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It is time for blog promotion. It’s time to start promoting your blog content to a target market, build a loyal audience and make money from it.

Sounds simple, right?

Well, at least on paper – it is so straightforward – just build it, drive traffic to it and make money from it!

After 10 years in internet marketing, one thing I can tell you is this. If you put in the required efforts and work that success here demands, you’re going to get the reward 10 times.

Though, certainly, there will be challenges and obstacles along the way. You may not experience any significant progress as quickly as you may love to see them.

But trust me, if you’re patient enough and work smarter, there are bright lights at the end of this tunnel.

Laying the Ground Work for Blog Promotion Ideas

This is the thing, success in online marketing is not accidental, nor magical – far beyond that.

Success in online marketing can be said to be predictable and manageable if you’re ready to do what is right, at the right time, and long enough to see it through.

Before you start blog promotion and content marketing everywhere. You must know exactly why you’re starting the blog in the first place. The purpose of which you’re into it.

Internet marketing is not just any other business. It is a people’s business. People, you don’t necessarily meet in person – but still 100% of people’s business.

You’ll need to be specific on how you intend to serve these people which will make them buy from you due to the trust and connections you must have built with them over time.

Make sure you have quality content already published on the blog that your target audience will find when they arrive. At least, an ideal 10 quality well-written relevant articles published.

Once you have that in place, let’s explore some blog promotion methods you need to start doing from today.

5 Smartest Ways to Promote Your Blog

Note: With the continuous decline in organic reach for social media status updates. And with the steady rise in demand for paid advertising, I see it as a kind of “pay-to-play” platform, so I wouldn’t include it on the list here.

Besides, you already know a bunch about social media marketing, right?

1. Attending Live Events

About 11 years ago, I attended a seminar organized by one of my mentors in online marketing – Dr. Sunny Obazu. There I met with other content marketers alike. We interacted with each other, exchanged business cards, and talked about our online businesses.

live event seminar

From that meeting, I have gained loyal readers to this blog that helps in spreading the word since that time. I have made decent money too by coaching others on what I know about building a blog that makes money.

Even to date, I still reap the reward of just attending that seminar more than 11 years ago.

Live events, Seminars, blogger’s summits, etc… are places most people don’t look up to for blog promotion and brand awareness building. In reality, blogger’s live events are one of the best places to start talking about your blog and what you do online.

Here are other reasons you should consider attending live blogger events a necessity.

Meet and Learn from your competitors

Chances are, your direct competitors will be there too for the same purposes related to yours.

You can seize the opportunity to meet and learn one or two tactics that will improve your business from them. Especially if they are one of the speakers for the event.

Meeting with your competitors face-to-face allows you to observe them closely to study their strengths and weakness. This will come in handy when making an informed decision about gaining a competitive edge.

Gain More Knowledge 

One of the reasons you attend the live business event is to improve your business knowledge and the quality of your products and services.

At live business events, you get to meet with other experts sharing their vast experience in the field with everyone. No matter how experienced or knowledgeable you perceive yourself in your field, there is always room for improvement.

Networking Relationship 

You can’t build a popular blog that makes money all alone. You’ll need at one point or the other the helping hands of other professionals in your field.

Seminars and live events, affiliate summits, etc…are great places to meet with like-minded people you can build strong business relationships with.

2. Expose Your Content to Targeted Bloggers

One of the best things you can do to promote your blog is to get your content noticed by relevant bloggers who already have the kind of community of readers you’re targeting.

Reach out to these bloggers. I know this is some cold calling. They never heard of you before even from Adam, and that’s okay. Everyone does that at one point or another.

I do it too and still do it. It is one of the most effective blog promotion ideas today.

Reaching out to other bloggers in your field who already have the kind of readers you want to attract to your content can be a very tedious task to do.

But if you can endure the frustrations and pains, the rewards can be just what you want.

There are two sets of people you’ll need to target in your blog promotion checklist:

Industry leaders/bloggers, you have mentioned in the post, or readers you believe might be interested in reading your content. This is because they have shown interest in your blog topic by reading a similar piece of information elsewhere.

Here is how to reach out to this set of people.

There are dozens of ways to do bloggers’ outreach, but here I will show how I do mine with the NinjaOutreach app.

First, sign up for the Ninja Outreach marketing from here.

ninja outreach app homepage - blog promotion app

Warning! The whole process is not fancy. It is tedious work to do, but if you can – the reward can just be massive. Another thing is, to make sure you’re not reaching out to a relevant audience with mediocre content.

Your content should be equal if not better than what they’ve already read on your competitor’s websites.

Now, here are two ways you can find people whom you didn’t mention in your post but have shown interest in reading your type of information.

