Getting Your Blog Noticed With These 4 Strategies
While blogging itself is a great exercise, your probably want other people read it as well. When you start a blog with the purpose of making money, attracting visitors is one of the key goals. Without people coming to your blog, your writing will remain solely for yourself and you will not be able to generate an income through it. After you have started your blog, and you have at least a few posts on it, the time is right to start getting the word out. This can be tricky for new bloggers, as they are not entirely sure how to begin. So to help you out, here are a few ways for getting your blog noticed, and to start drawing in a larger visitor count.
Social Media
Promoting your blog through social media is one of the better methods available today for two reasons. First, using social media is entirely free. While there are ways to boost your visibility by spending money on social media sites, this is not required. New bloggers can set up for no cost on pretty much every social media site, and begin promoting their blog.
The second reason social media is a good place to start is the potential reach. Millions of people access their social media accounts every day, making it a prime location to promote your writing. If you can build up a large enough following on your social media accounts, you will be able to share new blog posts with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people all with the click of a button.
The two most popular social media sites are Facebook and Twitter, so it is a good idea to get started with these. Depending on your niche, sites like Pinterest and YouTube may also be useful, but you can figure those out later. For now, set up a “Fan Page” on Facebook for your blog, and start inviting people to “Like” it. After that, create a new Twitter handle for your blog, and include links to both of these profiles on every page of your blog.
It is also important to remember that your social media accounts should be about more than just sending out links to new articles. Share information that your followers will find helpful, even it if doesn’t come from you, and interact with people on a personal level. If you give people a reason to follow your social media accounts, they will keep coming back and checking out your blog when you post something new. This guide provides some additional information about building a blog audience through social media if you’d like to check it out.
Search Engine Optimization
The second strategy to focus on is Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Most people get the information they need through search engines these days, so you want your website to appear as high as possible in search results related to your blog. The way to do this is through SEO, and while there are many facets to this strategy, there are a few simple ones that you can focus on when you’re first starting out.
First, you want to come up with your keyword list. This will be a list of keywords and phrases related to your blog – the idea to is find phrases that both represent your content, and that are likely to be searched for. Key phrases are typically only a couple of words long, so don’t get too specific. There is an art to finding good keywords, and you can learn more about it here.
Now that you have a keyword list, you want to include these words in your blog. Some important places to put them are in the title of your page, the alt-text for images, sub-headings, and any internal links. Create a new keyword for each blog post, and include it in the content a couple of times.
There is a lot to know about SEO, but by beginning with a few keywords in your content and on your website, you’ll be off to a good start. For a more complete guide to optimizing your blog for search engines, here is a helpful checklist.
Guest Blogging
This next method is fairly straightforward – instead of writing content for your own blog, you will write it for another. The goal of guest blogging is to find other blogs/websites in your niche, and see if they would like some free content. In exchange for the content, you include links that direct readers back to your own site. By doing so, you have now increased your visibility to a whole new audience. Guest blogging is a mutually beneficial relationship – you get to promote your website to new eyes, and the owner of the other website gets free content in exchange.
If you know of some popular websites in your niche, send them an email or see if there is a section on their website about guest blogging opportunities. There are also websites that help connect writers to guest blogging communities, which will give you a large list to choose from.
Remember that when you are writing content for another website, you want the quality to be as high as possible. This is essentially one large advertisement for you and your blog, so put some effort into it. High quality leads to more visitors, a better working relationship with that blog, and getting your blog noticed, while low quality leads to you being denied further guest blogging opportunities.
Comment Marketing
Lastly, we have Comment Marketing. With this strategy, you find articles related to what you write about, and leave a link to your website in the comment section. However, it is not as simple as copy and pasting a link to every blog article that you find. Most people – and you may be one of them – have protection on their comment sections that weed out spam. They may also have manual control over their comment sections, and will deny any comment that does not contribute to the conversation.
To make sure that your link goes through, you need to write a high quality comment. This means actually reading the article posted, finding a way to join in on the conversation, and not overly promoting your own content. For example, you could start off complimenting the author on their writing. Then, proceed to ask a follow up question, and conclude with something like
“I hope you don’t mind me posting this, but I wrote about a similar topic a while back and I thought your readers might be interested – here’s a link.”
Many bloggers will not mind you linking to your own content as long as you are not spamming their website, and engaging in the comment section.
For more on the proper way to conduct Comment Marketing, this guide is a great resource.
Getting Your Blog Noticed Takes Time
In the beginning, it is going to be hard to attract visitors to your blog. Unless you already have a large following on social media, or the money to spend on an ad campaign, you’ll essentially be starting off from zero, and need to work your way up. However, if you can apply the methods mentioned above, and continue to produce high quality content, it won’t be long before you start seeing the visitors trickle. Then, as long as you keep doing what you’re doing, and looking for new ways to reach a wider audience, the number of visitors should continue to grow.