Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
If you didn’t get here by reading the first part, this is part two of three in my miniseries called “how to grow your blog”. Click here for the first part and if you’ve already read it, just carry on reading. At this point you should have your blog completely setup and ready for action. Next is….
Setup Auto Promotion And Social Presence
At this point you could start blogging, but that would be silly. As if you just publish a blog post, how is anyone going to find it? They won’t unless you really promote. You absolutely need to manually promote your blog posts, but you can setup some auto promotional stuff. All while creating a real social presence in your market place. You need to get on Facebook and Twitter and you need to start building a real presence. First what you should do is setup a Facebook Page and Twitter account.
Once you setup your Facebook page, you should install the Facebook social widget in your sidebar so visitors can like your page straight from your blog. Once you’ve got your Twitter setup you should start following a few people and add another widget on your blog linking to your Twitter account. Next you should setup an update system so your Facebook and Twitter presence will automatically grow. In order to grow your social presence, you just need to share lots of great content on a regular basis. What you can do is plug an RSS feed into a tool so every time it gets updated it will feed your Twitter and Facebook.
What I do is find around 10 blogs in my niche that get regularly updated on a weekly basis. Then use RSS mix to combine them together so you have 1 feed that gets updated every day. For your Facebook page/s, you can use an app called RSS graffiti to automatically feed your Facebook page with content from the RSS feed (just search for RSS graffiti in Facebook – it’s very straightforward).
Then for your Twitter account you can use a tool called Hootsuite.com to auto feed your Twitter account with the content from the feed. Make sure when you combine the feeds into 1, you include your own blog’s feed as you want to automatically syndicate your blog’s content onto your Facebook page and Twitter account. Once you’ve got your Facebook and Twitter setup with the update system in place, your social presence will be taken care of. Next you can use a tool like Onlywire or Ping.fm to automatically bookmark/syndicate your blog content onto 30-50 social sites.
Start Blogging
At this point your blog should be up, your keywords should be set, your social presence should be sorted and your auto promotional stuff should be in place. The next step now is to start posting content. You have two options when it comes to the actual blogging. The first option is to spend 2-6 hours producing a killer piece of content once a week. The second option is to publish between 4 and 7 blog posts per week of around 500 words each. If you’d like to build an incredible blog, get a following and recognition you need to post nothing but AMAZING content.
The kind of content that takes several hours to create. Lots of images, videos, points and conclusions; the works. If you want to go the super high quality route then keep in mind it’s going to take a little longer to start seeing results. However if you’d just like to generate A LOT of traffic and aren’t so fussed about the quality of your content, try write a 500 word blog post every single day.
With the social presence and automated promotional stuff your content should receive a lot of traffic. You can blog about anything to do with your niche. As a rule of thumb; try to incorporate 1 keyword into every blog post you write. Find the keyword from the Google Keyword Tool and incorporate it into your blog post’s title, description and header tags.
Comments
James Anderson, December 1, 2011, 09:30
Great continuation from part one! I’ve already set up my social media accounts and started seeing some traction. Your advice on using RSS feeds for auto-promotion is brilliant. Thanks for sharing!
Linda Scott, December 1, 2011, 11:15
This post is a lifesaver! I was overwhelmed with the idea of promoting my blog manually. The tools you mentioned for auto-promotion will save me so much time. Can’t wait to implement them!
Tommy Nguyen, December 1, 2011, 13:00
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 →Setting up a social presence sounds like a lot of work, but your step-by-step breakdown makes it manageable. I appreciate the practical tips and resources. Looking forward to seeing results!
Sarah Brown, December 1, 2011, 14:45
David, your insights are incredibly helpful. I’ve struggled with maintaining a consistent social media presence. Using tools like Hootsuite and Onlywire should make it much easier. Thanks for the guidance!
Robert Lee, December 1, 2011, 16:30
I’m curious about the effectiveness of automated tools for social media growth. Have you had significant success with them, or do you find manual engagement more impactful? Would love to hear your thoughts!
