How to Promote Your Blog: 7 Proven Strategies

How to Promote Your Blog: 7 Proven Strategies

How to Promote Your Blog: 7 Proven Strategies

Search for “the way to sell your weblog,” and also you’ll see hundreds of techniques.
But no longer all of them paintings. Believe us—we’ve attempted them.

These are the seven that have worked for us.

1. Build percentage triggers into your content material
   People are much more likely to share content with unique insights. Data, reviews, critiques—whatever they are able to’t locate someplace else.

Here’s an example that illustrates this. In 2015, our chief advertising officer, Tim Soulo, wrote a manual to strategic writing on his non-public blog. He crammed everything he knew and concept he created a masterpiece.

Yet, while he asked advertising influencer Rand Fishkin to tweet the submit, this become how Rand spoke back:

Email from Rand Fishkin, a marketing influencer
A few years later, Rand retweeted our publish on podcast advertising without any prompting:

What turned into the difference?

In Tim’s submit, he rehashed the equal advice from other articles on the topic. No doubt it became useful, however nothing turned into specific. In the latter article by way of our Rebekah Bek, the whole thing become completely based on experience.

I’m not going to certainly just inform you to create “particular content.” You ought to have heard it one hundred times by using now. So in preference to repeating the same vintage advice, I propose building share triggers alternatively.

Coined with the aid of professor Jonah Berger in his book, “Contagious,” proportion triggers are mental ideas that make people need to proportion some thing. They are:

Social foreign money – People share things that make them appearance correct to others.
Triggers – People share matters that are top of mind.
Emotion – People want to feel some thing to percentage something.
Public – People have a tendency to imitate others’ behavior if they could see or study it.
Practical value – People like to bypass alongside sensible, beneficial data.
Stories – People don’t just share records—they percentage memories too.
Here’s the way to put them into motion (you’ll need to include at least one or ):

Make your content material realistic – Create something the reader can use proper away. For instance, our suite of loose tools generates a lot of links and stocks.
Make your content material opinionated – Give the reader some thing new to consider. Tim’s rant on e-mail outreach and our publish on podcast marketing are a few examples of opinionated content material.
Evoke emotion – People used to percentage Upworthy articles because the ones made them experience awe, marvel, and happiness. Appealing to those feelings—alongside bad ones like anger and unhappiness—can compel humans to percentage greater.
Make your content visible – Visual content material makes ingesting content material less complicated, as a result increasing the chance that a person will proportion it.
Make your content material newsworthy – Journalists and bloggers are continuously searching for tales to cover. Data is one sort of story. So when you have precise information to proportion, create a chunk of content material around it.
Tell a story – Humans love telling and sharing testimonies. A precise story that captures people’s interest can result in greater stocks.
Include what different human beings are sharing – If human beings are sharing and linking due to positive reasons in competing pages, we are able to count on that the ones motives are crucial to that topic.
For the very last tip, here’s how you can discover why people are linking:

Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
Search for a subject you’re writing approximately
Look at the SERP evaluate
Find a comparable article with plenty of referring domains
Click on the number within the Backlinks column
Skim the Anchor and target URL column for commonalities
For instance, if we examine this publish on the appropriate kettlebell swing, we see that human beings are linking because of the advantages:

The not unusual anchors when other web sites are linking to this put up on kettlebell swings, via Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
It’s something we will remember including to our content material.

Learn extra: What Is Link Bait? 7 Successful Examples

2. Write approximately “clean to rank” topics
   You need traffic from Google. But in case you’re new to the sport, many topics are from your attain—at least for now. They’re too aggressive, and also you’re outgunned by web sites with more assets.

But what if I inform you that you may locate subjects which might be clean to rank for? Here’s how:

Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
Search for a applicable time period (e.G., “beards”)
Add a Referring domains filter to max. 10
Add a Page site visitors clear out to min. 500
Add a Domain Rating filter out to max. 30
Since oneway links are an vital ranking thing, pages that also get tons of seek site visitors without masses of back links should be exceptionally smooth to rank for.

Pages that get search traffic without many backlinks, through Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
In this case, you’ll see >2,000 pages that get >500 seek traffic a month with fewer than 10 referring domain names.

Click on any article after which at the Organic keywords tab to look what key phrases they’re ranking for.

The key phrases the web page is ranking for, through Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
If you’re strolling a blog about beards, you could goal the equal subjects too.

Learn more: How to Find Low-Competition Keywords for SEO

three. Run an outreach marketing campaign
If you’ve published an amazing piece of content material, why now not show it to human beings to your area of interest who have a big audience?

It’s why Tim reached out to Rand. In virtual marketing, we name this “outreach.”

The key to successful outreach is to invite your self this query whenever you’re about to ship a new e mail:

Why would all of us care about some thing I say?

There are two sturdy outreach reasons:

You cited that individual (or their work) to your article.
Your article has some thing groundbreaking that this individual doesn’t understand about but is clearly interested by.
The latter motive is why method #1 works. There’s no trick to getting pinnacle humans in your subject to promote you. You have to do extraordinary work.

This is also why on every occasion we ship outreach emails to promote our content material, we awareness on pitching the item—now not a sneaky request to tweet it.

