something new and of value to my readers with each share. I’m assuming that like me, people are subscribed to many of the same groups related to their special interests. I don’t want them to get spammed with the same sharing text over and over again with each of my shares. I feel that’s a turn-off and won’t drive views-rather the opposite!
“I’m utterly dependent on social sharing apps such as ShareThis. They make it so much easier to share!”
Bill Ferris
Bill Ferris is the owner of DecorInteriorsUS.com and has nearly thirty years of marketing and brand management experience. He has balanced a strategic mind with a creative eye to successfully work with a variety of companies from start-ups to Fortune 500 members.
“Effective promotion of blog content requires…
“1) Relevant content that answers topical questions or resolves current issues
“2) Awareness of on-page factors that trigger Google activity
“3) Relationship building with subject matter influencers
“4) Active engagement in online communities
“Hopefully, you’ve created content that is currently relevant to your industry by using tools like Google trends. AdWords, and Answer the Public are great resources to identify popular phrases and questions related to the subject of your article.
“Incorporate these high-volume keywords and FAQs in HTML header tags, lists, captions, alt tags, and filenames in your content – things that Google loves. This is key if you want to become a featured snippet – prime promotional real estate above everything in the SERPs. Not only do you get more space devoted to your listing, you also potentially get imagery, which is even more enticing to customers looking for answers. When you finally publish your article, this will help drive traffic to your site.
“It’s also important to figure out who your customers are listening to and where. Simple searches on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms help identify the most popular voices in your industry. Visit their websites to see if they have their own blogs and gather contact information. Before reaching out to them via email for an ask, be sure to follow their social profiles and interact on an on-going basis. As you develop your content, you might want to consult these industry experts for their opinion or to get a quote. Not only does Google value authority indicators, but these influencers are more likely to help out a ‘friend’ who has established a real interaction, than a stranger who is simply promoting their content by requesting a backlink or repost on their blog or social page. It’s also in their self-interest to promote content in which they have a backlink and are cited as an expert in their field.
“Every industry has their specialized portals and online resources which have many visitors. In the home furnishings industry in which we compete, Houzz.com is an important site that both residential and commercial customers utilize. Look through sites like this for forums and comment sections where people are talking about things that are relevant to your content. Engage the people in the conversation and mention your content when appropriate. This is not a time to necessarily post an active backlink, but simply an opportunity to post your article title and identify your business. Hopefully, people will search for both and click through to your web page to read your article.
“Of course, you’ll also create posts with links on your own social media pages that elevate awareness of your content. We periodically do promoted posts on all platforms, when we feel very strongly about some new content or it is seasonally relevant. Be sure not to forget about Google+. Even though it’s not as active as other social sites, it is quickly indexed by Google (of course) and ranks on SERPs. You can successfully utilize great content to drive traffic, but you need to have a comprehensive, long-term view on its promotion.”
