25 Ways To Promote Your Blog For Free (Increase Traffic Fast!)
Have you been blogging but not able to get the desired traffic? There could be many reasons for that, but the most prominent reason for it is no proper promotion or weak marketing.
Writing a blog simply isn’t enough, with the exponential growth of many blogs over time these days. No matter how strong is the content, there needs some strong means to promote the same and take it to the right audience.
Often bloggers do not understand the value of promotion and what magic it can do to your blog’s traffic. I agree, quality is important but what’s the point if the targeted user is not able to get to your blog and not able to read your impeccable piece of content? So, I hope you understand how important it is to market your blog.
Now, often people have this misconception that you need to pay loads of sums to market your blog. You know since there is AdSense and what not. But this is not true at all.
In fact, there are dozens of ways by which you can promote your blog for free!
Yes, you read that right. And since this is something many people struggle with, I am going to make it list down the top 25 ways by which you can promote your blog for free.
So without any further ado, let’s jump in!
25 Ways to Promote Your Blog for Free
Here are the top 25 ways to promote your blog successfully on the internet and get the maximum possible traffic for your content.
1. Social Media
I cannot stress enough on how important social media is today. Social media emerged to be one of the biggest mediums for advertisements and promotions. The main advantage with social media is, one can segregate one’s target audience specifically and choose them to directly promote the product to them.
Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and many other platforms have a specified tool for a blog and other product promotions. Integrating your blogs with social media apps and pages will greatly enhance your chances of reaching the target audience.
Quick Tip: You can share your blogs and articles that you are writing and publishing on your blog. This will allow you to bring in more traffic from social media platforms. This is a must-do activity when it comes to blogging and when you are thinking about free promotion, nothing beats social media promotion.
Related Read:How to Effectively Promote Your Blog on Social Media
2. Email Marketing
Email marketing is a conventional method to reach out to your target audience. Before social media took over everyone, Email marketing was the most effective method to promote blogs and other related products. Even today, this method of advertising is proven effective in terms of conversion and targeted marketing.
When you are promoting using the email marketing method, you need to make sure that your subscribers have positively subscribed to you. If you are sending Emails to random strangers, it comes under the umbrella of Spamming. This is something that you do not want to do if you are up for “white hat promotion”, which is something you should always target for.
But, if you have an email subscriber list, it will make it really easy for you to market your blogs via emails. This helps in keeping in touch with your readers and helps you in creating a proper brand image.
Quick Tip: There are multiple email marketing tools out there that offer free plans for the service they provide. Of course, the features you get will be limited but it is not bad to start with. Once you get a hold of it, you will be able to build your blog by build sending emails. You can send blog updates, daily posts, newsletters, offers, promotions, and many more to your subscribers.
3. RSS Feed
One of the most effective ways for blog promotion to date has been RSS Feeds. RSS is a common platform that is a hub for a large number of users worldwide. An effective RSS feed can show up to the world audience and increase the chances of new readers by seeing your content.
In the early stages of social media, RSS feeds were very effective in promoting your blog content. Even today, RSS feed has got its own importance in blog advertising and promotions.
4. Email Signature
Fancy introducing yourself? Well, if yes, this will fit you well.
Adding up your blog link in the Email signature of your blog mail id or your personal mail id is one of the important blog promotion tips one could ever give.
Often it is not realized that a single signature at the end of your mail can carry useful links to your website blog or the targeted location you want them to go to.
It can really get people connected to you, get aware of your blog. It is an indirect promotion, those who read and reply to your emails get to know about your blog and the content in it. This does seem like a little addition, but it can add up to a whole lot of people reaching your blog if you play your cards right.
Quick Tip: You can set the blog link in the signature after including your address or contact number which is usually done in an Email signature. This will give an option to your readers to learn more about you if they wish to. If you are leaving it empty, it will not add up to anything, and a good chance to promote your blog goes in vain.
5. Blog Commenting
This one goes both ways, technical and psychological.
Who do you believe people tend to like more? A person who is quite in the corner not paying attention to the crowd or the one who is taking an initiative to talk to the community he is living in?
I think we both know the answer to that. The one who is showing efforts. That’s right!
Similarly, it goes into the digital world. The more you interact with other users, the more you are brought to the spotlight, and this can easily be done by commenting on other blogs.
Also, did I mention this?
Commenting on other blogs with your blog post is a good way to get backlinks.