An example of an outreach e mail from Ahrefs
Assuming you’ve created some thing noteworthy, right here’s how you can discover human beings to probably attain out to:

Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
Search on your topic
Click on the Authors tab
The top 100 authors for the topic “link constructing,” through Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
These 100 human beings have written many articles in your subject matter, so it’s affordable to assume they’re fascinated. Find their emails, reach out to them, and percentage your unique insights.

Learn more: Blogger Outreach: How to Do It at Scale (Without Feeling Like a Jerk)

4. Update different humans’s posts
   Here’s any other robust reason you can use in your outreach: You noticed a person’s weblog put up is declining in visitors, so that you provide to help replace it.

In reality, this become what Irina Maltseva, the previous head of advertising at Hunter, did:

An outreach e-mail supplying to update a publish that become declining in site visitors
Why does this paintings? Four reasons:

It is critical to replace older content material—you don’t want previous facts, and up to date content allows improve search visitors.
Keeping music and updating vintage content are burdensome duties. By offering to replace antique content material, you’re offering to take it off their fingers.
While visitor blogging is a valid manner to force visitors, you’re typically “guessing” the form of topics they’re inquisitive about. But you don’t need to bet if you’re updating their antique content material.
They’re extra than possibly to permit you to hyperlink back in your web site and/or your content.
Here’s how you may locate content material that’s declining in traffic:

Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
Search for your subject matter
Set the Trends dropdown to Last 12 months
From right here, you’ll want to eyeball the list and look out for pages with declining web page site visitors:

Pages that are declining in visitors, through Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
Click at the article to peer the Page visitors chart in element:

A unique page that has declining visitors, via Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
Looks like this unique article has suffered a drastic drop in traffic. If you’re in this niche, you may attain out to the editor and see if they’ll be inquisitive about updating the submit. If they’re, propose doing the paintings for them—it’ll sweeten the ask.

Learn more: Republishing Content: How to Update Old Blog Posts for search engine optimization

5. Share barebones posts on Reddit
   There is a subreddit for nearly some thing. That consists of your area of interest too. There’s no doubt that Reddit is a fantastic region to promote your content. Do it proper, and it may even cause a hug of death.

But allow me throw a wrench to your plans. Redditors hate advertising and marketing and marketing. If your content smells like self-promoting, they’ll no longer hesitate to throw you out.

So you may’t just waltz in, drop a link, and watch for the flood of traffic.

Reddit, but, does love useful content. So to remedy this conundrum, you may share a barebones version of your content material. Strip the whole thing out, particularly your internal and outside hyperlinks. Leave simplest a link lower back to the unique at the lowest of your Reddit publish, so all people who’s involved can check it out.

Here’s an example of it within the wild:

Tim Soulo’s barebones submit on Reddit

6. Repurpose your content material into films
   We have a video on blog put up templates you could swipe. But did you recognize that it became at the start a weblog post?

Not all and sundry desires to study. Some want to look at films. By turning your articles into videos, you may potentially attain a new set of target market.

You’ve already created the content besides. Why no longer take advantage of it and supply it a new rent on life?

Let’s be honest, though. Repurposing is hard paintings. It’s one component to say, “Turn your blog post right into a video,” and another to clearly do it. So in case you’re happening this route, you’ll ought to prioritize.

One way to do that is to recognition on subjects that human beings are already searching for on YouTube. That way, your repurposed movies can generate seek site visitors too.

Here’s a way to discover those topics:

Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
Select YouTube
Enter some applicable keywords
Go to the Matching terms report
The Matching phrases file, through Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
Look thru the list to peer if there are any topics wherein you already have existing blog content material. Those are the topics you have to repurpose.

For example, this changed into how we determined to repurpose our article on influencer advertising:

The seek volume for the keyword “influencer advertising,” thru Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
Learn extra: The Complete Guide to Content Repurposing

7. Run ads
   Most individuals who are looking for methods to sell their blogs are simply seeking out free promotion techniques. They don’t need to pay for promoting due to the fact they assume they haven’t any budget for it.

But what they don’t recognize is that, in truth, no blog advertising method is free. While it could no longer value in advance cash, it takes time. And time is money. Even the richest individual in the international can’t purchase time.

So you sincerely do have the finances to sell your content with advertisements because they free up your precious time—time that would be higher spent some place else.

At Ahrefs, we run ads for all our newly posted content. Facebook advertisements are our cross-to:

An instance of a Facebook ad
If you find Facebook advertisements too complex or too high priced, don’t overlook that there are different systems you could test too. For instance, we additionally run advertisements on Quora:

Data on Ahrefs’ Quora advertisements
And Twitter:

Data on Ahrefs’ Twitter ads
Learn more: PPC Marketing: Beginner’s Guide to Pay-Per-Click Ads

Final mind
Ryan Holiday writes in “Perennial Seller”:

Creating more paintings is one of the best advertising techniques of all.

If you’ve published an terrific article and got tons of achievement, the fine element you can do to sell your weblog in addition is to post every other first rate piece of content.

A constant output of high-quality paintings is the muse in the back of all your weblog advertising techniques. It supercharges the entirety.