You know by now that simply writing great blog posts won’t guarantee success. Sadly, thousands of blogs with well-written blog posts are dying anonymous deaths every day. While expertly written posts are essential for retaining visitors and boosting repeat visitors, they aren’t as useful as a blog promotional tool. Unfortunately, blog promotion and blog building has been used interchangeably by many of the experts.
This misconception leads hardworking bloggers down the road of fiddling with blog tweaks and mechanics while their blog suffers from a lack of traffic.
To clear up any confusion, blog promotion is a concerted effort to attract visitors from another website to your own. Blog promotion can extend to offline platforms but let’s focus on online for now.
On the other hand, blog building includes selecting topics, writing cornerstone posts, elegant design, usability, engaging with commenters and hundreds of other tasks. Don’t confuse the two.
What A Blog Promotion Plan Looks Like
If you are just starting your blog then I encourage you to spend 50% of your time attracting your ideal reader to your blog. From there, a professional design, good headlines, solid writing, and good call-to-actions take over.I know it’s hard to put your finger on blog promotion, here are some points to focus on:
Define Your Audience
Sketch a detailed picture of your audience. Know exactly what they love and hate. Most importantly get a firm grasp on how they solve the problems associated with your topic.Find Where Your Audience Hangs Out
There are many great tools for homing in on your audience’s favorite online hangouts. Alltop, Technorati, Listorious, and BoardReader.com are my go to resources. Once you know where your audience hangs out, it’s time to identify what they want to know about.Understand Your Audience’s Research Triggers
Every visitor to your blog is there for a reason. Something triggered them to seek out your blog and spend time there. A trigger causes them to pose a question that they MUST answer. You need to find that trigger. For example, one of my blog review clients writes a blog about dental practice management. Her readers come to the blog because they have specific questions about managing their dental team.Uncovering your audience’s triggers will help you create specific “hooks” for attracting visitors to your blog. A good blog promotion plan includes dozens of triggers that can be used to catch a reader’s attention.
Selecting Your Promotion Tactics
People hate advertising. In fact, you and I have a finely tuned advertising radar that filters out anything that resembles a “pitch”. Showing up and pitching your blog post won’t cut it. Blog promotion is more seduction than selling. The indirect, education-focused, approach is the best approach – period.Your tactics will change based on the where your audience gathers. For example, promoting in forums rely on picking the right topics to engage in, building a reputation as a resource, and savvy use of your signature. We’ll talk more about that in a moment.
How to Get Started Fast
The sooner you get started the quicker you’ll refine your methods and start driving traffic to your blog. In the meantime, I want to give you a jumpstart. I’ve written a Special Report called How To Attract Your First 1,000 Blog Readers that includes 3 proven tactics for quickly growing your readership. You can get it here.In the meantime, I’ll dig into specific blog promotion tactics every Wednesday. Let me know some of the topics you’ll want to explore in the comments.