Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
As a blogger, you have the responsibility of promoting your blog posts. Sure, you can have other people promote them via social sharing and all that good stuff, but at the end of the day you need to work your ass off to promote your posts. There are really two kinds of promotional work you need to do to ensure upfront and lasting traffic to your blog posts. Social and search engine promotion.
Social promotion is basically syndicating your content on social media sites and blogging communities. While search engine traffic is fantastic for building a list and making money… Hardly anyone who comes directly from the search engines will share your content, leave comments or return to your blog. That’s why you need to engage in activities like blog commenting and content syndication. So you attract visitors who’ll interact with your content.
Then the other side is link building, building backlinks to your posts so they rank in the search engines and bring in free search engine traffic for months/years to come. Remember – Social Traffic = Short term interactive traffic and Search Engine Traffic = Long term traffic that comes in for years (it ensures you make the most out of every blog post).
Keeping that stuff in mind: Here are 6 cool ways to promote your blog posts…
1. Share On Social Networks
As soon as you publish a new blog post, you need to share it with your closest friends and followers. It’s the fastest way to drive traffic to your blog posts and gain a little exposure. I generally use Ping.fm (no longer available, alternatives: Buffer – https://buffer.com, Hootsuite – https://hootsuite.com, SocialBee – https://socialbee.io) to share my new posts on 30+ social networks. Ping.fm is completely free, all you have to do is login, enter a quick message along with your post’s URL and hit ping. When you share your content on social networks, your friends and friends of theirs will see your post, visit it and are highly likely to share it with their other friends. It works virally so you slowly work your way through people’s networks of friends.
2. Blog Engage
Blog Engage (works, checked as of 2024) is a seriously powerful blogging community that’s been around for a while. For a onetime cost of around $30 you get a lifetime membership. It’s a place for you to syndicate your content, make friends and gain exposure. Every time you publish a new blog post, you should submit it into Blog Engage. Once submitted, it goes into the queue.
Everyone’s posts go into a queue until they get featured on the home page where other members can choose to vote up and or comment on your post. A lot of the biggest bloggers in the world use Blog Engage and it’s just a fantastic way to get traffic and exposure for your blog. You also gain a high Page Rank backlink from every submission.
3. Submit To TribePro
TribePro (discontinued, alternatives: Triberr – https://triberr.com, Viral Content Bee – https://viralcontentbee.com, CoPromote – https://copromote.com) is an amazing content syndication platform that I use very heavily. The concept is just incredible and it’s something you’re going to have to start using. Essentially you join tribes; there are hundreds if not thousands of them. The tribes are like content syndication sites where all the members share each other’s content.
You syndicate other member’s content on bookmarking/social media sites. In return they do the same whenever you submit your own content into the tribe. Or with the higher up packages you can automatically syndicate someone’s content every time they submit a piece into the tribe.
If they choose to auto syndicate you back you’ll automatically get a load of backlinks and exposure when you submit your content into the tribe. Over time you build up tons of auto syndicators so whenever you submit content into a tribe, it gets shared thousands of times on dozens of sites. Powerful strategy, a must-have tool!
4. Spin And Submit To Directories
Article Marketing is something I’ve done since the very beginning of my Internet Marketing career. I enjoy it; it’s simple, fun and highly effective. After you’re done with a post, you can spin it. You know that thing where you take each word/sentence/paragraph and turn it from this {to|right the way to|all the way to} {this|exactly this}.
Once spun load up your favorite article submission tool and submit your spun blog post to as many directories as possible linking back to your post in your author resource box. You can do it manually, but why bother when you can save hours of work using a tool like Article Marketing Robot. Once your submissions get approved you’ll gain hundreds of relevant backlinks. With recent Google algorithm changes, it’s a much better idea to write a new article for submission.
5. Submit to web2.0 sites
Same strategy as #4, but submitting to different websites. Take your spun article and submit unique variations of it to the top 10+ web2.0 sites. This will give you instant backlinks; web2.0’s don’t even get reviewed. They are basically sites where users can create their own pages and add content.
Sites like blogger, WordPress, Hubpages and Squidoo. Create accounts on them and post your spun content linking back to your posts. Here’s a more extensive list of web2.0’s. For maximum results, bookmark your web2.0’s, submit their RSS feeds and send them through ping.fm.
6. Biz Sugar
Biz Sugar (works, checked as of 2024) is another blogging community you can use to syndicate your content. It’s less effective than Blog Engage but it’s completely free. I don’t know that much about Biz Sugar, but I know several very successful bloggers who all syndicate their posts there. Exactly the same as Blog Engage, less popular but still worth the submission. It definitely drives traffic and you get a powerful backlink since the home page is PR6.