Emily Johnson, December 1, 2011, 18:15
This post came at the perfect time. I was just about to start blogging without any promotional strategies in place. The auto-promotion tips are exactly what I needed. Thank you, David!
William Martinez, December 1, 2011, 20:00
Hi David, what’s your take on using Instagram for blog promotion? I’ve heard mixed reviews about its effectiveness for driving traffic to blogs. Any advice would be appreciated!
Angela Davis, December 1, 2011, 21:45
Thank you for another valuable post. I’ve always been hesitant to use automated tools, but your positive experiences are convincing me to give them a try. Keep up the great work!
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‘Combine into one feed, Graffiti to Facebook, Hootsuite to Twitter’ – translate that and it’s just ‘make new posts post themselves everywhere.’ Three tool names for one sentence.
Playing devil’s advocate against Gail here, because the plain-English version loses something real: the specificity of ‘RSS Mix into one feed, then Graffiti to Facebook, then Hootsuite to Twitter’ is a genuine sequence, not padding, and someone actually trying to build this today needs the tool names, not just the concept. Not my own view necessarily, that clarity always beats jargon – sometimes the jargon is just precision, and ‘set it up so it posts itself’ would leave a beginner with nothing to actually click.
Gail’s right that the language is clunkier than it needs to be, I’ll grant that fully. But I think what’s being missed underneath the jargon is something genuinely useful: promotion becoming a system running quietly in the background instead of a task you remember to do, or don’t, depending on how tired you are that day. That part holds up regardless of which three tools happen to do it. Build it once, let it run – that’s the actual point, whatever you call the pieces.
Look. Auto-feeding your blog into Facebook and Twitter isn’t a social presence. It’s a broadcast pretending to be one. Real presence involves someone replying to a comment, which none of these tools do for you. Fine as a distribution layer. Calling it presence is the part I’d push back on.
Marla’s right about the label. What ratio of auto-syndicated posts versus manually engaged ones would you actually need before it counts as presence rather than broadcast?
This is a thoughtful post, and I am grateful for the detail on the RSS and syndication tools. My question concerns the assumption underneath: the post takes for granted that Facebook and Twitter are where an audience naturally gathers. In my market, distribution businesses such as mine rely much more heavily on WhatsApp groups and Instagram than either platform mentioned here. I wonder whether the underlying principle, syndicate automatically to wherever your audience already exists, would translate more usefully than the specific tool names given.
Elif’s question about translating this to a different platform is exactly the kind of thing I’d spend three weeks ‘researching’ before writing a single post, if I’m honest. I have four projects that never launched because I was still optimising the promotion pipeline instead of publishing anything the pipeline could promote. Reading this post, the auto-syndication setup is dangerously well-suited to becoming yet another elaborate delay dressed up as preparation. Probably safest, for someone like me anyway, to publish first with no system at all and bolt the syndication on once there’s something worth syndicating.
The post presents the quality-versus-volume choice as purely strategic – which gets more traffic faster. Worth asking a different question too: which version of yourself does four to seven posts a week for volume’s sake actually build. There’s a version of consistency that’s discipline and a version that’s just noise dressed as effort. The post doesn’t distinguish between them, and I’d guess most people reading this already know, in their gut, which one they’d be doing.
Hollis’s question is one I actually had to sit with for years before I finally left. Six years building a team in Dubai, and the four-to-seven-posts-a-week, syndicate-everywhere model in this post was more or less exactly what we ran – volume, automation, constant visible activity, all of it dressed up as consistency and discipline. Some of it genuinely was discipline, I won’t pretend otherwise. But a good chunk of it, if I’m honest with myself now, was activity standing in for actual progress, because staying busy felt a lot safer than stopping to measure whether any single piece of it was working. I don’t think the post is wrong to offer this path. I do think it undersells how easily this exact setup lets you hide inside the busyness instead of confronting whether it’s producing anything.