Getting the attention of readers is a complex and time-consuming task, and if you don’t do it correctly, the chances of creating a successful blog are minimized.
In this post, we’ll examine the best ways to increase exposure to your blog in the fastest possible way.
10 Ways to Get Your Blog Noticed
- Set Realistic Expectations
- Get Noticed on Facebook
- Get Found on Twitter
- Grow an Email List
- Build a Community Around Your Blog
- Publish the Right Content
- Don’t Forget Your SEO
- Guest Posting on Authoritative Websites
- Spy on Your Competitors
- Utilize Every Possible Opportunity to Promote Your Blog
1. Set Realistic Expectations
Before even thinking about ways to promote your blog, you need to set your expectations correctly.
Having realistic goals is important and will help you create a plan that can get you results.
You must understand that getting your blog noticed will take time. Even if you have the best content for your topics and even if you know exactly what to do, it takes a lot of effort to get your blog in front of many eyes.
A realistic plan will help you stay focused on your goals and not get disappointed and quit (this is the case for most new bloggers).
If you’ve read my previous article on how to increase blog traffic, you know that the traffic won’t grow magically from day 1, but it will take months to get your first organic visits from Google.
What are realistic expectations?
No one answer works for all cases, but as a general rule of thumb, when it comes to organic traffic, you should not expect too much before at least 6 months (especially if you are working on a brand-new domain).
After that, depending on how often you publish new content, the type of content, and your promotion techniques, you will get better results.
2. Get Noticed on Facebook
Facebook is perhaps the easiest and fastest way today to promote your blog. You can use Facebook’s ‘boost post’ feature to your blog posts in front of many people.
When done correctly, boosting a post on Facebook can generate significant traffic and engagement to your blog.
For instance, in promoting my blog post on How to Become a Digital Marketing Consultant, I got a decent amount of traffic from Facebook and over 700 likes, spending just $10 per day for 2 days.
But the benefits of boosting a post on Facebook don’t end with just likes and traffic. When you boost your post, you also increase your chances of getting natural links from other bloggers who see your post in their timelines.
This is especially true when your content is of high quality and contains valuable insights that other bloggers can link to from their own content.
To get the most out of Facebook’s ‘boost post’ feature, it’s important to target the right audience. You can do this by selecting specific demographics, interests, and behaviors that align with your blog’s target audience.
This will help ensure that your boosted post reaches the people most likely to be interested in your blog’s content.
3. Get Found on Twitter
Another way to speed up your blog readership is to use Twitter-promoted tweets. It works similarly to Facebook boost posts but also has the added advantage of targeting your tweets to specific Twitter accounts.
Here is a quick outline of how to make the most of Twitter’s promoted tweets.
First, find the influencers in your industry. These are the people that have a lot of Twitter followers and tweet about topics related to your blog.
Create a spreadsheet and add the Twitter usernames of influencers and the people they follow.
Try to have at least 1500 accounts on your list. Add any other Twitter accounts you think will likely engage with your tweets.
Go to Twitter ads and create a new campaign to get ‘Tweet Engagements’.
Create at least 3-4 tweets to use as ‘promoted tweets’ in your campaign.
Create a Tailored Audience’ and upload to Twitter your list of influencers. Ensure you also select the ‘Expand reach by targeting similar users’ option. This tells Twitter to find users that are similar to the ones you have on your list.
Fill out the other campaign options, set a daily budget, and run the campaign for a few days.
When you start the campaign, Twitter will show your tweets in front of the people that matter, and any retweets you get from them have a much bigger effect than a retweet from a ‘normal’ Twitter user.
Note: You shouldn’t use Facebook boost posts, and Twitter promoted tweets for all your posts but only for your really good stuff.
Spend some money and more time on the posts that make your blog stand out from the rest.
4. Grow an Email List
Many people believe that email is dead. This is far from the truth; money is still on the email list.
Email is one of the most converting channels and one of the ways to get direct traffic to a new website or blog.
There is a big chance that you are reading this post because of an email notification you received from me.
There are many ways to get more email subscribers, and having an email subscribe box in your sidebar is not enough.
The best way to grow your email list naturally is to place the subscribe box either in the main content of your blog or as an exit popup.
When you try to leave this page, you will notice that a popup will appear asking you to subscribe to my email list. This technique works very well; I use it on all my blogs and websites.
I doubled my subscriber rate almost instantly and grew an email list with over 50,000 subscribers in a short period.
5. Build a Community Around Your Blog
Building a community around your blog is difficult, especially for new websites, but it’s a great way to differentiate your blog from the rest.
One element that contributes a lot to community building is comments.
These days many websites have comments turned off because they are time-consuming to manage.
When you have comments enabled, it’s likely to get a lot of spam comments from users and bots, which can potentially create many problems.
But when done correctly, blog post comments can send the right signals to search engines about the quality and usefulness of your content.
