40 Best (FREE) Ways How To Promote A Blog and Increase Traffic

        40 Best (FREE) Ways To Promote A Blog and Increase Traffic               According to data referenced in a recent piece in the New York Times, titled “Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest”, approximately 95% of blogs fail; the piece, that analyzed several failed and “retired” bloggers, to understand why they quit, came to the conclusion that many blogs fail due to lack of readership.

Luckily, I’ve grown some blogs into 500,000+ monthly visitors (see image below) and I’ve literally tried every method on the the internet. However, I want to let you know that it didn’t happen overnight and it took a lot of testing, failing and starting all over again.

P.S. This article is VERY comprehensive at over 8,000 words; it contains 101 unique and practical ways to promote a blog and get traffic, with links to case studies, research, resources and tutorials when necessary. I believe this is the only guide you’ll need if you want to unleash an avalanche of traffic on your blog.

Enjoy.

1. Publish More Articles: One of the most effective, but often ignored, ways to get traffic to a blog is by publishing more articles; research from Hubspot has shown that businesses that publish 16+ blog posts monthly get 3.5 times more traffic and 4.5 times more leads than businesses that publish between 0 – 5 blog posts monthly.

Seven-figure blogger Neil Patel also revealed that his monthly traffic went from 46,134 visitors to 59,787 visitors because he increased content frequency from 1 article to 2 articles weekly.

No matter your niche, research has shown that publishing more content will always lead to an increase in traffic for you; increase your content frequency to 2 or more articles a week, and you’ll notice a significant increase in traffic to your blog.

2. Publish Longer Content: Research has shown that Google and other search engines give preference to longer, comprehensive articles; research by serpIQ that analyzed top 10 results for over 20,000 keywords came to the conclusion that Google ranks content that have more than 2,000 words better than content with fewer words.

Research by Buzzsumo, in a partnership with Moz, which analyzed over 1 million articles, found that articles that are 3,000 – 10,000 words get twice as many shares and 3 times the links content that have fewer than 1,000 words get. The screenshot below shows the average shares and links articles analyzed get based on their word count:

In the Neil Patel article we referenced earlier, he also reveals that one of the top reasons why his blogs get a lot of traffic is because he writes in-depth and comprehensive articles; the average article on Neil’s blog ranges from 4,000 to 8,000 words, and the result is that he ranks for lots of long-tail keywords, which leads to significant traffic on the long run.

3. Start an Email List: Ask most successful bloggers what the top source of traffic to their blog is and they’ll tell you that email is in the top 3. Highly successful blogger Darren Rowse always record a traffic spike (the kind that almost doubles his blog traffic) whenever he sends an email to his list about a new blog post (see a screenshot of one of his traffic spikes below).

Email is such a powerful medium for generating traffic that many bloggers vouch for it; the reason is simple, all things being equal, your email list will only keep growing and rarely decrease. Even more, unlike your blog traffic that can fluctuate, you have access to a database of the people on your email list and can always email them.

The best email management tool is constant contact.  I recommend you sign up and start building your list immediately. You can get a 20% discount if you purchase here. Don’t wait.

Here’s another screenshot from Neil Patel showing traffic to his new blog in 30 days from a list size of 3,612 visitors:

If you haven’t started building an email list, start now. Install the free SumoMe plugin and use their email list building options including the ScrollBar, Popup and Welcome Mat.

4. Guest Blog: One of the fastest ways to grow your blog is by writing for other people’s blogs; in other words, you can look for a blog that is much bigger than yours and write an article for that blog. You’ll be allowed to have a bio that includes a link to your site in your guest post. This can result in a lot of traffic for you.

Here’s a screenshot showing the kind of traffic you can get from a guest post:

To make guest blogging work, try to only guest blog on blogs that are more popular than yours; look for blogs with tens, or hundreds, of thousands of subscribers and submit your guest post to them.

5. Optimize Your Blog for Search Engines: Search engines are the #1 source of traffic for most established blogs. Just take a look at the below screenshot:

The above screenshot shows traffic to an authority blog in one month; you can see that out of 582,000 visitors, 476,000 came from search engines. That’s how powerful search traffic is; after all, Google is the biggest website in the world!