First, you can find them on your competitor’s blog through the comment section. All the people who have left comments on a blog post similar to yours are your target audience.

But trying to reach out to these people manually on their website through the contact us page can be a hit-and-miss game. A very very difficult and time-consuming task to do too.

Trust me, I have done that before, is not funny at all. Especially if the number of comments authors on the posts is like that of Adrienne Smith or Harleena Singh.

You’re in for a really tedious task.

Alternatively, you can discover hundreds of people who have shown great interest in your blog topic by heading over to the app Buzzsumo.

Type in your content keyword and let the app return a list of top posts with the highest social shares.

Here is a post I promoted to a relevant audience using the same blog promotion ideas I discuss here.

app buzzsumo homepage - blog promotion app

Using the Buzzsumo Pro account, you can view directly those who have shared the post on Twitter. You will be able to download the data in Excel or CSV files which you can later import into your favorite outreach software.

One drawback here is this, currently, Ninja Outreach doesn’t have a social media outreach platform where you can reach out to people directly from the app. So we’re going to concentrate on using the email outreach function.

From the BuzzSumo result, the post from backlinks got the highest shares for that online marketing topic. So I head over to the post, and luckily, it had about 500 comments on it.

Good! This means I have hundreds of relevant audiences to reach out to with a similar article.

Now, getting these comments and authors’ contact email addresses is not going to be an easy task. You’ll have to go through some lines of codes and dig out what you need – a very time-consuming job I must have warned you.

If the comment section is not served on a page-by-page basis. I mean not broken into several pages – the task got easier. But if you have to navigate from page one to the last page, more work to do.

There are two ways to get the links on a page using the NinjaOutreah app: First is to input the post URL to extract all the links on that page. This process can be a bit messy and not really what you want.

This is because it will present you with all the links on that page – navigation menu links, sidebar links, footer links, etc. This is not what you’re looking for, right?

So, here is an option…

Attention!!!

The strategies described here were initially screenshot to explain every step of it better, but after what happened to the blog back in 2016, those screenshots were no longer retrieved. I will soon update accordingly with the proper screenshot. But here is an article put together by the Ninjaoutreach on how to use the tool to promote your content.

It is not an easier way to get around things but it will ensure you get only what you need. Before I show you how to do this, here are two things you’ll want to keep in mind or have by your side.

The first few words of the first comment author on the page and the last few words of the last comment author are on the same page. Alternatively, memorize the first and last comments author’s names.

Open the page source code in a new browser tab by pressing “CTRL + U” on your computer keypad. Press “CTRL + F” and input the first few words of the comment author or his name (depending on what method you use), that’s the beginning of the comment section.

Here is an example to explain what I mean here.

On this page with over 500 comments already, we need to find all the blog addresses of the authors of the comments by wading through some lines of code. The first comment author on the page is Jimmy.

So to locate the start of the comment in the source code, you either use Jimmy as your search query or his first few comments words.

In my case, I use Jimmy to locate the start of the comment section in the page source code as you can see below.

To locate the end of a comment section, do the same thing.

After that, you’ll need to copy all the source code from the start to the end of the comment section and paste it into the NinjaOutreach link extractor app. Like what you have below. After that click on the “Extract” button.

The app will weed out all the irrelevant content and present you with only the URLs on the page like this.

When you’re done with this, copy the extracted links and log in to your Ninja outreach dashboard. On your list management page, click on “Import” at the top right corner of the page and a dialogue box will pop up.

Click on “Click here to Submit websites”, in the dialogue box that opens paste your extracted links in and click submit.

Ninja Outreach app will crawl the submitted websites internally and email you with details of all websites you enter. Such as the author’s names, web addresses; email addresses both personal and business are available on the blog.

It might take a while before the mail arrived, so be patient.

The contact details the Ninja Outreach app will present may not be so accurate. This is because it relies on the personal info the authors of the comments input in the appropriate field when leaving their comments.

For example, if the comment author inputs a keyword in the comment name field when leaving his comment, that’s what the Ninja Outreach app will report as the comment author’s name.

So you might need to visit the website directly to get the owner’s name.

Don’t worry, this process only takes about two minutes or so to do. Because from the Ninja Outreach App interface, you can navigate to the blog’s contact page directly.

Don’t let us skip steps.

After some hours, check your inbox for a mail from the Ninja outreach app. It will come with a subject line like this.

Now go back to your Ninja outreach app dashboard to create a list. This list is meant to identify each campaign setting. Click on the List Management tab on your dashboard to do that.

This shouldn’t take more than 20 seconds. Once you’re through with it, it’s time to get things rolling by reaching out to this potential audience.

Now, click on “Out Reach Mode” on your dashboard sidebar.

Select your list from the drop-down menu on the upper left page and a page like what you’ve seen below will appear.

