Stop waiting for your blog to go viral and make it happen with this blog post promotion strategy
With nearly three million blog posts created every day, you can’t just publish content and expect to get visitors.
Ok, so your mom will always read your blog. I mean you can’t expect to get the kind of visitors you need to make money blogging. Simply posting content is amateur blogging. Real professionals understand that blogging is a business.
Even Coca-Cola, the most recognizable brand on earth spends billions a year marketing and promoting its product.
I’m guessing you don’t have that kind of brand power or that kind of a following…and that you’re going to need to actively promote your blog to build traffic.
That’s why I’m going to share my complete process for promoting a blog post, the same process I used to launch one post to thousands of visitors less than a month after publishing.
Why Should You Promote Your Blog Posts?
First, look at your blog traffic on Google Analytics. Where’s most of your traffic coming from?
If you’re like most bloggers, you get at least a third of your traffic from search engines and Google search is as high as 70% for many bloggers.
That means growing traffic is about getting on Google’s radar and ranking posts. Do that and you’ll get consistent traffic every month for years after you hit publish.
That doesn’t happen without a little push. You can wait for your super-stellar content to start attracting links and social shares. You might start seeing some traffic eventually but how long can you wait for that to start happening?
You need an effective blog promotion strategy to jumpstart your Google rankings. A post promotion strategy will not only draw instant traffic but will create the initial search rankings to attract natural links and preserve your rank on Google.
That means building quickly to thousands in monthly traffic for every post and keeping that traffic coming as you add new posts to your blog.
How to Promote Your Blog Posts for Massive Traffic
Ranking a post on Google means setting it up to rank for as many keywords as possible and then building the signals that tell Google that the post is important and answers searcher’s questions.
I’m going to use a post I published on my investing blog, My Stock Market Basics, as a case study for my blog post promotion strategy.
I published the post mid-August 2016, just four months after starting the blog. I didn’t yet have much domain authority so it was going to take a hardcore promotion strategy to rank the post.
I was able to grow search traffic to the post to 429 visitors a week over the course of 15 weeks. That’s nearly 1,900 visitors a month to a single post and in less than four months after it was published.
For your post promotion to go well, it has to start with creating quality long-form content. I know, I hate it when bloggers say the key to blogging success is to “create quality content.”
No chit! I need to write things that are helpful and that people will want to read, really?
Not everything you publish needs to be Pulitzer-prize material but the content you plan on promoting, your hub content you really want to draw traffic, needs to be over 2,000 words and something special.
This piece on real estate investing was going to be a long post about my entire experience buying rental houses and how to do it right. It ended up being over 5,500 words and ranks for over hundreds of keywords according to Google Search Console.
Critical Post Promotion Steps Before You Hit Publish
That’s an important point. While you might target one keyword as the most important for a post, highlighting it in your on-page SEO, most of your traffic is going to come from other keywords for which the post ranks. In fact, Ahrefs studied three million searches and found that the top-ranked post also ranked for an average of 1,300 other keywords. Being able to rank for these keywords means doing some keyword research before writing the post.
Once you’re done writing this superb content that you just know is going viral as soon as you hit publish, it’s time to check your on-page SEO factors that will set the stage for Google love.
- An interesting title that gets attention without being too spammy
- A headline that includes your target keyword phrase and is marked as H-2
- Section headings to break up the reading, each marked with H-3 tags
- Relevant images to the content with alt-tags and descriptions
- Content that is engaging and explores the topic in-depth
You also want to go back through other posts on your blog to build internal links to the new post. You’ll need to do this right after publishing the new post or the links won’t work.
Do a Google search for ‘site:[yourwebsite.com] topic’ to find other posts on your blog that might relate to the new post. The posts that show up at the top of the search are also going to be the ones with the highest search ranking and will have the most SEO juice to pass on through a link.
Look through each post for a keyword related to your new post’s target keyword on which to link. This is going to create instant search authority for your new post and it takes all of about five minutes.
How to Boost a Blog Post After You Hit Publish
After publishing a post comes the real work. These are going to be the off-page SEO techniques that everyone avoids but that pay off in huge search rank-building. It can be an intense process but that #1 Google position doesn’t come easy.
- Social media sharing through pages and groups. Social media sharing isn’t the end-all solution many bloggers think it to be but can still help spread the word on your post. Make sure to create a feature image to share that fits each platform appropriately. Share in related Facebook groups when you can but don’t be spammy.
- Social media sponsored posts can also work for posts that have mass appeal. Try boosting a post for $10 on Facebook or test a few different ads to drive traffic. I’ve gotten cost-per-click down to less than $0.10 on Facebook ads, bringing hundreds of visitors to a post on a small budget.
- Guest post linking is one of the best ways to promote really important blog posts. Propose topics for guest posts related to the post you want to promote then refer back to the post with a link in the guest post’s content. Just a few of these on quality blogs can really boost your post.
- Outreach to target blogger list. If you’ve developed a relationship with bloggers on your outreach list, a critical part of SEO, then you should have at least a handful of willing partners when you want to promote a post. Reach out through general email outreach, roundup posts and even broken link-building.
- Blog commenting is of limited help since it doesn’t pass on any ranking power to your post but it is a natural part of the relationship-building process with your outreach list and will bring some traffic to your new post.
If you’ve ever heard that successful bloggers spend 20% of their time writing and 80% of their time promoting…this is where that 80% goes. Done correctly and this blog post promotion strategy should take at least a few days but it will move the needle immediately on traffic.
Promoting your blog posts with this strategy will build at least five to ten quality links to your post, enough to rank it on Google and start earning those natural links that will preserve your rank. I’ve done nothing with my real estate post for almost a year and still get thousands of visitors a month from Google.
You won’t need to promote all your blog posts with this entire process. You might use social media, blog commenting, and some outreach for all your posts but you’ll want to save some of the techniques only for very special posts for which you’re trying to rank difficult keywords.
Stop waiting for the internet to find your blog posts. Develop a blog post promotion strategy you can use to give your best work that initial boost to start ranking on Google. You’ll get the kind of links and attention that builds your traffic and your blog, making it easier to promote posts in the future.