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How To Promote Your Blog & Grow Your Audience

blogging | business | February 18, 2011 | 1 Comment

megaphoneSo you’ve started a blog, and you have some really great stuff to offer, but how do you get people to come? This is a question we hear from a lot of clients of ours, and we see frequently from others online. Getting visitors to your website or blog seems hard when you’re just starting out, but with some great tactics in place, you’ll start to see your visitors grow and your community strengthen.

We have tons of great ways to get quality and targeted users to visit your blog and join your community, check out our list below for some ideas and places to start.

Social Media

Social media is a great way to grow your online audience. You can share your blog posts with a larger audience, find people that might be interested through targeted searches, get more members in your community, and get them to build your community with you. A good start is to create your own profiles (twitter and facebook), adding relevant information and linking them to your blog. You’ll want to start sharing relevant information that people might be interested in, like other articles in your genre, tips, resources, etc.

Twitter

On Twitter, you can find people with similar interests and follow them, such as related companies in the area, other experts in your industry, and people blogging about the same topics. Once you start following people, you will start to see they will follow you back and you’ll have a larger group seeing your material. Retweeting what others have said and commenting on their posts are great ways to interact too.

Facebook

On Facebook, you can join groups, ask to be friends with other people with similar interests, and “like” pages in your industry. Once you join other communities, you can answer questions, post comments, interact with others and they will find your blog through these interactions.

On both Facebook and Twitter, it’s a great idea to invite friends and colleagues that might be interested in joining your communities and they can help spread the word with you.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a great application that helps streamline your social media profiles. You can post to Twitter and Facebook at the same time, it has analytics to track how many people opened your links, etc. We use this at Snoack Studios and really like it. We find that it helps make posting to multiple places quick and easy. You can also schedule your posts which is handy if you go out of town or have a busy day where you can’t check in to post.

Connect them all

Connecting all of your social media profiles is important and helps your profiles feel more full and active. On Facebook, you can add a tab that shows your tweets, and also have your blog posts automatically posted to your wall. I like RSS Graffiti for these automatic posts and Involver for the Twitter tab. On Twitter, you can have your blog posts automatically tweeted through Hootsuite’s RSS feature.

Connecting with other blogs

It’s also great to find other blogs that are similar and comment on their posts. People that are active on these blogs will read the comments and go to the websites of those that comment. So it’s a great way to be found by people that are interested in the topics you’re posting on.

Guest Posts

You can also find people to be guest bloggers on your site, and they will bring traffic of their own by sharing it on their social networks and/or their blog/website. It’s also a nice way to keep content flowing on your blog, without having to create it all yourself. Different people bring different opinions, more expertise, and people love to see that.

Google Analytics

It’s a great idea to install Google Analytics on your blog, to monitor traffic and see how many people are visiting your site. You’ll need a free Google account to get it set up and we recommend you have it send you a report weekly so you can stay on top of it. It gives you a code to install on your site and it’s very easy to setup.

Post it everywhere

Make sure to include a link to your blog on your website, your email signature, your facebook profile, your LinkedIn profile, postcards you send out, your business card, print ads and anywhere you can think of. You can get a lot of traffic from these small mentions, even if it’s just a link at the bottom of an ad. People will see it and check it out.

Remember, building your community takes time and you can’t implement everything overnight. If you work on setting up profiles and finding people over time, you’ll do well. Just make sure to keep up with them and keep giving things that people will find valuable and resourceful.

What are your favorite methods for promoting your blog?

1 Comment »

  1. The Best Posts of 2011 | Snoack Studios Blog
    January 11, 2012 @ 8:01 am

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