You have catchy blog titles and headlines and quality posts, so now you want to work on getting as many eyes on your blog as is humanly possible. This means you need some blog marketing strategies!
There are plenty of plans of action you could undertake to help boost traffic and get more visitors. The problem is, some of these tactics are sketchy or swarmy and others just plain won’t work. If you want to make the best use of your time, you need to select legitimate marketing strategies for your blog that have been proven successful… like the following free blog marketing strategies.
1.) Take your show on the road.
Write up a high-quality, niche specific blog post and submit it to the top blogs in your field. This should be good, original content that peppers in a reference to your blog and maybe a couple of links to it.
Being a guest blogger will not only help to boost traffic to your site from click-throughs from this guest post, but it will also help to establish you and your blog as an authority in your niche. How COOL is that?!
2.) Get a Twitter account.
If you don’t have a Twitter account that you use professionally or for your blog, you should get one now. Right now.
Of course, you should be sure to Tweet about each new post you have using appropriate keywords and hashtags so that folks interested in your niche should find them. You should also start retweeting what others in your niche post; eventually, they and their followers will start to take note of you…and will start clicking the links in your tweets.
3.) Read other blogs.
You want to be in the know about your niche and related news or trends, so reading other blogs in your area is a great way to do that. Commenting on those same blogs happens to be a successful blog marketing strategies.
Since you have already read the post, you are able to make a smart, quality comment on what you have read. You can also create some sort of connection between the post you are commenting on and one of your posts. While you are at it, be sure to leave a link so the folks who follow this blog can click-through to your site.
4.) Join a community or ten.
Have you heard of blogging communities? These are places where bloggers meet and connect, commenting on each other’s blogs, sharing links and other blog-related activities. BlogHer, Blog Engage and Blog Catalog are just a few examples.
You should join up with a few of these networks and start working them. Find other niche bloggers and connect with them. This will help you find folks that may want to trade links or guest posts with you. Additionally, you may just wow some of the other bloggers on the site, and they may just start to link to some of your content on their own because it is just so darn good!
5.) Use keywords to open doors.
You need to use the right niche-specific keywords in your posts. These are words that real, actual people will search for when seeking out content like yours.
But you don’t want just any keywords; you want unique, low-competition keywords so that your posts will be toward the top of these user’s search results instead of your competitors. Use Google’s keyword tool to find out what keywords are best for you.
6.) Keep it current.
You want to be sure to update your blog regularly with fresh, current content. Once a week should be minimum, but there are blogs that have new posts going up several times a day. You don’t have to post continuously, but you should find a frequency that works for you.
If you have fresh content going up all the time, the new posts give previous visitors and subscribers a reason to go to your blog. You will also catch the eye of the search engines. Just make sure that your content is pertinent and high quality; posting daily will hurt you if your writing is trite, stale or simply recycled.
7.) SEO.
I KNOW! You never read about SEO at the Buzz Baiting blog, so you didn’t see this one coming. You should know, though, even the most basic SEO efforts can help you to market your blog to more people and build traffic to your site.
You don’t have to dive in and try to turn into an SEO expert all at once, but you should start to wade in maybe with elements that aren’t too terribly time consuming or tough to learn. Many of the free blog marketing strategies listed here are SEO 101, so you have already gotten started!
This is very informative post. I liked idea #3 the best and feel that many of the others are very relevant to today’s professional (and part-time) bloggers.
I am a blogger from Indonesia, this is the first time I visited this site. Blogging info here is very useful.