It’s important that you don’t ignore SEO; familiarize yourself with the concept of SEO and optimize your blog and your articles to rank well for relevant keywords in Google and other search engines.

6. Comment on Other Blogs: The right comment on a highly authoritative blog can send you lots of traffic; identify the top blogs in your niche and start interacting and commenting on blogs on a regular basis. This will get the blogger and members of his community to notice you and visit your blog, leading to more traffic for you; you might even get a link, or invitation to guest blog out of it.
7. Develop a Blogger Outreach Plan: Many bloggers fail to get traffic because they take a passive approach to blogging; if you simply publish your article, rest and wait for traffic to come then nothing will happen.

For every article you publish, make sure you have a solid blogger outreach plan; compile a list of dozens of relevant bloggers that you can email your article to and ask them to share or link to your article. This article is a good place to learn how to do blogger outreach.

8. Feature Other Bloggers in Your Articles and Ask them to Share: One of the techniques superstar blogger Neil Patel uses to grow his blog is that of linking to dozens of bloggers inside his articles (according to him, his articles usually contain 100+ links) and then reaching out to the bloggers who he linked to letting them know that he linked to them. The result is hundreds, sometimes thousands, of shares per article and eventually lots of traffic back to him.

Regularly link to other bloggers in your articles and email all of them to let them know about your article; many of them will share your article, resulting in lots of traffic for you.

9. Do “Expert Roundups” and Get Featured Experts to Share: How will you like to leverage the reach of 10, 20 or more experts in your niche to grow yours? Is this even possible? Yes, by doing “expert roundups” in which you interview a group of experts and ask them one or two questions to be compiled inside one article, you can massively boost your blog traffic.

Once your expert roundup has been published, ask all the bloggers featured to spread the word about it; the result of this will often be thousands of extra visitors to your blog.

A good example of an expert roundup is this article that features 32 bloggers who reveal their favorite site building platform; the result is hundreds of shares. Here’s another good examplethat got over 1,000 shares.

10. Do Case Studies of Influencers and Get them to Share: Identify influencers in your niche with good reach, do a case study about these influencers and get them to share it. A good example is this case study of Quora influencer Oliver Emberton; Oliver shared the article on social media when it went live, eventually resulting in 100s of shares and thousands of views. The article also ranks on page 1 for his name in Google, bringing in long-term search traffic.

11. Publish a Resource Article: Resource articles are exceptionally effective for boosting traffic to your blog, much more than the average blog post; this article on Digital Current shows that it’s possible to get 100,000 views per article by publishing resource articles, and that resource articles can get up to 10,000% more views than the average article.

The screenshot below shows the kind of traffic you can get from a single resource article:

12. Feature or Interview Owners & Influencers of Popular Social Media Groups: There are several Facebook and LinkedIn groups with thousands and tens of thousands of followers; unfortunately, most people try to get traffic by spamming these social media groups, only to end up having their articles removed. A better way to get traffic from social media groups is to interview owners, or influencers, of these groups and ask them to share the article you feature them in. Even if they do not share your article, you can share it in the group yourself as a member of the group.
13. Feature/Interview Owners of Popular Forums: Compile a list of the biggest forum owners in your niche and interview them; if possible, get them to participate in a round up post on your blog. Send them a link after your article has been published and encourage them to share it.
14. Run a Blogging Contest: Host your own blogging contest and make it a condition that participants share your article on social media or blog about it; if possible, try to get some sponsors and have them blog about your contest as well. This will go a long way to boost your blog’s reach.
15. Develop and Execute a Social Media Strategy: Simply creating social media profiles and sharing your latest articles won’t cut it. Develop a social media strategy by focusing only on key social networks, engaging with influencers and top pages, and, interacting in groups to grow your social media reach. Also make sure you constantly post updates, and regularly recycle old articles on social media; simply sharing your article once, or once in a while, won’t cut it. Most popular bloggers share links to old articles on their blog for years. Posting frequency should vary depending on the social media site; research shows that it is optimal to post twice daily on Facebook, thrice daily on Twitter and Google+ and 5 times daily on Pinterest.
16. Syndicate Your Content to Top Blogs: Many top blogs and networks will allow you to republish your content on their site with credit back to you; most big blogs, including mega publications like Business Insider and Huffington Post, do it if they feel that your content is good enough.