Commenting just two good lines of appreciation is a good gesture, and that will be of your use in the future. But, you need to understand that this begins with honest appreciation.
Quick Tip: The faker or “copy-pasted” your comment is, it will directly be sniffed out by the bots and the authors. So instead, try to genuinely appraise your partner or competitor blogs.
6. Post Frequently
What can be more upsetting than a blog that does not post regularly?
One of the things bloggers do not get is that they need to have some content for their regular users. If they do not have content for their users to read, what are they even promoting?
Although this is an indirect thing, it is very important for any blog. It helps your readers to stay updated with your posts and also helps them get to the conclusion that how updated are you.
By showing some blog activity with some content regularly, it will help the readers whether to stick with your blog or not. Also, the new readers would see how frequent are you with the posts and choose as per that. Be it, daily, weekly, fortnight, or monthly there should be a consistent time frame upon which the readers and subscribers can rely upon.
Quick Tip: Create a content calendar and follow it religiously. Set aside some time for your blog writing so that you can keep up with your blog publishing and do not get mixed up in other activities.
7. Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is one of the promising and effective ways to promote a blog. In guest blogging, a blog owner or a person approaches another blog for publishing an article on their blog in turn for a high-quality article.
If you do not have a brand name, it can be a challenge for some bloggers but definitely not for all.
When you have a good name in your industry, it is easier to get your articles approved, but it does not mean that your proposals will always be rejected.
You just need to focus on the value you will be adding to the guest blog. Also, another part of guest blogging is link building, when you get more posts on other blogs linking back to your website, it helps a lot in SEO.
Quick Tip: When you are pitching the article to any blog, make sure that you are really thinking about the ideas that you will be sending out. Many other bloggers must be accepting the guest articles, but if you have a good idea or topic that will add significant value to the targeted blog, then you are good to go.
8. Quora Commenting
This might sound new to most people, but one can actually promote their blog effectively using Quora. How?
This can easily be done by answering the questions that are being asked around your blog niche. When you are answering this single question, you are definitely not answering to a single person.
If you have used quora, you must have noticed the view count under each comment, and that is what changes the game.
Also, since Quora is not just a forum any more. The questions asked in quora are the first ones to appear in search engine page results, and that will help in building your brand by answering the question there.
Quora also has topic-related questions. Selecting such topics and answering with links to your blog is a really cool idea. But you have to make sure that, you have all the needed information to answer the question.
Quick Tip: Google up the questions you think your blog works around. Ask the questions that you think can lead the users to your blog. Once you do that, comment a nicely crafted response in the thread. This will help you eliminate the mediocre questions.
9. Youtube
Youtube is another great platform to promote your blog through videos. Although not a surprise, when you are regular on your youtube promotions, you can actually pull significant traffic from the video-sharing platform.
It is much better if you have an account on the name of your blog, through which you can stay connected to your readers uniquely through your blog channel on youtube.
Some find it easy to do video sharing, and some find it difficult. It all depends on the niche as well. If you are going with a niche like travel, it definitely is easy, but you will be facing much more competition, but again the video that you need to upload will require good footages and production quality.
On the other hand, if you are blogging on a niche that is difficult to handle on video formats like an investment, you need to think more about how you can display the video in a much more engaging way. But again, you will face lesser competition.
Quick Tip: Start making normal videos that do not eat up a lot of your time. When you see the gears moving, and the subscribers rising, improve your video quality and extend the time you give to your videos.
10. Link other Blogs in own posts
This is an effective and a potential blog promotion tip which can increase the exposure of your blog. While writing a blog article of your interest, you can give the link of a blog post, which you can relate to the current article.
Links like these may trigger other bloggers to notice your blogs and refer your blog posts in their blogs. In this way, it helps your blog receive exposure from other bloggers and helps in the overall promotion.
You also need to understand the quality of the blogs you are promoting. If you are promoting blogs that are at the same level as of yours, it might not help that much, but if you are promoting blogs that are useful to the readers, it will help them in understanding your piece of content in a better format.
Quick Tip: When you are promoting your blog by linking other blogs in your content, make sure you are actually linking some strong blogs that can actually be useful to the end-user. You should not force the linking. A good way is to quote your sources of information and add them to the context of the blog.
