Yesterday I posted the top 15 digital marketing blogs you must follow. I’ve been following these sites for ages now and have learnt so many valuable things its well worth visiting their site and subscribing to their RSS feed. Day 4 of the ProBlogger.net guide to improving your blog covers how you should go about promoting your content once you’ve spent the time writing it. I’ve attempted to promote the article in question a number of ways but thought it would be a good idea to list Darren’s suggestions and cover each point with my own views of what has and hasn’t worked in the past.
Asking other blogger
Creating a good network of contacts within your blogging niche is essential if you want to grow your sites audience. Getting people that run similar content based sites to link back to your articles is essential to building up your chances of being found in search engines. Contact others and let them know you have a story they might not have covered, they will of course write about it but ask them to link to you. To aid in the relationship make sure you link back to them and return the favor. The Internet is plenty big enough for multiple sites to share the same space.
Social messaging
Pretty much everyone you ask these days is a member of one social website or another. Messaging your friends/contacts with links back to your content in a hope of them spreading it is a well rehearsed procedure that many sites carry out to get their story passed around the web as quickly as possible. StumbleUpon.com is absolutely fantastic at this. Create a small network of 20 friends and ask them all to give your new article a thumbs up and you’ll be receiving pretty decent traffic for weeks. Make sure you like in anything you return the favour and help other people out. Developing these long terms relationships will help you when it comes to really moving your site/blog along.
Social bookmarking
Social bookmarking through sites such as digg.com, delicious.com etc all work very well but as a starting point I would suggest that you concentrate your time on building up relationships with people in your niche. Once you have a considerable base of users then you can really use social bookmarking to your advantage and attract serious numbers of new users. It’s estimated that getting your site on the front page of digg.com can bring in over 25 thousand users every hour.
Internal links
Most blogs and websites don’t do it properly but you must interlink between related content, if you don’t then you won’t be achieving the the kind of natural search ranking you are due. Content management systems like WordPress which I use on this website allow you to install third party applications like the related content module which I also have turned on. As you can see at the end of each post there are related content links based on category. This is a must not only on special content but all content!
Newsletters
Newsletters provide a quick and easy way of driving substantial traffic to a piece of content you have published. As with any type of data capture its going to take you a good amount of time to convert regular readers of your blog to weekly/daily newsletter subscribers. Its a highly valuable tool though as you can communicate directly with people on a personal level and direct them to certain pages.
Other blogs comment and forums sections
Posted related content links into other blogs and forums as a way of promoting your content has been around for ages. It’s still a valuable weapon in your arsonal though, hence the reason it makes this list. Try to find relevant forum posts and blogs as you are writing content to target for back links when you publish it. Many sites don’t pass on any search engine optimisation love when you post relevant links but people will click on the links and you may convert these users into regular readers or even subscribers. I’ve in the past commented on stories on several large sites and dropped in a related link, although the search engines won’t see this link I still get traffic on an almost daily basis so they are well worth investing time in.
Email signatures
Simple one really, make sure on each email you send that it includes a link to you blog or a recent post. I send over 100 emails at day, that’s a lot of people you can engage with.
Followup posts
Once you have posted one post on a subject make sure you follow it up a week later with a second post, this not only provides the perfect opportunity for you to get users accessing multiple pages but will get people returning for updates.
Advertise your post
I’ve used paid social media campaigns before to drive highly targeted traffic to selected posts. Some of these campaign have worked and some have failed miserably. If your going to spend money on driving traffic to your site just make sure you have some means of conversion, a click on a affiliate link or a newsletter sign-up will do so long as you have something to show for the money you have spent.
Mainstream media
You’ve got to be very well know for this kind of promotion. Once to get to the stage of being known by mainstream TV and press media then you can use your blog as a fantastic promotional tool. It hardly ever happens but if it does you’ll reap the rewards.
Article marketing
If your confident that your work can stand up on other websites then you can use your posts of more importantly variations to help your attract traffic. Many blogs accept guest posts as long as they are of substantial quality and length. Just make sure you make variations on your original copy of you could be hurt in terms of search engine duplicate penalties.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Your site was extremely interesting, especially since I was searching for thoughts on this subject last Thursday.
I’m Out! :)
Thanks, your site seems to be down though?