You spend hours researching for your next blog post.

You sit down for our writing, reviewing and rewriting content of good quality for your readers.

And then you press “publish” and… Nothing happens.

Does it sound familiar?

It does for me.

That was my situation when I first started publishing content in the blogosphere.

Then I reach this conclusion:

“I’m tired of writing content, spending hours that could be invested differently to increase my income, for nothing. If I’m going to have a blog, I need to get real results from it.”

That’s how I learn this ways to promote a blog post for free that I’ve been implementing in my own posts to increase my readership.

If there’s something that I’ve learnt during these year is that:

[Tweet “If you want to have a blog in the long run, you need to get real results from your blogging strategy.”]

Otherwise, it won’t be profitable to have a blog, and you’ll end up giving up on it. Full stop.

Now the most important question: are you willing to do what it takes to have a blog in the long run?

If the answer is yes, let’s get started!

Did you know that there are different sources of traffic?

 

I already explained in the blog post how to link your blog to Google Analytics. If you haven’t done this yet, you should do it right now. You’re missing out a lot of valuable information.

If you have already done your homework, I’m sure that you have already identified the different types of traffic sources:

If you really want to make a difference, you need to tackle each type at a time:

• Social: traffic coming from social networks – people (or you) sharing content on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.
• Referral: other sites online that have added a link to your site – this is the traffic coming from these sites that have “referred” you.
• Direct: people that, for example, have added your site to their bookmarks and are accessing your site directly.
• Organic Search: people that are looking for content through search engines and land in your site.
• Email: people coming from email that you send (only if you’re implementing a email marketing strategy).

I recommend you to go to your Google Analytics account to see your results. Then you’ll have a better idea about which type of traffic you want to improve.

6 ways to promote a blog post for free

 

SOCIAL TRAFFIC

• Build relationship

If you need to improve your traffic coming from your social networks, you need to be social. It makes sense, doesn’t it?

Since I started this blog, I have met new colleagues and I have collaborated in different blogs of my industry. This is a win-win solution for the blogger and the guest blogger.

I’m sure that if you have your own blog, you know other blogs in your industry.

Whereas people call them “competence”, I see a good collaboration opportunity with other bloggers.

Try to keep in touch with other blogger in your industry, share their contents on your networks, comment in their blog posts and you’ll see how all these action will benefit you in the long run.

• Email outreach

I’m not a big fan of this strategy, but if you have read some articles on increasing a blog readership, I bet that you have already heard this term before.

The aim of this strategy is to see who is talking and sharing content related to your blog post topic in order to reach them and reach them, as they’re interested in this specific topic.

The tool that stands out for this purpose is Buzzsumo. (There’s a free trial of this tool if you want to give it a try).

If you look for a specific topic, you’ll be able to see a list of people who shared it and you’ll be able to reach them on social media or by email telling them that you created X content that can be of interest.

• Make it easy for people to share your content

If you’re using WordPress as your platform for your blog, there are certain plugins that you can use to make your content more shareable.

[Tweet “These three tools will make your content more shareable.”]

• ClicktoTweet – the one that you’ve seen above. You add a sentence to summarise your content or a part of it to make it easier for people to share it on Twitter.
• Addtoany – will add some buttons at the end of your blog post so people can share your content with a simple click. (You can see an example scrolling down this post.)
• Sumome – a plugin that provides different blog solutions (subscriber acquisition, heat maps, among other) will also add some buttons that are visible as you scroll through your blog post (see mine on the right).

REFERRAL TRAFFFIC

• Guest blogging

The easiest way to get some links to your site, it’s writing content for other bloggers/platforms.

Following the first tip that I mentioned above, once you start blogging in a specific industry, you’ll be able to get to know more bloggers. You could suggest writing a post for their blogs in return of a favour.

The aim here is to add value to the readers of this blogger and attract more readers to your site at the same time.

• Comment in other blog

If you have created a very valuable piece of content, you can browse through other blogs adding a comment and linking to this content.

IMPORTANT: I’m not suggesting that you should spam away in other blogs. (You have no idea how many spam comments I have to delete each day.)

Again, you should add value with your comments and you should make sure that your content complements the topic of the blog that you’re commenting on.

ORGANIC TRAFFIC

• SEO

I have already talked about how to write content for people and search engines.

It’s important that your content is optimised for search engines. Otherwise, it won’t rank high enough and you won’t be visible through Google (for example).

SEO is hard and you won’t see results from one day to another. It requires time and consistency.

But it can be one of the best strategies to follow in the long run.

 

As you can see, in my case, organic traffic is increasing every month.

You can read a lot of posts on SEO online. But I’d recommend using Yoast SEO every time you write a post to increase readers coming from search engines.

And consistency is KEY.

 

Have you already used any of these strategies? Which type of source brings more traffic to your site? I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to leave a comment below.