Select your email template, and click on the first contact from your prospects list. From there on you don’t need to click on the prospect again.

Things to keep in mind.

  • Don’t forget to always check the “to” field to be sure the receiver’s email is right there. If not, you’ll need to find this out by visiting the website directly.
  • Don’t forget to edit the outgoing email template to fits your needs.
  • Remember the subject line is important.
  • Be brief, and straight to the point.

This is not going to be fancy work to do. But honestly, I have seen better results doing these things than what I used to do in the past.

3. Questions and Answers Section

Recently, I did a mini voluntary “Ask me anything” related to blogging, SEO, content marketing, etc…on one of the blogger groups I belong to. I wasn’t expecting what followed, to be honest.

I was like whoa! Why haven’t I done this thing a long time ago?

question and answer books

It opened doors to a new opportunity. A new relationship. Loyal followers. Potential business deals. And above all these, it exposed my blog to people who never care to know or find out what I was doing here in the past.

From the questions and answers section, a good number of the group members became aware of my blog and expertise, the value of which my content offers here.

Granted, this might not be something within your scope to try out. Because you’re just starting and have little knowledge of the game. That’s okay, everyone starts somewhere.

You don’t have to go all out on the questions and answers section if you don’t have what it takes to do that. But keep your eyes open to forums and bloggers’ communities.

Whenever you see someone asking questions you can help with the answer, help them out.

Answering industry-related questions helps elevate you to expert status and drive free targeted traffic to your relevant content. Even if you don’t want to do this as I did, you can leverage Q and A sites like Quora and Yahoo Answers.

Visit these places and look for questions you can comfortably answer.

Since you’re trying to promote your blog content in the process, a good rule of thumb is to look for questions that naturally demand a reference to additional resources.

Use this opportunity to point the user to one of your pillar articles.

4. Don’t Sweat Much on Blog Design

Believe me, I know how this aspect can be so tempting that you can be forced to start tweaking your blog design here and there every week. Or even days from each other.

The truth is, no one cares about your blog design more than they do care about the quality of your content.

And in that humble beginning, you don’t have that much going on your blog like that.

So instead of wasting your time tweaking your blog design every day and night, focus on creating quality content. Networking, making at least 50 contacts a day with the right people. Read other people’s blogs and leave valuable comments on them.

Don’t take this wrong, I know that blog design can be one of the major reasons people abandon a website. But yours is different plus you’re in a stage where all that matters most is providing your first-time visitors with a memorable experience of your content.

In the beginning, focus on publishing useful content that both your human visitors and search engine spiders will love. There are more days ahead for you to get your blog design right.

Come to think of it, you’ve just started, and not until you know exactly the direction in which your blog should be heading, your blog design is just an experiment.

5. Use The Power of Guest Blogging

This one is straightforward, right? You already know how to use guest blogging to promote your blog.

Not so, especially if you’re nobody when getting started on the blogosphere. I mean you have no bloggers network to leverage and no name to your writing ability.

It might be difficult to find blogs to accept your guest post pitches.

But you don’t have to leave things to luck or chance. You need to wear the hat and go all out on blogs that accept guest articles.

The good news is that there are lots of blogs out there ready to accept anyone with better quality writing skills for the web. These blogs don’t care much about who you are or whether you have been blogging for gazillion years.

It does not matter to them. What they do care about is your present quality. How good your writing is at the moment and what you can offer them.

To get started with your guest blogging campaign, you’ll need to do two things. Maybe just one depending on your choice, though.

You either find blogs where bloggers in your niche are already publishing their guest articles. Or you find blogs that are accepting articles from guest authors not necessarily from your competitors.

I don’t know if you grab the difference between the two.

Here is the thing:

This search string will present you with a search result of blogs that accept guest articles:

“Your niche keyword + write for us”

While this search string will present you with a search result of posts that are written by guest contributors on another blog.

“Your Niche keyword + inurl:guest author”

The latter is more like spying on your competitors. Where they are getting links through guesting blogging.

In my opinion, that’s what you should concentrate mostly on. Because it will help in building quality links faster which will give your blog better search visibility.

However, since you’re just starting on the blogosphere, getting your guest articles accepted on relevant blogs might be a very daunting task.

Here are some tactics to get your guest post pitches accepted.

Tip 1. Start With Your Peers

One of the guest post best practices is to feature on high-traffic blogs with large followings so you can promote your blog to a large audience.

That’s fine and valid advice. But in your case, it may not work out as expected.

Instead, start looking for guest post opportunities from bloggers who are just some years into the game. Those who are just a bit above you in blogging status.

It is a lot easier to have your post accepted by blogs in this category. What you need most at this stage is exposure and not all that massive traffic.