I have comments enabled on this blog, and many of my articles have hundreds of comments. For example, my article on On-Page SEO has more than 200 comments.
When an article receives a lot of good comments, it’s a clear sign that the content is good, and not surprisingly, articles with many comments tend to rank higher on Google.
As a first step, encourage your readers to leave comments on your blog posts and respond to those comments. This will help create a sense of community and encourage your readers to return for more.
Make sure you manually approve comments from real people (not bots or spam) and only publish comments contributing to the discussion.
Besides comments, other ways to build a community around your blog include:
Host webinars: Hosting webinars or live streams where you share your knowledge and expertise can be a great way to connect with your readers and build a community. Webinars can provide value to your readers, answer their questions, and build a deeper relationship with them.
Run contests and giveaways: Contests and giveaways are a great way to engage your readers and encourage them to share your content with their friends and network. This can help to grow your community and bring in new readers.
6. Publish the Right Content
I have often mentioned in my blogs the importance of publishing good quality content so that I won’t repeat myself, but I want to draw your attention to 3 other techniques that play a role in your blog’s growth rate and success.
First is to understand what evergreen content is and why publishing content that will stay relevant for a long time is important.
Second, to learn how to write SEO-friendly blog posts to increase their chances of getting higher rankings on Google.
Third, how to interlink your pages together and boost your SEO.
These 3 techniques are the basic principles of successful blogging and, in conjunction with the ideas discussed in this post, can guarantee your blog’s success.
It may sound simple, but that’s how blogging has worked for the past 10 years and how it will work for the next 10 years.
7. Don’t Forget Your SEO
While working on your social media promotion and email marketing, don’t forget about SEO.
A blog with good SEO is more likely to get higher rankings in search engines, and when this happens, it can get noticed.
Good rankings will give you more organic traffic, which is continuous, and targeted, boosting your blog’s reputation.
A web page that appears in the first positions of Google for competitive keywords has a better reputation than other blogs.
This means your SEO practices are working, and the readers know that the particular blog will probably provide an answer to their search queries.
When this is done, the reader is happy and may share the blog through social media and get even more attention.
8. Guest Posting on Authoritative Websites
My view on guest posting is simple. Don’t guest post for links but for exposure.
I don’t like to guest post on any website but only on authority websites that can get me traffic and exposure.
I wrote posts on sites like Content Marketing Institute and Social Media Examiner, and the gains in social media followers and traffic are worth more than the link in my author bio.
How can you use guest posting to get more exposure for your blog?
Guest post only on authority websites. Analyze your industry or niche and find websites that have been in business for many years, have lots of content and traffic, and accept contributions from other authors.
Read their contributor guidelines carefully and apply to become a guest author.
Write your best post and send it for approval.
Be patient. From my experience, getting your posts published on established websites may take a couple of months.
I know that the above process may not help beginners and people with no prior experience with guest posting, but once you start with guest posting and have your first articles published, it is as simple as that.
9. Spy on Your Competitors
Why spy on your competitors? To find practices and techniques they are using to promote their blog and replicate them.
Maybe they get referral traffic from a website that you didn’t know that they accepted guest posts, perhaps they rank for a keyword you haven’t thought of, or maybe they wrote a post about a topic that is easy to get high rankings.
The answers that you can get from spying on your competitors are a lot.
How do you spy on your competition without spending too much time or effort?
Register for their newsletter so you get notified when they publish a new post.
Analyze their website using tools like Semrush or ahrefs. They are not free, but the information you can get about your competitors is priceless.
You can see for which keywords they are ranking, from where they get their referral traffic, and many more.
I use SEMRUSH for competitor analysis, which is probably the only tool you need.
With SEMRUSH I can compare domains, track ranking positions, analyze backlinks, perform a site audit, analyze how difficult a keyword is, and view details about how a competitor uses Google Ads.
I did my research before choosing Semrush, and it is a great digital marketing tool at a reasonable price.
10. Utilize Every Possible Opportunity to Promote Your Blog
Besides social, SEO, email marketing, guest posting, and competition analysis, there are other ways to get your website noticed and increase your traffic.
A good blogger will use any possible medium like:
- Email signatures – add your blog URL below your name so that people will see the link whenever you send an email.
- Business cards – Give business cards with your blog address to people you meet offline.
- Attend conferences and seminars related to your niche – making personal connections with other bloggers in your niche is a great way to get established in your industry.
- Create Android, iPhone, Chrome, and Amazon applications and publish them in the respective app markets.
- Create a free kindle book and publish it on Amazon.
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Whether you are a company or individual, when you maintain a blog or website online, you are looking for one simple thing, attention.
You want your work to get noticed and appreciated by others and your content to be read and shared.
You want your website or blog to generate leads, visits, and revenue.
I described 10 ways to achieve this above, but the list is by no means complete. Whatever you choose to do, work on it consistently and have patience, it takes time to get noticed online, but once this happens, everything becomes more manageable.
