Want to know the various ways of free blog promotion?
You can write and post great content, attractive infographics and meaningful images on your website, but if no one finds your blog on the web or if your hard work does not reach the audience then it can demotivate.
There are close to 600 million blog sites on the web and every day it’s skyrocketing.
In such a crowded market how to keep your head out of the water.
Though the competition is very high, still if you can write good engaging content for the audience consistently and make out a blog promotion strategy, there is a very good chance that your blog website will start attracting people with time.
There are various ways to promote a blog for free, it can be a paid promotion or a free one.
In today’s post, I shall talk about the free blog promotion ideas, which will help beginners and as well as intermediate bloggers also to promote their blogs.
If you want to check how to start a website for a blog then just click here.
The below infographic shows the various effective ways of how to promote blog post freely.
Website optimization for free blog promotion:
Optimize your site well to give readers an enjoyable experience. Making sure that your site loads faster and performs well is Google’s one of the top priority web fundamentals.
If you keep your house messy and unclean, there is a great chance that most of your neighbours will turn away to visit your home. In contrast, if you keep your house clean and decorative, people would love to come.
The same is the case with your site. If you keep it clean and present your audience with an enjoyable reading experience, your readers will always come back.
So, when I say website optimization, I mean you should take care of the following parameters to keep your site optimized.
1. Hosting Plan for website:
The first step for website optimization is to select a quality host provider. All your website’s data are going to be hosted on their server and as you are going to stick with your host provider for a pretty long time, so it’s always a better idea to select a good host provider at the beginning itself.
You will get good customer support working 24/7, a fast optimized website, free SSL for security, an unlimited database and many more. Most of the hosting providers nowadays have most of these features.
A2 Hosting, Siteground, Bluehost, Wpx hosting etc. are some of the well known hosting providers in the market. I also recommend if you can afford to go for managed hosting for a higher speed and secured website.
2. Website theme selection:
This is one more important feature of a fast loading website. There are hundreds of free and paid themes. Basically, the theme which has better coding and scripts will be more efficient. This means a lightweight theme will give you the desired results of fast loading.
WordPress themes such as Generate press, Astra, Genesis, OceanWP, Divi are well known for their fast loading features. Most of these themes have both free and paid versions. You can start with a free theme initially and when your website traffic grows try to go for a paid version.
3. WordPress Caching Plugin:
Your WordPress website pages are dynamic. Every time a visitor visits a post, your pages are dynamically built. There are a number of steps that takes place in the background of your website which inevitably affects your sites loading time.
A WordPress caching plugin gets rid of this issue. The plugin duplicates the pages and shows them to the visitors rather than every time creating the original pages. It can increase your site’s speed by 2x to 5x.
You can go with W3 total cache or WP rocket as WordPress caching plugin.
4. Indexing web pages:
To bring traffic to your blog, the first thing you need to confirm is that your blog post or article is searchable or findable by Google or any other search engine. Until and unless search engines like Google don’t crawl your site pages via a .txt file your site is not going to be successful.
So, every time you publish a blog post, get it indexed in the Google search console to make your article searchable by your audience.
Email Marketing for free blog promotion:
Email marketing is one of the best ways to promote your blog post. For collecting email ids, you should have a subscribe my blog tab on your site and also a pop up when the reader tends to move away from your blog.
Offer your readers a lead magnet in exchange for their email ids. A lead magnet can be an informational brochure, e-book, informational graphic document, catchy images, formats, excel sheets anything in your niche which people will love to have.
This method is a proven way that immensely helps to build your brand along with an email list.https://thedigitalgenesis.com/profitable-blogging-niche/
Once you are ready with a good email list, start to be in constant contact with your readers at least weekly once through the mail. When you publish a new blog post or organize a webinar, your subscribers shall be the first ones to know about that through your mail.
You can promote a product using your email list. And the study shows that email campaign gives far better results in product promotion compared to any other campaign.
Your subscribers are a significant source of sharing your content and spreading your word.
A McKinsey report shows that email marketing can be effective as high as 40x compared to social media for new acquisitions.
On-page SEO for content optimization:
Try to optimize your content as much as possible. WordPress along with some additional plugins has a lot of On-page SEO options to make your content stand out.
I use a free plugin Yoast SEO in my blog. This plugin nicely helps me to optimize my content for On-page SEO.
