6 Effective Ways to Promote Your Blog Posts

You’ve got great things to say, and you need to make sure your audience is listening! Whether you run a stand-alone blog or run a blog as part of your digital marketing strategy for your B2C or B2B business, getting great visibility for your posts is important, but challenging.

Blog posts are great for a variety of reasons. Blogging remains a top marketing tactic, and with good reason. From a technical standpoint, blogs are great for SEO. From a business standpoint, they help generate leads, engage your audience, and when done well, help boost conversions. In fact, nearly 60% of marketers say that blogging has gained them new customers.

While the quality of your content is incredibly important, today we are talking about what to do once you’ve created your blog content. Today is all about promotion! If you need help with content creation, we recommend this great guide.

Today we are sharing 6 effective ways to promote your blog posts. If you’ve checked in with your analytics and just aren’t getting the numbers you want with your content, keep reading to see what more you could be doing to promote your posts.

1. On Site via Related Posts

Let’s start on site. You’ve got a few options for promoting your blog posts here, and one is by sharing related posts. It is such a simple thing to do, but it can seriously pay off. By engaging your readers while they are at your blog, you’ve got a better chance that they will stay at your website longer.

Related posts are, as you have probably guessed, blog posts that are similar in subject matter to whatever the current blog post is that a reader is reading. These should be your own blog posts so that if a user is interested, they click and keep reading at your website.

This is great not just for keeping your readers at your blog, but for helping promote other blog posts of yours and showing that you have a lot of knowledge and information about a certain topic. Becoming an industry thought leader is a great way to keep your blog readership high, and one way to get there is by sharing related posts.

Sharing related posts is something you could do manually, but instead, we recommend using a plugin like Inline Related Posts that will do all the hard work for you- they made our list of top WordPress tools for blog engagement, and with good reason!

2. Online via Social Media

Social media would of course make our list of top strategies for blog promotion, but we want to get a bit more specific. Social media is a great way to share your blog content, but you need to be a bit more strategic these days if you want to see actual results.

There are two main ways that we recommend using social media for blog promotion- one is through the use of boosted posts, and the other is by encouraging your audience to share your content on social media.

Boosted Posts

Let’s first discuss boosted posts. Gone are the days of great organic results on social media. To really make the most of social media to promote your content, you’re going to have to pay to play. Go ahead and share the post on all of your social channels organically, but consider paying to boost them to get a ton more visibility (and hopefully- clicks).

You’ll want to make sure you’ve got a great headline, featured image, and CTA when sharing your blog on social media. After all, there are billions of people using social. You clearly aren’t the only person sharing your blog post. Make it stand out. You’ve also got to make sure your targeting is correct so that your post is landing in front of the right audience. Consider running an A/B test to see which audience converts better or installing the Facebook pixel so that you can retarget users who have visited your blog previously.

Social Sharing

For a more cost friendly option that can still provide some great results, encourage your readers to share your blog on social media. Encouraging them doesn’t mean asking them to at the bottom of your post- that likely won’t yield you great results. Instead, you’ll want to make it easy for them to do, so we recommend adding something like a click to tweet embed that is super convenient for your readers.

Content Marketing Institute is a top content marketing blog that always embeds several click to tweet buttons in their blogs. By pulling out your best quotes or statistics, you are giving your audience some great, bite sized content for them to quickly tweet out to their audience (along with a link back to your blog of course). It’s a great way to organically promote your blog without having to do a lot of work.

3. Indirectly via Other Bloggers

Reaching out to other bloggers is an excellent way to promote your content. Sure, this one takes more time, but it is definitely worth the effort. Not only will this help to promote your blog posts, it’ll help with your SEO as well (more on that in a minute).

Don’t quite believe it? Look at the chart above- influencer outreach scored the highest percentage when bloggers were asked what gave them “strong results.” You can easily handle this incorrectly if you aren’t careful, so be sure to keep that in mind.

You likely get tons of generic outreach requests in your email inbox. People ask for you to update your blog with a link of theirs in exchange for adding a link of yours. Sound familiar? Of course it does, and the tactic itself isn’t bad, but the execution is. By taking the time to personalize the request you are likely to get a lot more responses.

Most importantly, make sure whenever you reach out to a blogger or company that their blog is a good fit for your link. Quality matters just as much as quantity here. Not only will your link likely get no clicks if it isn’t a good fit, you could potentially damage your SEO score if your backlink profile is messy and doesn’t seem to fit what your website or blog is.

4. Organically via Search

Speaking of SEO, optimizing your website and especially your individual blog posts is a great way to slowly build up traffic to your blog. This is another tactic that takes time, but it is one that will absolutely pay off. After all, 51% of search traffic comes from organic search. The higher you can climb in the search rankings, the more traffic you will get.

While we do not know the exact ‘recipe’ that Google and other search engines use for ranking websites (otherwise known as the search algorithms), there is a lot that we do know. By making sure your site is properly optimized, you will slowly start to climb the results rankings.

We recommend using an SEO tool like Yoast to help you with your optimization. Additionally, Ahrefs put together an awesome SEO checklist that you should definitely follow for your posts.

Always keep in mind that the quality of your content should be your top priority. Making sure you’ve got your keyword in your H1 tag, meta description, and alt tags is certainly important, and will help you rank high, but if your content is not useful to your audience, it won’t really matter. Check in with your analytics- if you are increasing your traffic, but your bounce rate is really high, you’ve got a problem. Refer back to the beginning of this article and check out the guide on content creation.

5. Visually via Video

Repurposing your content is a great way to bring it new life and get it in front of a new audience. One great way to do that is by turning your blog content into a video format. People love watching videos and are expecting more video content from the brands they interact with online. Give the people what they want!

Over 70% of people prefer learning about a product or service via video compared to text. If you’ve already created the blog content, you can easily transform that content into a video format. The above video is a great example of this. Instead of coming up with an entirely new concept, the Backlinko team simply took existing content of theirs and transformed it into a video.

If you don’t have the time or skills to put together video content, consider hiring a freelancer who can, or relying on a service like Lumen5 that will help you create really engaging video with ease.

6. Directly via Web Push Notification 

You’ve always got the option to directly reach out to your readers and tell them about your latest blog post. Instead of sending a newsletter into a crowded email inbox, why not reach out via web push notification? These notifications are easy to opt into (one click!), deliver on mobile and desktop devices, and it doesn’t require the reader to give out any personal information to subscribe.

This is a great way to promote your blog posts. You can easily segment your audience so that the right content is going to the right group. You can segment your audience based on numerous factors, including their behavior at your website. The above notification would be great to send to any reader who has engaged with content marketing content, for example.

We recommend personalizing your web push notifications so that they feel more relevant and are more likely to draw people in. Include a great CTA in the form of an action button, and A/B test different elements like images or copy to see what performs best.

Check out these additional tips on creating excellent web push campaigns. In no time at all you can be up and running and sending web push campaigns that your readers will appreciate and use to connect with your blog posts.

Wrapping Up

When it comes to your blog, you’ve got lots of options. These are our picks for the most effective ways to promote your blog posts- and we hope you agree. From simple additions to your content like a related posts section or a click to tweet button, to bigger strategies like video marketing, web push notifications, and blogger outreach, there is a lot that you can do to promote your blogs. Don’t settle for low visibility!

What do you find to be the most challenging aspect of content marketing? Is it creating the content itself, promoting it, reaching out to other bloggers, or something else? Let us know!

If you are interested in promoting your blog posts via web push notification, you can get started for free with Aimtell. Looking for more information first? No problem- check out our Beginner’s Guide.

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