Creative ways of promoting your blog

Every blogger wants one thing more than anything: more traffic

In order to increase your traffic and keep growing, you need to get creative and you need to leverage a lot of different platforms and channels. There is a lot of competition when it comes to content, so in order to stand out and reach your audience, you don’t just need quality, but also a strong promotional strategy.

In my latest Quick Win for Smart Insights, I show you how you can build such a strategy by listing all of the main methods of promoting a blog. You’ll get to learn:

• The top free ways of promoting your blog, such as social media strategies and how to maximise your traffic from social media, search engine optimisation tips, and other effective free tactics
• The top paid ways of promoting a blog, including PPC ads, social media ads, content syndication platforms, and more
• The best blogging communities to share your posts in and increase your social shares
• How to build your own blog promotion checklist to help you make sure you are leveraging every channel possible

But in this blog post, I’m going to share some creative ways of promoting your blog post, to help you mix up your promotional strategy and generate more traffic:

Mix up your social updates

It’s not enough to share your blog posts just one or twice on your social media – you’ll lose a lot of potential traffic, as social media updates generally disappear very quickly from your followers’ newsfeeds.

To maximise your reach and generate more traffic, share your blog posts multiple times; for example:

• Once every 1-2 days on Twitter
• Once a week on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+

But, to keep things interesting you can share a different update every time – which is also great for testing to see which types of updates generate the most link clicks – by changing things up:

• Use different text updates; for example, some of the ways you can mix things up is to use a quote from your blog post as the text update, an interesting fact, or a controversial statement (all taken from the blog post). Or, you can change the call to action; for example, “discover how to (…)”, “learn the best ways to (…)”, and so on.
• Promote the blog post using different media: use fun GIFs or create social media images – you can use tools like Canva, Crello, and Pablo by Buffer to help – to attach when sharing your blog post. For example, you can add text over your image, like before (a quote from your blog, a fact, a statement, etc.)

Answer questions on Quora

If you’re not sure how to use Quora, it’s a Q&A platform, where anyone can answer any question they want, and anyone can respond.

There are questions about any topic you can think of, from questions about personal lives to specific niche topics about any industry.

As you start building up your profile on Quora and responding to questions regularly, it will help you build up your blog and website traffic and your influence as a thought leader in your niche.

To get started, complete your profile; don’t forget to include a link to your blog and make sure to write a compelling bio, as it will be seen every time you answer something.

Then, start answering questions; use the search bar to find relevant questions and to find topics to subscribe to.

You can include relevant links in your answers, but try not to promote just yours – include other helpful resources and links, as the more value you offer, the better.

You should also try to respond to new questions regularly to build up your followers and your traffic: check Quora regularly to see if there are any new questions (so yours can be the first answer!) and try to respond to a new question every day, or every few days.

Repurpose your content

Your content doesn’t have to be used just once and discarded. In fact, there are all kinds of ways that you can repurpose your content to reach a wider audience and drive more traffic back to your blog.

First, check your blog analytics: what are your most popular blog posts? Which generated the most traffic and engagement?

These posts are the perfect ones to reuse as they’ve already demonstrated they drive results.

Here are some of the best ways to repurpose your content to maximise your results:

• Turn a top-performing how-to post into a Slideshare presentation; the ones on the front page get hundreds of thousands of views, so if you can create an awesome presentation with a compelling headline and that provides a lot of value to the reader, you have the potential to reach a whole new audience. Make sure to also add your logo and branding (use your brand colours) and to include a call to action to get people to visit your blog/website
• Turn a top performing blog into a social media video: videos tend to get more engagement and more clicks than other forms of content. You can use your blog posts as inspiration, and then use a video marketing tool like Wave or ly (or an animation tool, like Vyond) to create your video. You can then share it on your social profiles and link back to your blog
• Turn a fact-heavy blog post into an infographic: infographics are still popular and can help you generate more traffic – you just need interesting facts and statistics and a compelling design. To help you make your infographic, you can try tools like Canva or Visme; once done, share your infographic on social media and on your blog to promote it and drive more traffic.

Create round-up posts

One of the ways that you can effectively boost your social media shares and traffic, is to write a round-up post; for example, it can be about:

• The best bloggers in your niche
• The top curated content from your industry – the articles that provide the most value to the reader
• The top infographics/videos/blog posts/resources/etc. from your niche

These types of curated posts can actually provide a lot of value to the reader – especially a blog where you curate the best blog posts and resources in your niche – which is a big bonus. But the way you’re going to boost your shares is by reaching out to all of the bloggers and influencers you’ve mentioned in your post to let them know about it and, of course, so they can share it.

You can reach out via email or social media: just send them a short message letting them know about it and asking them to share it with their audience if they like the post.

Conclusion

Blog promotion is no easy feat. In order to drive traffic to your blog, you need to promote your blog on multiple channels and on a regular basis. That means not only using all of the classic channels of blog promotion – like SEO, social media, and email marketing – but you also need to get creative and try different methods.

If you want to learn more about all the different ways that you can promote your blog and generate more traffic, check out my Quick Win, where you’ll get to learn every top blog promotion method and other lesser-known ways that you can leverage.