There are many ways to promote your blog on the Internet.
Let your connections know about your new blog
Everyone who comes in contact with you should know that you have a blog. Some good ways to ensure this include the following.
• Add your blog URL to your email signature so your email contacts can check it out. WiseStamp is a great app to try for anyone using Gmail or other browser-based email systems. It will even pull in your latest blog post into your signature.
• Add your blog URL to the social profiles you use the most including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, and so on. This way, whenever people find you on social media, they can discover your blog as well.
• Add your blog URL to forum profiles and signatures where you participate in discussions, preferably related to your new blog’s niche.
• Add your blog URL to author bios of any sites you are already contributing to, including other blogs that you own. Maybe you already have a blog about photography and you are starting a blog about marketing. Your author bio and about page should link up to your new marketing blog.
Network with others at every opportunity
Attend networking events? Be sure to have a quick elevator pitch about your blog when they ask you what you do. If you’re at a blogging conference in particular, it’s highly acceptable to let people know that you founded yourdomain.com, a blog that helps people learn more about your subject matter. Even if you have a day job that you need to promote, your elevator pitch would be that you are a [your job title], and you also run yourdomain.com, a blog that helps people learn more about your subject matter.
Submit your blog to search engines
We suggest to use a plugin called Yoast SEO. One of the features of this plugin allows you to create a custom sitemap for your blog. You can use this sitemap to submit your blog to search engines through Google Webmaster Tools (for Google) and Bing Webmaster Tools (for Bing and Yahoo).
Submit your blog to directories
While there are hundreds of directories that will list your blog for a specific yearly or permanent fee listing, only a handful should be considered in terms of quality. These include Best of the Web Blogs ($150 for submission), and EatonWeb Blog Directory ($35 for submission). Some of these directories offer free listings as well, but you will be waiting a very, very long time to see yours get added, assuming they add it at all.
Comment on other blogs
Commenting on other relevant blogs is a great way to build relationships with top bloggers within your niche. Research the web to find top blogs in your niche and start commenting on their newest posts. This will help you make them and their readers aware of your existence as well as developing your own authority within the niche.
Contribute to other blogs in your niche
Matt Cutts, Google’s head of webspam, has denounced guest blogging as a tactic for SEO. With that said, it’s still a great way to get exposure within your niche so long as you are submitting quality content to quality blogs. Find blogs that have lots of social shares and community engagement as judged by the number of comments per post and social followers. Get to know the blog owners and/or editors, establish a relationship with them, and then approach them to see if they are accepting new contributors on their website.
The key is to say new contributors as opposed to guest bloggers - “contributors” tells the blog owner/editor that you are committed to creating high quality content for them as opposed to just slapping something together to promote yourself.
Create a Feedburner account
Feedburner is a service owned by Google that allows you to track the number of subscribers to your RSS feed. Use it to offer your blog visitors a way to subscribe to your blog in their favorite RSS reader such as Feedly.
Optimize your blog for search
Regularly creating valuable content on your blog is one way to get search engines to index your content. If you want blog and your posts to rank for particular keywords, you will want to always strive to optimize both for search. This can be as simple as using the fields provided by Yoast SEO to add a keyword optimized SEO title and meta description to your blog’s homepage, main static pages, and each one of your posts.
To stay on Google’s good side, avoid overstuffing your blog with keywords. Choose one keyword phrase to optimize for on each page and post. Include it in your SEO title, meta description, and one image on the page.
Start building your mailing list
Don’t wait until you start getting a substantial amount of traffic to build a mailing list — start from the very beginning. If on your first day of launching your blog you get two people who love it, you want those two people to be able to give you their email address so you can keep them up to date with what is happening on your blog. Later, this list will be what you use to promote your monetization strategy.
Operating a mailing list is generally not expensive in the beginning. Services like MailChimp allow you to have up to 2,000 subscribers with up to 12,000 emails for free, while services like Aweber allow you to have up to 500 subscribers with unlimited emails for $19 per month.
Look at what your competitors are doing
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to promoting your blog. Just look at what your competitors are doing in terms of marketing strategy. You can use SEO backlink tools to show you the links your competitors are getting which will shed light into their strategies in regards to social networks, directories, guest posting opportunities, and other online marketing tactics. CognitiveSEO has a free Backlink Explorer you can use for this purpose.
Look at paid advertising options
If you have a budget, you can boost your initial traffic through paid advertising. Google AdWords allows you to pay to promote your blog on Google Search and their display networks. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and StumbleUpon have their own advertising platforms to help you drive traffic to your blog and blog posts. You can also look at advertising options on other blogs in your niche that receive a lot of traffic. This will generally be in the form of banner advertisements or sponsored reviews.