Yoast SEO will prompt you by giving instructions to optimize your content and its readability too. The plugin indicates the following at the end of the WordPress editor page,
Focus Keyphrase, SEO title, Meta description
- Focus Keyphrase: This is the keyword or keyphrase for which you want your blog to rank in Google search. Place the focus keyword or keyphrase in the first part of your article, Title, sub-headings of the blog and additionally in some more places throughout the article.
- SEO Title: Insert your focus keyword or keyphrase in the title and keep on typing a catchy line till the orange line becomes green. You can use a free online blog headline generator to optimize your title more.
- Meta description: Use compelling metaphrases in the meta description box to attract your readers when your blog shows up in the google search. Keep on typing until the orange line becomes green.
- Add keywords in the heading(H1) and subheadings(H2/H3). Use internal and external links, place the focus keyword in the first part of your blog.
- Image optimization: If your site’s images are not properly optimized, it can hurt your site’s performance along with loading time. People love to read articles with catchy images. Always add a description to your images (Alt-text), so that when people look for the word in a search engine, your images can show up in the images section.
An informational image or an infographic can give a lot of information and are more likely remembered by people compared to a write-up consisting of the same information.
However with all these catchy images, comes the bulky sizes, which directly affects the speed and loading time of web pages.
Fortunately, there are a number of WordPress image optimization plugins that can make your life easy. The plugins such as Optimole, Imagify when activated on your site automatically checks every image and makes it lightweight.
Once you take care of the above points, your content becomes optimized for On-page SEO which directly helps in good user experiences, a very important criterion in blog promotion.
Keyword research for free blog promotion:
Learn a good bit of keyword research every week, it can significantly help to bring more and more organic traffic to your blog from search engines, forums, etc. within a span of few months.
Keyword research can be made simple with the use of tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, Ubersuggest etc.
Ahrefs has a 7 day trial charging 7$, after that, it charges 99$ monthly.
Semrush has 7 day free trial and after that it charges as per relevant plan.
Ubersuggest has a free keyword research tool and also a premium version of it. In the free version, you can check most of the features but for a limited part. To get full access, the tool charges 12$ monthly.
Google autosuggest is a very good way to know about relevant keywords for a specific topic. Search engine gives more preference to long-tail keywords which are generally used by the public.
You can find in the below image a list of relevant long-tail keywords shown by Google when you type the desired phrase.
Similarly, another way of getting long tail keywords freely from Google is findling a list of such words at the end of google search results page.
And finally, you can also find frequently asked questions by public while searching in Google. These questions act as attractive keywords for your blog post, check the below snapshot,
I have a Ubersuggest premium plan for my blog.
For finding keywords using Ubersuggest, proceed as per the below steps. Here let’s use the phrase ‘How to promote a blog‘.
- In the first step, search for the phrase How to promote a blog in Google?
- You will find a list of articles ranking for the above phrase on the 1st page of Google search results as shown in the below snapshot,
- Click on the first result and copy the URL.
- Sign in to Ubersuggest, and paste the URL in the Competitive Analysis search bar as shown below,
- In step 2, click Top Pages by Traffic tab. It will show the top blog posts that are bringing traffic to that site as shown below,
- Come on to the next step, scroll through the SEO TITLE URLs to find the post which we found in the google search results, after getting that, click the View All tab in the EST. VISITS column which will show you all the keywords for which the said post is ranking. Check below,
You will get the list of keywords, monthly search volume, CPC(cost per click) value and SEO difficulty ratio as shown in the above snapshot. All these can be exported to a CSV file and you can tally the results as per your requirements.
Try to choose long-tail keywords which have a good search volume monthly having a decent CPC value with a lower SEO difficulty ratio (it shows how competitive is the keyword), a keyword with a lower competition can be ranked more easily.
Keywords having a SEO difficulty ratio of less than 30 is good to use.
Similarly, check for all the other top 4 URLs in the google search results, extract a good number of keywords and try to use all the relevant words in your blog post.
So, in brief, the above points are good to go for keyword research.
Free blog promotion using Quality Content:
Content is king. Regardless of how much effort you put in promoting a blog or article if your post does not contain good and engaging content, then it has very little chance to show up in the search engine rankings.
Write detailed and meaningful posts to keep your readers engaged,
According to a publication made by Hubspot,
Blog posts that contain more than 3000 words get 3x more traffic, 4x more social shares and get 3.5x more backlinks. The research was conducted by Semrush in 2019.
And,
Listicle posts get 2x shares compared to any other blog formats. The research was conducted by Semrush in 2019.
The finding shows people loves quality content.
Include a hook in your blog posts. A hook may be a small tutorial, a well-defined list or statistics or an interesting infographic.