Also Read: Does Blogging helps SEO? SEO Blogging Tips
11. Keywords Optimization
What your targeted user might be searching for matters a lot. Once you understand what your user might be searching to land on your page, it will help you in building the content accordingly.
SEO is something that can be a chapter in itself but if you are willing to do it on your own the easiest way to start is by optimizing your blogs for keywords. These keywords get scanned by search engine crawlers, and the search engine in return displays them to the users searching those keywords.
Adding keywords is one of the best things you can do in maintaining your blog’s SEO.
Quick Tip: Make a list of keywords that are working in your niche. When you are done with these keywords, you can go ahead and write your blogs by including them. Do not overstuff the keywords as the crawlers can easily sniff out the spammers and a spammer is something that you would not wanna be called.
12. Use Images
Images carry a lot of value to the users.
As they say, a picture is worth more than a thousand words. It actually is right.
With the advent of the internet, the attention span of the average user is falling significantly. Most people do not read the article and rather, they skim through it.
While all that is happening, one thing can make them stay, and that is images. A quick glance can give your reader the idea of what you are trying to tell them with the images.
Also, if you are giving efforts to your images by custom creating them, it is a really good opportunity to add it to your website and add a code snippet which the users can copy and use it on their own blog. This can give you a shout out and a backlink easily!
Quick Tip: I am sure you have noticed the images in this blog too. If this had been a simple text, it would have bored you by now, but the reason you are still reading is that the images are keeping you engaged. So, start by adding images to your old blog, and while you are writing new ones, you can add them on the go.
13. Podcasts
Just like videos, Podcasts are really a smart way to take your content more excitingly and engagingly. Podcasts are one of the trending ways, where most of the blogs are employing today as well.
In a simple podcast, you get a chance to talk about different things that are happening in your ecosystem. You can talk about the new things as well as somewhere the talk, you can plug in your product, and it can help you in promoting that as well!
Podcasts, allow you to repurpose the blog content in an audio format and engage people in the topic which you have written.
A quick tip: When you are doing a podcast, try to invite popular and innovative people on your talk so that they can bring in their fan base as well which can directly give you a boost in the number of users.
14. Online Forums
Joining online forums can help you promote your blog in a bigger perspective. There are many online forums available based on different interests of the people. These are platforms where bloggers unite to discuss topics of common interest, and there are platforms where the fans of the bloggers connect to interact with each other.
To join these online forums, select the topic that you are interested in and with which you can relate your blog. Most of these forums are free to join, and you can join them easily by providing you mail and creating your profile.
Quick Tip: Join the forums and share the links of your blog posts in the online forums. This can have long term results on your blogs as the promotion goes passively with your one-time participation.
15. Blog Exchange
Blog exchange is a practice where you exchange your article with the other blogger in return for another article by the other blogger. This contribution enhances blog promotion mutually for both parties.
This is mostly done with the bloggers that you have good relations with. This way, you mutually benefit from the deal, and both get to share the exposure equally.
Quick Tip: When you are approaching someone for a blog exchange deal, it is good to make good connections first and learn more about the other party’s blog. You do not want to attract users ate not even part of your targeted audience.
16. Social Media Plugins
Taking the help of social media plugins such as social media buttons will help the readers to share your content on other platforms easily. If your content is compelling or encouraging the readers to share with their friends and family, social media buttons can be of great help.
It is highly recommended to employ social media plugins, to get your blog promoted among different circles.
A quick tip: There are loads of Social Media plugins available for free on the WordPress plugins repository. You can install any one of them you like and start using it.
17. Pinterest
Pinterest is one of the most influential social media platforms, most of the blog writers are less aware of. Just like categories on other platforms, Pinterest has topics covering all the areas where readers of related topics visit and read the pins of their interest.
Pinterest groups help us in a great way to promote your blog and posts. Try to spin your content on Pinterest as well. If you have any idea of how you can represent your blog ideas in the forms of Pinterest pins, you need to do it.
A quick tip: See what your competitors are doing by typing in their blog’s keywords. Try to understand what is working and what is not working for them and once you have the idea, go ahead with planning your own strategy.
18. Blog Contests
Getting creative is needed to stand a step ahead of many other blogs on the internet. Conducting a blog contest is a creative idea to greatly influence your readers and subscribers.
It will also make them actively participate in the contest and stay involved with your blog. In short, generally, bloggers plan a winning prize or giveaway for the winner in the contest. The gift might be small or big, but the participation of readers will surely boost up your promotion. It is very important to frame the rules and game details clearly without any further confusion.
