Beat Your Own Drum – Simple Steps to Promote Your Blog

The Blogchatter Half-Marathon has ten commandments, of which the tenth and final one is:

Thou Shalt Promote Thyself

You’ve written awesome content.

You ponder over it, plan it, research it, write it down, hit Publish!

Now what?

When you start out with blogging, you wonder how do you get people to read your blog?

I remember long ago, two years actually, Kiran Manral hosted an Instagram Live for Blogchatter.com where she spoke about marketing your book. Here’s a tweet about that, but the video seems to have been taken down:

I’ll never forget what Kiran Manral said: “Market your book shamelessly. Market, market, market.”

It stuck with me that the same holds good for my blog. Here I was with a free blog on WordPress. (Actually, I started ten years ago on Blogspot, but that’s another story!) I’ve written that great blog post (!) and have no one to read it.

I just promoted it once on social media and that was it. I was too embarrassed to ask my family and friends to read my blog. My loss!

Let’s go through the actual steps necessary:

Pre-promotion Tasks

Ha! Yep, you need to do some stuff before you publish. Ignorant me did not know that.

Have a good web host. Nothing frustrates a reader than bad experiences due to bad hosting issues. Your web host needs to be reliable, versatile, secure, fast and fit your budget.

Make sure your site loads quickly. Nothing is more annoying than having to wait for a site to load. Do pages load quickly? Does it look great on desktop and mobile?

Make sure your site is search engine ready for indexing via a Robots.txt file.

Research keywords and SEO strategies for each topic you want to write about.

Once Your Blog is Written

By all means ask your family and friends to read, like and comment on your post. The high you get from this is itself a motivation to go further – a validation that you have written something the world should see!

Have external and internal links on your posts. Your internal links are pages in your own website that might interest your reader.

Check that all these links are working as they have a tendency to break when a site changes or are taken down.

Have share buttons on your blog post to make it easy for someone to share your fantastic work! How often I have come across a great post and eagerly looked around for a share button!

How Your Content Looks is Important

• A good headline helps you to hook a reader. Curiosity is your click-bait. They may see your post on a social media platform or a search engine results page and click on the link.
• The length of your content needs to be as long as you need to get your message across. No more no less.
• Its always nice to have images, videos, bullet points, diagrams, and simple paragraphs to explain. It makes it interesting for your reader.

Simple Steps to Promote Your Blog

E-mail marketing is a great way to promote your blog. Start an email list and build it up. Send limited emails about your blog post to them. BUT send too many mails and you can lose you subscribers!

Use Social Media Platforms. Tweet, post on Instagram and Facebook. Reddit has places you can post about your blog. Blogchatter and other blogging platforms allow you to submit your blog posts. Pinterest helps your blog to grow.

Repurpose your blog posts. Turn it into a podcast, video or infographic which can be posted elsewhere to get an even wider audience.

Build relationships with other people in the blogsphere. Give and take works really well here. Read, like and comment, share other people’s work to get reciprocation. Write guest posts for other bloggers and vice versa.

Paid marketing works too. Place ads on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.   

Conclusion

There are so many simple ways to promote your blog. I have very briefly touched on a some of them here. I could go on writing for pages, but the best way is for you to start with one or two ways that interest you and research more about them. Add more as you become comfortable. Do include analytics and social media monitoring to study how your blog could do better. What works for one post may not suit another. Finally, note down all of the things you have done and narrow it down to the ones that work for you. Use the process that works for you.

This is my tenth post for the Blogchatter Half Marathon 2021.

Hurray! I did it – ten posts in 15 days!

This blog post is part of the Blogchatter Half Marathon