Look for a list of publications and network sites in your industry that republish content and see if they’d like to republish your articles.

17. Do Cross-Promotion with Other Bloggers: Find a blogger with similar audience to yours and see if you can do a “shout out exchange”; in other words, you mention them on your blog and they mention you on theirs. You can also promote them to your email list while they promote you to theirs.
18. Submit Your Content to Blogging Communities: Blogging communities have existed for a long time and are a good place to get traffic; some notable examples are Bizsugar in the business niche, Blokube in the blogging and social media niche and DesignFloat in the design niche. Look for a blogging community in your niche that you can share interesting articles with and occasionally submit your articles.
19. Promote Your Blog on Top Forums in Your Niche: Forums can also be a good source of traffic; many of the top forums in your niche probably get millions of monthly visitors, and many have hundreds of thousands of members, but you can’t simply start spamming the forums with your links. Instead, focus on making valuable contributions to the forum in form of ideas, response to other people’s discussions and being active in popular discussions; make sure to have a link to your blog in your forum signature, and you’ll notice an increase in your traffic.
20. Create an Ultimate/Advanced Guide: An ultimate guide is designed to be the first and last article your readers read on a subject; due to their nature, ultimate guides are usually very comprehensive in nature. It isn’t unusual to see an ultimate guide that is 5,000 – 10,000 words.

As we saw earlier in this article, search engines favor comprehensive articles rank them better; people love them too, so they’ll share them massively. By publishing an ultimate guide, you’ll benefit from all angles.

Once you’ve published your ultimate guide, reach out to bloggers in your niche and ask them to spread the word about it.

21. Include Social Share Buttons on Your Blog: Many bloggers fail to include social sharing buttons on their blogs and this is costing these bloggers social shares, exposure and traffic. While it is not clear to what extent, research shows that adding social share buttons to your page will lead to more shares of your content and as a result increased traffic.
22. Publish Regular Infographics: Research shows that infographics shared on Twitter get 823% more retweets than images and articles. Neil Patel reveals that infographics have been so effective for him, often helping him catapult his blogs from no traffic to over 100,000 visitors monthly. In his words, old infographics generate more than 50,000 monthly visitors to one of his blogs.

You can promote your blog by creating good looking infographics, especially those that share important facts and statistics, and tell influencers in your niche to share it and republish it. You should also submit your infographics to several infographics directories.

23. Publish Slides to Slideshare: Do you know that Slideshare is popularly known as the sleeping giant of content marketing. The reason for this is simple; over 70 million professionals use Slideshare, and it is one of the 100 most visited websites in the world. The good news is that you can use it to promote your blog.

In a case study, Ana Hoffman revealed that by publishing 9 presentations on Slideshare she was able to generate 243,000 views to her slides and over 1,400 clicks to her blog in 30 days; as a result, Slideshare became her second largest referral traffic. Now, that’s one great way to promote a blog!

Create your own Slideshare presentations too, using fewer words and visually rich images to communicate your points, and watch your traffic grow.

24. Facebook Groups: Facebook groups can also be a good source of traffic and exposure for your blog but, unfortunately, many people fail to get results because they approach these groups in a wrong way and can barely be differentiated from spammers.

In a case study analyzing how he increased traffic from Facebook groups by 3,000%, Bruce Zhang revealed that the best way to get traffic from Facebook groups isn’t just to post your links; instead, make sure to use catchy text images as well as a compelling message that shows how people will benefit by reading your article.

