Blog Promotion: my tips to promote a blog

I have already shown how to use blog to promote e-shop with books. But the reality is cruel.

We have to promote a blog too.

The good news is there are many ways to promote your blog for free.

Fortunately blog promotion is not too difficult. I will show you how to promote a blog for free. You just need some creativity and time. Here we go with blog promotion tips:

(all images are public domain and royalty free)

I will present only few ways for promoting your blog. This is far from the ultimate list, but I tried them all and you have a chance to learn from my mistakes. Like Bobby Fisher said: We learn from mistakes, but it is always better to learn from other's mistakes.

You have a site and you have a blog to promote this site. But blog without traffic is useless...

Yes, content is king! It is obvious, you need great content to make an impression on readers - humans and search engines' bots. You should always aim for original content because you want to offer your readers something nobody else has.

English is not my native language, so my posts in English are not grammatically and stylistically 100 percent. I try to compensate my weak points with original views and passionate approach. I believe this is important part of great content too.

And because we are talking about blogs - you need fresh content. You have to add something new from time to time, ideally every few days, but in reality even once a month will do. You don't have to only add fresh content, you have to check old posts too. Check what links are not working anymore, add new info, if it is available, replace old photos ...

My tip - take a minute before making a post and check what are exact keywords people are looking for. For instance, if you are writing about content, you can see:

1.600 people search for 'great content',

590 for 'original content'

and 91 for 'best content'.

Don't worry about competition at this stage, use the string with highest number for the title of you post. After a while try to figure out what keywords are working for you (driving you traffic) and only than fine tune your post, if necessary.

Using beautiful pictures seems obvious too. When we promote art related blogs, this is even more important. Promoting a blog without beautiful images is like promoting a book without a cover. Yes, content is king, but we all like to see a great image.

And yet I see so many blogs with great content which hardly ever publish an image. Yes, finding beautiful pictures can be time consuming and checking the copyright status can be tricky too. But it pays in the long term.

I noticed about one half of my traffic to my blogs comes through pictures. This is true for posts with one hundred and fifty words and one image and this is true for posts with thousand words and one image.

But if I add more images, the traffic coming through pictures is increasing and it can bring me more than 80 percents of traffic.

With a rise of Pinterest the trend is clearly going up.

Let's face it. Web is very competitive place and you will find jealousy wherever you go. But you should be better than average blogger. If you write a blog about public domain pictures, you should link to resources of public domain pictures.

This will help to build your authority in the eyes of the search engines (you are building relevant links and search engines love links) and in the eyes of your visitors (you are giving them great resources - when they recognize you as authority, they will check your blog and will not waste their time with searching through the wild world of web).

Blog promotion is in many ways like dating. You will not find a perfect partner just sitting at home. When you post few posts, you have to look around, check other blogs and press like button if you find something you like.

Maybe you will even make a comment (be positive and polite and never publish any links on other people's posts!). I have read about a rule of 100 for successful blogging. Some bloggers try to make one hundred contacts (through e-mail, comments, likes and so on every day).

It is too much work for me, but if I was writing only one blog and I wanted to make a living from this blog, I would certainly consider applying this rule in my daily routine.

Blog promotion is very hard with your first blog, but after a while it gets easier. I needed six months to see any results on my first two blogs. My third blog needed three months to get traffic because I linked it from my older ones.

When I started to build links to my blogs from lenses, the traffic improved even further.

And when I open a new blog, I know it will bring me traffic from the first day. Now I know how to write posts and now I know how to promote a blog. In my case some things are tricky because I run logs in different niches and I write them in different languages, but basic rules of promoting a blog are always the same.

So use what you got to promote you blog: Facebook, Twitter, your Squidoo lenses, your other blogs, mini sites, links from you friend's blogs ....

This is probably the most important part of blog promotion. Many blog services have built-in statistics and most of them let you use Google Analytics. What has statistics with promoting a blog?

Well, it shows you what brings you traffic. You can for instance aim at very popular search string, like Little Red Riding Hood. Frankly, a mere mortal can only dream to get traffic for this string.

Little Red Riding Hood is too competitive and many powerful companies pay good money to be on the first page of results of search engines. But for some reason you can maybe notice the less popular string Little Red Riding Hood summary gives you traffic.

So when you see Little Red Riding Hood is somehow associated with Little Red Riding Hood summary, check the position of your post for this string. You are probably on first page of results already, but maybe you can improve your position from number five to number two?

And maybe you can get some traffic from related keyword string: summary of Red Riding Hood?

Blogging is like any other business. You can hardly expect the results overnight. Even if you are skilled blogger and you know how to promote a blog, you will have to adapt to constant changes of search engines algorithms, you will have to add fresh content, you will have to build relations on the web and to make it short - you will have to be patient and persist.

Just like in any other business.

There are four blogs and I occasionally cooperate with all of them. Two are in English and two in Slovene language