Recently started a new blog? Follow this guide to discover how to effectively promote it online.
Writing high-quality content is only a small part of creating and maintaining a successful blog. To further increase site traffic and attract more readers to your site, you’ll need to work on blog promotion. Luckily, there are plenty of strategies that are cost-effective and easy to implement. Read on to discover how to promote your blog effectively in ten different ways – start experimenting with any of these solutions and watch the traffic roll into your site. Before learning how to promote your blog, the first step you should take is optimizing your site for search engines. With good SEO, it will be much easier for a blog to rank high on search engine result pages (SERPs) and attract more traffic. Many factors impact a site’s SEO performance, including the website platform and hosting service you choose to create a blog. These two aspects determine the overall consistency of the site experience you offer to visitors. When choosing a platform to build a blog, consider starting with a content management system ( CMS). This tool makes it easy for non-technical users to create and manage a website. It also offers complete control over a site’s design, functionality, and SEO. One of the best CMSs to get started with is WordPress. It comes built-in with many SEO features, including meta descriptions, a customizable URL structure, and the ability to use page titles. Keep in mind that there are two different versions of WordPress – WordPress.com and WordPress.org. Although both platforms provide the same quality of SEO performance, the latter gives users more freedom to utilize plugins to further improve their SEO. Make sure to also pick a web hosting service that’s reliable, fast, and secure. Some of the top hosting providers to consider are: Hostinger – has excellent performance and comes with an SEO toolkit to evaluate technical SEO issues on a website. Their hosting prices start at $1.39/month. Bluehost – offers several SEO tools to increase site traffic. The cost of starting a WordPress blog with their shared hosting plans startsfrom $3.95/month. HostGator – provides great uptime and speed. The fee of creating a blog with this web host’s shared hosting solutions starting at $2.75/month. Aside from choosing the right platform and hosting service, there are other blog SEO practices to keep in mind in order to increase blog traffic: To manage and monitor your blog’s search engine rankings, make sure to use the best SEO tools for the job, such as SEMRush or Ahrefs. Additionally, take advantage of free Google SEO tools such as Google Analytics to see the in-depth breakdown of your blog traffic, helping you identify how well your SEO efforts are working. Knowing the important keywords to use on your blog posts can also improve the blog’s ranking on SERPs and generate valuable traffic. These terms can be discovered by doing keyword research. Keyword research helps bloggers to create content their visitors are searching for. This process also reveals how many people are searching for a specific keyword and how high the competition is. There are plenty of keyword research tools such as KWFinder and SpyFu that can be used to discover keywords, common questions, and topics for content. When doing keyword research, consider these aspects to decide the best keywords for your blog: Searcher’s intent – This refers to website users’ intention when searching Google for a specific term. To attract qualified traffic, be sure to choose keywords that match your target audience’s user intent. Search volume – A keyword’s search volume shows how competitive the term is. Try to target keywords with great search volume since they can increase a blog’s chance to generate significant organic traffic. Keep in mind, however, that it requires more effort to rank for terms with high search volume. Traffic potential – To identify the keyword’s traffic potential of a topic, use tools like Ahrefs and see how much traffic the current top-ranking pages get and what other keywords they rank for. This process can help you prioritize your keywords and find related terms that users are searching for. Keyword difficulty – Many SEO analytics tools provide this metric to show how difficult it is to rank for a specific keyword. The higher the score of the term, the more competitive it is. Once you have a list of terms to rank for, it’s time to use them for on-page SEO. Here are some key places on a blog to use these keywords: Page titles – A blog page title is the first element of a site page that people notice in the SERPs. Make sure to use a target keyword at the start of the page title to have both Google and your audience recognize the main subject of the page. Subheadings – The purpose of subheadings is to make content scannable. Using target keywords in subheadings can increase a content’s relevance for the readers. Content – It’s one of the most important search ranking factors. Thus, try to include keywords naturally throughout the content and avoid keyword stuffing. URLs – Using a clean URL with a keyword can improve a site’s architecture, make a blog easier to navigate, and help it rank higher in relevant search results. Meta descriptions – A meta description is a short explanation that shows up on SERPs under the page title. To boost a page’s click-through rate, try to create a compelling description using target keywords. Images – Always use alt text for pictures to help search engine crawlers understand your images. Additionally, alt text is vital to a blog’s accessibility since it allows visually impaired users better understand an on-page image. Remember to use Google Search Console to track your current keyword positioning and analyze which pages drive traffic to your blog. Email marketing can be one of the most effective ways of promoting your blog and converting visitors if done correctly. This blog promotion strategy helps you notify readers of new blog posts or share any good news with ease. Sending personalized messages to blog visitors can also help create meaningful relationships with them, keep the audience hooked with high-quality content, and boost engagement on a blog.