Hooks in a blog post bring the reader repeatedly and has the best chance of your blog post getting shared.
Quora Platform:
Quora was founded on 2009, it was made public in 2010, and in no time quora has become the top question and answer site. The site has become one of the top online destinations in the world.
The quality of traffic in quora is always high and people continue to visit the site for getting answers to various questions.
It is one of the top blog promotion platforms on the web, and not getting involved with quora means losing a big chunk of a quality audience.
So for getting involved, you need to create an account in quora, make a detailed profile. Indicate your interests, niche, a brief regarding you and above all a good clear profile picture.
Now as you are done with your profile, search for related topics to your blogging niche.
Once you get a related topic, look for the questions which people are looking for and are followed by at least 10 people. In the next step try to give a detailed answer (include statistics wherever possible).
Build your brand and authority by replying on topics that are familiar to you which in return shall have a positive effect on your blog traffic and promotion.
If any of the quora question is related to any of your blog post, then just write a small brief and link it to your blog post which will help in bringing quora traffic to your website.
Free blog advertising using Medium.com:
Medium.com is a publishing platform. It was created in 2012 by one of twitter’s co-founder Ev Williams. If your audience are mostly students and working professionals, then Medium can be your best friend in getting you new readers.
Medium has a base of more than 150 million visitors per month, and the quality of the traffic is much better.
You can republish and share your evergreen blog posts in Medium. The quality of the content has to be high to get a good number of readers. Register with Medium.com and make a good looking profile.
There are options to link your blog website with that of Medium if you are using WordPress as your CMS. Once you write and publish a post on your blog, it will simultaneously get republished in Medium also.
One question that may come to your mind is that, whether Google will penalise you for republishing the same post in a different platform.
The answer is NO!!
Yes Its a NO!
The reply to this question is given by Medium.com themselves in their Helpcenter section.
The traffic in Medium loves stories rather than purely technical, create your contents as stories and publish your best performing posts on Medium. It will take time initially. But if your stories are engaging, the traffic from Medium has the ability to crash your website.
Free blog promotion using Social Media:
Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Reddit etc. has a huge audience. About 2 billion people engage with Facebook monthly.
Identify your target audience and once this part is done, identify the social networks that deal with your target audience.
The above 5 social platforms brings the most number of traffic to a blog generally and way for free blog promotion.
If your niche deals with professionals or businesses then Linkedin may be a better option for you. Or else if your target audience is visual, then Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram may bring you good traffic.
Once after sharing your posts in the respective social media, analyse the results and try to find which media audience are getting more involved and target those.
Join a few active groups in your niche. Try to write answers to the queries posted by people in the group. In this way, you can build your authority. Helping people by solving their queries is one of the best way to build your reputation and brand promotion.
Follow and connect with people who are big names in your niche. Learn from them and implement those points in free blog promotion.
Include social sharing buttons below each blog post, so that whenever a reader finds your post helpful, he or she can share it in their feed using the social buttons with ease.
Guest Posting:
Greggory Ciotti went on to get a staggering 36000 new blog subscribers just by using guest posting.
So, guest blogging still one of the best way to increase your website traffic and promote your brand. Guest posting is fundamentally a content marketing strategy to promote blog for free by publishing posts or articles on a third-party platform.
This is a win-win situation for both the parties involved in guest blogging.
Guest blogging helps in:
- An increasing number of backlinks, which is necessary from an SEO point of view.
- Introduces your blog or website to a whole new audience.
- Increases your site domain authority.
- Building relationships with top bloggers in your niche.
- Increases your social media following by the increased number of shares.
- Improving your writing skills.
- Increases your brand authority.
Guest blogging is in and around for a long time, and it is still one of the best ways for all the above benefits to promote a blog for free.
Conclusion:
In this post, I have listed down 9 absolutely free ways of how do you promote a blog. The post will be helpful to beginners, but it’s also as good as for an intermediate.
You don’t have to start promoting your blog using all the above methods at a time. Initially just stick to one idea and go for it. Slowly, add up 2 or 3 more ways and stick to it.
Have Patience!!
Blog promotion is a time taking process, it may take months before showing you the results of your hard work.
Once you start to see your hard earned results, don’t stop!!
Analyze the outcomes, keep a track of them, rinse and repeat!
So, how do you promote your blog? If you are using any other method, I would love to hear that in the comment box. And if you like the post, don’t forget to share it in your feed.
That’s all!!
Stay safe
Tanay?