7. Press Release
Whenever I post a news related blog post or anything that’s related to what’s going on in the world… I write and submit a press release announcing my post to the world. That’s essentially what PR’s will do for you, they’re used for announcements. They also drive direct referral traffic, rank extremely well in the search engines and provide powerful backlinks. Here’s a list of the top free press release sites and their domain Page Rank on the right:
You were never meant to do this alone
Reading this changes nothing. Doing it with people who show up changes everything. That is the whole difference between the people who transform and the people who keep starting over.
Start free →| http://www.betanews.com (works, checked as of 2024) | 7 |
| http://www.directionsmag.com (works, checked as of 2024) | 7 |
| https://www.prleap.com (works, checked as of 2024) | 6 |
| http://www.nanotech-now.com (works, checked as of 2024) | 6 |
| http://www.prlog.org (works, checked as of 2024) | 6 |
| http://www.downloadjunction.com (works, checked as of 2024) | 6 |
| http://www.24-7pressrelease.com (works, checked as of 2024) | 6 |
| http://www.pr.com (works, checked as of 2024) | 6 |
| http://www.newswiretoday.com (works, checked as of 2024) | 6 |
| http://www.pr-inside.com (works, checked as of 2024) | 6 |
| http://www.free-press-release.com (works, checked as of 2024) |
8. Blog Interact
Blog Interact is yet another blogging community that you can use to syndicate your blog posts. It’s full of members and very similar to Blog Engage. Again, you’ll gain a high-quality backlink and a little traffic per submission. If you engage in the community and vote/like other blog posts, you’ll gain a lot more out of them. I’m talking repeat visitors and regular blog commenters.
That’s it, 8 cool ways to promote your blog posts, gain traffic, backlinks and lots of exposure!
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Let me know what you think in the comments below. Also put your name and email in the form below for more blogging tips, tricks, and Internet Marketing secrets.
Comments (carried over from the previous site)
Ojo Olusegun, October 18, 2011, 08:00:
David I must say this, these tips are Badass!!! THANKS
Shonda, October 18, 2011, 08:15:
I signed up for TribePro about a year ago but I do not use it. Perhaps I will take a deeper look at it now. As for Blog Engage and Blog Interact – I notice some high traffic sites use these tools. However, I am curious if anyone uses Blog Glue or You Say Too? I wonder how these two tools work if anyone has experience with them. Thanks.
Nancee G. Kemper, October 18, 2011, 08:30:
David – you are amazing! I’m going to try each and every one of these strategies!
Jacob, October 18, 2011, 08:45:
Thanks for giving back to the community David. I will have to try out these blog promoting tips. I’m trying Biz Sugar and TribePro right now.
John Doe, October 18, 2011, 09:00:
Excellent tips, David! I’ve started using some of them and seeing great results.
Jane Smith, October 18, 2011, 09:15:
This is exactly what I needed to read today. Thanks for sharing!
Michael Brown, October 18, 2011, 09:30:
Great insights, David. I’ll definitely be implementing these strategies.
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One correction before anything else: Google retired the public PageRank score years ago, so the PR6 and PR7 figures next to each press release site in this list are leftover numbers from a metric that hasn’t updated in a long time. The underlying workload — syndication, directories, press releases — is still real, whatever number used to sit next to it.
The correction’s useful, but there’s a second issue sitting underneath it that has nothing to do with the numbers. Most of this list assumes constant, visible participation in communities of other marketers as the baseline personality for a blogger — four separate communities across the eight methods, each one asking you to show up socially, comment on other people’s submissions, vote things up, and generally be seen being active rather than just posting and leaving. Some of us write specifically because we’d rather not do that part, and this piece doesn’t really have a method on it that skips it.
Worth asking too what you’re actually building if none of those communities really involve you as yourself, just content wearing your name past a submission form.
Fine, but the introvert angle undersells the math. Eight methods. A recurring fee for one, a dozen weekly submissions for another, plus press releases, plus staying active in two more communities. That’s not a promotion checklist. That’s a second job.
Tried the spin-and-submit approach for two months back when those PR numbers Priya’s talking about still meant something to people. Spun three articles a week, submitted to about a dozen directories each time. Week one, referral hits showed up in analytics within days. By week four I started tracking how many of those visitors came back for a second page, and it was close to none — the spun content read fine to a bot and badly enough to a person that nobody stuck around. Cut it after month two once the hours spent spinning stopped being worth what little repeat traffic it brought. Plain guest posting was still bringing in a trickle after two months. The spun stuff wasn’t.
I confess I had taken quiet reassurance from seeing ‘PR6’ beside some of these sites, Priya, as though it certified something. Useful to learn it certifies nothing at all.
Very good list, thank you for this. My question is about point three, the syndication tribes — the members described in these communities, are they mostly concentrated in the United States market? I am wondering if a tribe built around a market like mine in Turkey would function the same way, or if the whole approach only works well where a platform’s users are already clustered.