Does your business have a blog that you wish it drove more traffic to your website? If so, you need to learn how to promote your blog effectively.
You could use hundreds of blog promotion tactics, but only a few will move the needle for you.
In this article, you will learn five blog promotion techniques that will help you get more website visitors and leads for your business.
Create 10x Content
High-quality content is the foundational stone of a strong blog promotion plan. People want to read useful content that speaks to them; shallow articles you got for $5 in Fiverr won’t do it anymore.
At the same time, competition is at its highest. There are over 5 billion blog posts published per day, while on YouTube, users upload 500 hours of video per minute.
When you create your content, not only it has to be useful, but it also has to stand out. Your content has to be better than the rest. That’s what 10x content is all about.
As defined by Rand Fishkin, “10x content is content that is 10 times better than the highest ranking result for a given keyword(s).”
To create content that’s ten times better than the rest, your content has to meet several criteria:
- It has to provide comprehensive and useful information to a problem.
- It has to be trustworthy and interesting.
- It has to be more detailed than its competition.
- It has to be unique (i.e., avoiding plagiarism and any other similar issue)
- It has to stir an emotional response in the reader.
- It has to deliver the content remarkably (e.g., have a unique design).
While every content piece you publish doesn’t have to meet all of these criteria at once, the more it does meet, the better.
Start by looking at your competition to see how they are answering their audience’s questions. Your goal isn’t to copy them and add small improvements that give your content a 10% increase in quality; it has to be radically better.
Aim to gain an in-depth look at your audience’s problems. Ask yourself, “what is it that my audience wants to know about this specific problem?”
For example, when I wrote a review on the best blog hosting providers for writers, I found:
- My competition was making their content generic (i.e., it wasn’t focused on any specific audience).
- My competition wasn’t analyzing the companies deeply enough.
- My competition wasn’t talking about the negative issues of the providers.
From these points, I realized:
- I wanted to make my review specifically for writers.
- I wanted to analyze each company using a specific set of quality parameters (e.g., speed, reliability, etc.).
- I wanted to be completely transparent and share both the good and the bad (as you can see in the image below).
When you create 10x content, think about your audience, check how your competition serves them, and create your content based on the gaps you see between what they should be doing and what they are doing.
The more unserved your audience is, the better your content will be.
Repurpose Your Content
Creating 10x content is hard work, but it doesn’t apply to written content only; the principles described previously apply to content types like:
- Video
- Ebook
- Email newsletter
- Infographic
After you have written and published your article, you can repurpose it into any of these content types. By repurposing your content, you can multiply your content’s ROI.
You can start by turning your content into video. The blog post you have created will serve as the video’s script. Don’t read every word as you wrote it because that will make you sound robotic. Instead, use each headline as the guiding point, add notes as you see fit, practice, and then record it as if you were talking to a friend or giving a speech.
With the finished video, embed it into the original blog post. Also, create a YouTube channel and add the video there. Slowly, your videos will start to gain traction, attracting more traffic to your business blog.
The same applies to podcasts; you can use the video audio or, alternatively, create an audio recording of your article without making a video. Then, embed the recording into your blog post, and add it to a platform like Soundcloud.
Use Targeted Email Outreach
Content creation is half the equation from content marketing. The other half is marketing, the act of promoting your content.
One of the best ways to promote content is through email outreach, the process of contacting people via email to distribute content. Specifically, email outreach aims to acquire links to rank your 10x content in Google and attract organic traffic from its massive user base.
A successful email outreach campaign requires a targeted approach. If you have ever received irrelevant, impersonal emails that ask for a link, you can imagine how ineffective a shotgun approach to email outreach can be.
Your email outreach must aim to contact the right people, provide value, and ask for what you want (i.e., a link).
To find the right people, analyze your competitors with an SEO tool like Ahrefs or Moz, and see who has linked them. The site owners and managers will be your targets.
Create a spreadsheet with the name of the people you will be pitching to, the reason why you will be pitching to them, and the content you want to promote.
If possible, add some personal notes for each person, like the content they recently published, company news, or industry news, and use it to make your email more friendly.
Use a tool like Hunter to find their email addresses, and an email outreach tool like Mailshake or GMass to create your email outreach campaigns. With these tools, you can even personalize your email outreach at scale.
Leverage Online Communities
Ideally, you want to promote your content to people who want to read your content and share it with others. Online communities are that ideal place.
To start, make a list of the sites where your audience hangs out. Even if your business belongs to a “boring” industry, research will show you that there’s an online community for it.
Two of the largest and most effective communities currently belong to Reddit and Facebook. There are “subreddits” (these are like forums) and Facebook groups for many obscure topics. Add your industry name to both sites and start searching. There are also niche-specific communities, which are also great. Some examples are:
- StackOverflow (for developers)
- Dribble (for designers)
- GrowthHackers (for marketers)
Make a list of all the sites you find, and analyze their engagement. These communities should be active, publishing content regularly. The more recent the content you see, and the more people comment, the better it will be for your promotion.
Join each community you have found. Get familiar with the way its members express themselves, the ins and outs, the memes and taboos, and the overall feeling of the place.
Read as many conversations as you can, and take notes. Participate in these conversations by adding your thoughts, answering people’s questions, and getting to know everybody.
Don’t promote your content right away; at first, it’s best to be conservative and become known as a useful member of the community. As you gain clout, you can start promoting your content, but always within a value-driven post.
Online communities don’t like self-promoters, so be careful. If you gain people’s respect, and if your content is genuinely ten times better than the rest, the community will appreciate it.
Leveraging online communities is more of an art than a science, so that it will take you a lot of practice. But if you keep doing it, your content will get more views quickly.
Use Paid Ads
The content promotion tactics I shared all focus on free organic traffic. There’s a much faster way to get traffic, and that’s by focusing on paid ads. Two of the most popular options to promote content are:
- Google Ads
- Facebook Ads
When you promote your content on these platforms, your content will show up when people search for specific keywords, in the case of Google (example below), or when they belong to a specific target audience, in the case of Facebook.
The best part is that you only pay for the clicks, impressions, or actions people take, making your investment highly efficient.
You can target your ads in both Google and Facebook by adding as much demographic and behavioral data about your target audience as possible, including:
- Location
- Age
- Device
- Professional title
- Past website behavior (i.e., the actions they took on your site)
While Google allows you to bid only for keywords, Facebook offers many more highly-relevant options for content promotion. These ad types are:
- Sponsored posts
- Link click ads
- Video ads
- Page posts
With Facebook, you can take your existing customers, email list, or website visitors and create a Custom Audience. This allows you to target specifically to them, so if you want to promote new content to people who already like your brand, you can do so easily.
You can also use Lookalike Audiences to target people like your clients, email subscribers, and fans.
Start Promoting Your Business Blog
Creating a business blog is easy, but taking steps to ensure its successful promotion isn’t. You need to take disciplined action to get the results you desire to reach.
With these five tactics, you will be able to promote your business blog and drive more traffic. It’s time to get started!