Quick Tip: Check with all the things on how you are going to go about the promotion of the contest. If you have a proper plan in place, then only go for the contest. If you do not have a plan ready, focus on that first.
19. Blog Carnivals
These are open environments, where bloggers get a chance to promote their blogs among a lot of people. Generally, blog carnivals are hosted by a blogger for which many others are invited. The host, the blog carnival, write a post summarizing the links of participant blogs.
The interested readers of the host access all the links as per their topic of interest and by this, the participants get a good amount of traffic. It depends on the host, how frequently are these blog carnivals are conducted.
Quick Tip: Start by doing a meetup first. It is not wise to plan a carnival directly unless you have a good brand name. See how many people turn up on your meetup and once you see that you are getting good friction, go for the carnival!
20. Visiting card signature
Visiting cards are another conventional method of marketing and promoting any product or service.
Although it might not be the best one since you will only be attracting the people who are in your circle or the people you meet, the thing with the promotion is that every drop counts!
Including a blog link in your visiting card can have a positive impact on the long term. This will promote your blog URL in everyone who sees your business card, and it will help in a great way.
Also Read: Blogging Hacks Every Blogger Should Know
21. Infographics
Very few people have that affinity to read through all the text written by you.
Actually, data in the form of infographics helps the readers greatly to get interested in the information being provided in the blog.
You also get the advantage if someone shares the infographic on their website or on their social media.
Investing time in Infographics to create additional value to the blog is something that you need to do if you want to rise above the crowd.
Quick Tip: there are tools available online which can help you in designing the infographics easily. Give them a try, and you can save a lot of time which would have been wasted in designing.
22. Video posts
Putting blog posts in the form of videos can grab a considerable amount of web traffic.
It is estimated that 41% of the worldwide web traffic comes from video blog posts.
Reading content these days has become old-fashioned, and content is conveyed effectively through videos. A video can even retain the engagement more than the conventional text method.
Quick Tip: Try to add more useful content on your Youtube channel, and then you can link those videos on your website easily by embedding them. This will save you time and hosting storage space.
Also Read: 7 Blogging Problems & How To Deal With Them
23. Free eBooks
One is most interested in finding a good guide about the topic they want to learn about rather than reading multiple blogs. If you have the time and energy, writing “the ultimate guide” on your blogging niche is something you can count on.
You can offer this ebook to your readers. You can even add an opt-in on your website to gather email IDs which you can further use in your email marketing campaigns.
Quick Tip: Writing an ebook can be quite a challenge. So, to tackle this, you need to focus on the time you can give in a day. Set aside an hour that you can give solely to your ebook. Once you are done with that, make a big announcement on your website regarding your book launch. This will help you to set things in motion.
24. Twitter Promotion
This is on top of the Social Media activity you will be taking up for the Social Media Promotion we talked about earlier.
There are a lot of things one can do with Twitter in terms of promotions. The average number of people who are following on twitter is higher than any social networking platform. One actually needs to tweet a lot like the average “shelf-life” of each tweet is only 10 days, as there will be a whole lot of new tweets coming every hour.
Using Twitter chats and Twitter hashtags are special ways to promote your blog effectively. You can even use Twitter’s analytics tool for planning your tweets and other activities related to your twitter account.
Quick Tip: Twitter has the magic of hashtags. Plan out your hashtags which you can use on your digital media initiatives. If you have a unique hashtag for your brand, people can use that to look up your other tweets.
25. Blog Syndication
If you stay connected with multiple blog networks, blog syndication will work in a great way. Most of the top blog networks allow a popular blogger to post their content on the famous or the prime blogs like Huffington Post or Business Insider.
This is not an easy bit, but if you can get it done, then it can do a lot for your blog promotion.
Quick Tip: Create a good brand name first, then there is a good chance that these people will recognize you when you approach them regarding the article publishing.
Also Read: How to Start a Career in Blogging?
Over to you!
All these methods are great and can add a whole lot of value to your blog. If you even implement 10 techniques from this list, I assure you, you will see a good jump in the traffic.
You do not need to go and implement every technique at once. Rather, start by implementing a single technique at a time this will not stress you, and you will find it much easier to implement.
Do tell us which marketing technique you liked the most and which one you think is the best on the list by commenting down below!
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