How to Promote Your WordPress Blog: 4 Easy Methods
So you want to know how to promote your blog. Before we even go there, you need to make sure your blog is up the right way, otherwise your marketing efforts won’t get you very far.
To boast a blog that adds value to its reader, the content needs to have been written for your target audience – according to their needs, their desires, their pain, their questions. It needs to provide solutions, so the reader will have an “ah-ha” moment.
Once you’ve achieved that – whether by your own hand or a pro writer’s – go ahead and try these four way easy methods of getting more traffic.
1 Pay for clicks via search engines
The best way of sourcing traffic is by making sure you blog regularly, and that the content is optimized for search engines. But when you first start blogging, it can take a while to get onto the radar of search engines, and even longer to get close enough to the first search results page so that users actually see your website’s link.
Because of this, it may be worthwhile to pay to get traffic to your blog.
Bear in mind, that when using organic SEO techniques, together with Pay Per Click advertising, clicks to your site can increase by 25% and result in 27% more profit compared to if you just use PPC or organic SEO. (Source)
Besides, you’ll only get traffic by advertising as long as you’re spending money, but with organic SEO, search engines will do the advertising for you by increasing your search rank.
Image Credit: PPCHero
2 Pay for clicks from social media
Both Facebook and Twitter offer methods for paid advertising, and it’s very affordable. In fact, with Facebook, you can get away with advertising for under $20 a shot.
For this method to work, you need to select social media channels you know your target audience visit, and you need some know-how about ad sizes, design and the right words to use.
You may want to start off by playing around on Facebook, specifically because it’s such a cheap way of advertising. Start off by spending a small amount, and then tweak the ad as you learn what aspects can be improved for better effect.
3 Speak out on other blogs
The simplest method of promoting your blog is to leave a comment on other blogs where your target audience hang out.
What your aim should be, is to leave a comment that is so good, that it compels people to want to find out more about you, and click back to your website. But this is not the point of commenting on other blogs; this is just a side benefit.
The real benefit is that when you make a comment on a blog that is more popular than yours, search engines pick up the link to your website from the comment, and your blog post is added to the search engine index faster, giving you organic traffic faster.
In the comment example below, note the following:
- If someone clicks on the commenter’s name, it will take them to his website.
- The commenter has provided value in his comment.
- At the end, he has left a subtle clickable link back to his own content.
Example of a value add comment made by Adarsh Thampy on the SocialMediaExaminer blog
Make sure you only leave comments on blogs that are in your niche, otherwise you’ll confuse search engines who look for relevancy.
4 Add links to your blog from social media
You don’t have to pay for all advertising to your blog from social media. Simply add your latest blog posts to your social media channels – the ones your target audience frequent of course – and link back to your website.
To maximize attention, you’ll need an image, so be sure to include a “featured image” on your WordPress post, so that it shows up on the social media status for Facebook. For Twitter, you’d need to make sure the image is a different size than for Facebook. What helps tremendously is using a plugin like Social Warfare, so that you can control how your post is displayed on all the various social media channels.
Key points
When you’re looking for ways to promote your WordPress blog, first make sure your content provides “ah-ha” moments for your target audience.
Then try these really simple methods to get links back to your blog, so that more people see your posts:
- Advertise via search engines
- Advertise via social media platforms where your target audience go
- Leave comments on other, more popular blogs than your own, but which are in your niche
- Add links from social media sites back to your blog