Fine if you can get that. But instead of chasing that BIG break or influential endorsement, start small. Getting people’s eyes on your content is what matters at this stage.

From these smaller blogs, assuming you’re doing a good job with your guest post by writing useful content, it may open the doors for that river-flowing stream you’re looking for.

Tips 2. Read Guest Post Guidelines

Not all blogs have visible guest post guidelines or policies on their blog. But a good rule is to always look for it on the blog before you even consider writing your guest article.

And if you can’t find it on the blog, consider reading the last ten published articles to see what their current qualities are.

Take note of small things like formatting, size of images, article length, concluding part, subheadings, intro, headlines, etc.

Look for the popular posts on the sidebar to see what type of articles readers are sharing and commenting on the most. See how you can come up with something better but with a similar approach.

Important: Search for posts written by “guest authors” using the blog search box.

This will give you an idea of what blog topic you should write about, and the type of post readers engage with most. And the content quality accepted by guest authors

Tips 3. Don’t Write Epic Content, Write Useful Content

This is confusing. Probably not!

It shouldn’t get you confused. There is a BIG difference between writing epic content and writing useful content.

A post may be said to be EPIC, this might come so because of its nature of design, formatting, length, quality of research, etc…

But if it does not provide the consumer with any meaningful benefits, is not useful to that reader.

For instance, high-end smartphones are one of the best things that ever happen in this world. But not everyone finds their advanced functions and features useful for them.

Some people are well comfortable with using such a thing as Nokia 3310.

nokia 3310

This is because they only need to make and receive calls. Every other function is of no use to them.

Trust me, my 85-year-old Dad doesn’t care about whatever your Android or iPhone smartphones can do. Nothing beats his old 3310 Nokia.

So if I’m to buy my dad a phone, I need to get him something he will find “useful” and not something of great functionalities and features that’s of no use to him.

Why do I have to say this?

I have seen a few content marketers doing the mistake of submitting an epic post for guest post requests that do not offer the host blogger audience relevant practical actionable tips or lessons.

So instead of focusing on writing some lengthy stuff like this one, focus on delivering useful content to the host blogger’s community.

If what readers over there read most is an article between 1,000 -1,500 words count, don’t go overboard writing some insane 5,000-word post. It might not work out well.

One of the reasons I told you above is to check out the host blog’s last ten published contents. Doing this will give you a clear understanding of what is working at the moment for the blog.

Tip 4. Edit. Edit. Edit.

You need to edit and proofread the heck out of your guest article. Not many blogs are ready to look into such things as error typos, misuse of words, spelling mistakes, etc.

If you’re writing for your blog, is easier to go back after weeks, months, and sometimes even years to edit and proofread your published posts. But this opportunity can’t happen on other people’s blogs.

So you’ll need to make sure your post is free from errors. This will reduce the workload on your host blogger and save them time to have your post published.

Conclusion…

Promoting your blog to go viral without advertising is possible. But with paid marketing, you will see the result quicker. The 5 ways described in this post are some of the best free traffic tactics, if you work on them long enough, hopefully, you will experience positive results.

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7 Comments

  1. Hey Shamsudeen,

    These are great free alternatives to paid advertising. I never been to live events to talk about my blog but it’s a good option. Especially for the fact that it’s targeted.

    I’ve done guest posting but I didnt get to the level of traffic I wanted despite the fact my blog was exposed to a lot of other bloggers. I still see it as a great way to get more exposure.

    Thanks for sharing these tips! Have a great upcoming weekend!

    1. Hi Sherman,

      There are more benefits to attending niche relevant live event than exposure, you get to meet with people from different diverse business background, sectors, experience and from there, you can even get some business deal.

      Who knows?

      Thanks Sherman, nice having you on the blog.

  2. Hi Adeshokan,

    This is one of the most detailed and compacted guide to massive traffic. Wondering if I’ve seen you in Serious Bloggers Only community, smart blogger or some forums because you know I tend to identify members by their awesome writing style…

    Thank you, you did well

    1. Hi Charles,

      Thanks for the kind words. I’m not sure if we’ve met anywhere online before, but that’s all in the past. Now we’ve known each other, nice meeting you.

      I frequent NairaLand, Inbound.org, Growth hackers, and some Facebook groups.

      Thanks.

  3. Nice and interesting article

    thank you.

  4. Hi Shamsudeen. Thanks for this incissive masterpiece. I agree with the fact that submitting guest post to blogs, whose content are related to your blog’s niche could attract tremendous traffic. Though I have not treaded this path, but I’ve read some tips from other bloggers saying the same thing. That makes it an effective blogging strategy that knows no bound. Nevertheless,can you recommend any software that can be used to edit a blog post.

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