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If you have a blog and want the rest of the world to know about it, then a road map on how to advertise your blog is probably exactly what you need. And not just any road map, but one that is thorough and descriptive so you know exactly what to do, right?! Here’s a simple strategy for you to pursue…
Actually, concentrating more on how to successfully promote your blog is a better strategy. Because when it comes to finding the best ways to promote your blogging efforts, efficiency is crucial.
You put in a lot of effort on your blog, so you want to make sure you’re getting the most bang for your buck, right?
However, deciding what to do and how to promote your blog can be a daunting task. I know because I’ve tried almost all of them.
I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on bookmarking, directory submissions, social networking, and comprehensive “Googling,” to name a few.
But I’ve found that there are a few tried-and-true, tried-and-true ways that can attract a lot of traffic to your blog. You still don’t have to pay to advertise your blog; everything is free!
With these 5 basic steps, you can learn how to promote your blog quickly and easily.
Don’t worry if they appear to be lengthy; they are actually very simple and will bring you far more readers than you could have envisioned –
Step 1 – The first step in figuring out how to advertise your blog is to figure out what your aims are for your promotion efforts.
Consider a company: they don’t just buy ad space or recruit salespeople without a well-defined strategy in place. They have a specific goal in mind, and all they do is geared toward achieving that goal.
The same can be said about your blog. Make a list of a few objectives you want to achieve with your promotion efforts: do you want to get 100, 500, or 1,000 visitors per day, or 500 new subscribers to your newsletter, or sell $x in your Amazon store? What is your motivation for promoting your blog? This is a pivotal step that must not be overlooked. Having a goal in mind will help you decide where to direct all of your blog’s guests.
You wouldn’t want to direct guests to your blog unless it was set up to receive them. Imagine attracting a large number of new readers and prospective clients to your blog, only to find that they leave within minutes of arriving (see this percentage for more information on how to use Google Analytics) or that they are directed to a page that is irrelevant to their expectations. All of your marketing plans have been thrown out the window! In any promotion strategy, setting goals and explicitly identifying what the customer can do next is vital. Why are you promoting your blog, specifically?
Step 2 –
It’s time to get things going now that you’ve set a concrete goal. I’ll use the well-known example of dog training to demonstrate this step. Imagine your dog training business being more specialized, such as lab dog training.
Your blog, Dog Training a Lab, is up and running, and you’ve been consistently sharing useful content for a few weeks. You’d like to promote your blog so that you can profit from your Amazon affiliate links. That is your ultimate goal: to use Amazon links in your blog posts to sell goods that you would recommend to your readers.
We can now move on to putting a strategy into action now that we’ve identified an objective.
And, as with any advertisement or promotion initiative, the key question is: how do I get in front of the people who are interested in what I have to offer? What are all of these guys doing? Where can you find people who want to talk about dog training?
They congregate on message boards –
Dog training is discussed in community forums by people who are interested in learning more about it.
I Googled dog training forums and found some blogs, then I Googled dog training a lab forums and found a couple of forums dedicated solely to labs!
Fantastic!
Go where the people are – community forums are full of people interested in dog training a lab. Participate if you can. Contribute, and people will come to your blog to buy your newest and best dog leash or whatever else you’re blogging about.
Step 3 – After that, it’s time to log on to Twitter and begin tweeting. Note that I said begin tweeting. Simply being on Twitter would not help your business; you must actually say something.
If tweeting is too much for you to handle at first, try tweeting someone else’s posts or reTweeting something someone else has said. Because your name is on the tweet, you gain momentum. You will get followers if you continue to use it. Take a great risk and send out a tweet about a new dog training video you recently saw. You’ll begin tweeting, which will drive traffic to your blog, which will result in sales in no time.
Step 4: Create a Facebook page for your company. Inform your friends about a dog toy sale or a new blog post you’ve just published. The goal is to be as visible as possible so that visitors can find you anywhere. We’ll go over how to make Facebook friends in another post, but for now, add a button on your blog encouraging people to find you on Facebook.
Put a social connect button with a Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, and Google+ button at the bottom of your blog posts so readers can simply click a button to share a great post with others – again, this makes it convenient for guests to share a great post with others and would attract more traffic to your blog. There is a plug-in for this in WordPress, and Blogger will have an alternative in their set-up as well.
Step 5 – Comments are what keep the world turning. You may have heard me say it before, but comments are truly priceless. Look for blogs that are related to your niche or a little outside of it. Let’s take the case of dog training a lab. I’d go to other dog training a lab blogs and read their posts before leaving a thoughtful remark. Then I’d step it up a notch and visit some general dog training blogs, where I’d read and comment on their posts. Do you see where this is going?
Take special care with the comments you receive; they do a lot more than just take up space on your post page. Visitors enjoy seeing and reading comments because they demonstrate interaction. Your relationship with the search engines improves as a result of your comments. They provide links that lead to your website and add links that lead away from it. Comments indicate that your blog is interactive and responsive, which is the distinction between a successful and unsuccessful blog.
Isn’t it five easy steps to promote your blog?
In fact, these steps are very simple to implement; set up these accounts in one evening and you’ll be surprised at how much of a difference it makes.
My new book, Profitable Blogging Made Easy, makes learning how to advertise your blog even easier. Get your copy here!
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