25. LinkedIn Groups: Similar to Facebook Groups, LinkedIn groups are a good source of traffic. Sharing your content with just your LinkedIn connections won’t send you traffic; instead, look for the top LinkedIn groups in your niche, join them and occasionally submit your best articles to them.
26. Promote Your Blog on Quora: Exactly how powerful is Quora for promoting your blog? Quora superstar Oliver Emberton used Quora to launch a popular blog. Within 7 month of start his blog, he was already getting millions of views monthly. Oliver did this by contributing great value and being very active on Quora; eventually, this paid off in quality traffic that led to articles on his blog going viral.
27. Look for Interview Opportunities: There are blogs and websites that are dedicated to interviewing successful people and showcasing their stories; if you have an exciting story or have a success that you can showcase, you can reach out to these websites and ask them to interview you. A good example is IdeaMensch, and there many more similar sites.
28. Ask Podcasts to Interview You: Similar to being interviewed on sites, you can ask podcast shows to interview you; many podcasters will happily oblige if they find that you have an exciting story.
29. Look for Opportunities to be Included in Link Roundups: Every niche has at least a dozen blogs that do weekly or monthly roundups; at the end of the week, or month, these blogs will publish an article with a summary of the most interesting content they read in a particular month. You can get some nice exposure by emailing these bloggers and asking them to include your article in their next roundup.
30. Key into Major Events: A major election, death, birth, sports event, etc? Smart bloggers are creative, and as a result they know how to leverage happenings around them to boost their reach and influence.

When major events happen, lots of people tend to get interested and start searching for it on search engines and social media; by capitalizing on this and using an angle relevant to your niche, you can get quality traffic. Example: “What the Superbowl Can Teach Us About Successful Blogging” or “What the Election Debates Can Teach You About Success”, etc. You get the idea? No matter the event, you can tie it to your blog’s topic and capitalize on it to boost traffic.                                                                   

31. Blog About a Major Personality: So what does blogging about Obama, or Justin Beiber or some other major personality have to do with promoting your blog? In June 2010, Think Traffic published an article titled “The Diddy Guide to Constant Creativity and Relentless Marketing“; the result was a Tweet of the article by P. Diddy himself to his 2.6 million Twitter followers.
32. Write Controversial Posts: Writing controversial posts, or attacking sacred cows in your niche, can be very powerful for generating traffic and boosting your exposure; this article on Shopify showed how publishing a controversial post can help skyrocket a blogger’s fame and traffic.
33. Include Elements of Transparency: If done right, transparency can be a very powerful weapon for promoting your blog. Several top blogs and startups can testify to this; seven-figure blogger Pat Flynn is a good example; one of the techniques he used to accelerate his blog growth was publishing income reports. People were excited about his income reports, so they visited it en mass and shared it a lot; it is also widely linked to across the web. Startups like Buffer and Groove are also using this principle to grow their blogs and business; by being transparent, they get people excited about what they are doing and this leads to more exposure for them.
34. Reduce the Number of Share Buttons on Your Blog: While we earlier noticed that including social sharing buttons on your blog can help increase traffic and social shares, there’s the paradox of choice factor to consider as well; research shows that giving people too many choices will ensure that they do not make any. In other words, having 10 social sharing buttons on your blog will make sure that your readers use none.

Smashing Magazine also noted that removing Facebook share buttons led to more traffic from Facebook, since readers now directly share their articles on their Facebook timeline instead of liking it (and shares result in more traffic than likes). So that’s consideration for a button you might want to remove.

35. Promote Your Blog on Pinterest: Pinterest can be a great source of traffic to your blog and many bloggers have leveraged it with great source to massively boost their blog traffic; Mandy Wallace was able to take her new blog to 1,000 daily visitors hugely thanks to Pinterest.

Look for quality interesting images, and focus on using irresistible headlines and you’ll be getting quality Pinterest traffic in no time.

36. Leverage Sound Bites to Increase Social Shares: According to successful blogger and psychology expert, Derek Halpern, “a sound bite is a short message, often no longer than 10 words, that describes the main idea of your content or sales message.”

Essentially, a sound bite is a persuasive summary of the message of your article that is easy to remember and easy to quote; because it is short and persuasive, people can, and will, share it, leading to more traffic for you. Mainly due to using this technique, Derek Halpern was able to generate 300 shares and around 9,000 hits for one of his article.

37. Tweetables and Shareables: Similar to sound bites, Tweetables and Shareables help you get more traffic by encouraging people to share your content; a “Tweetable” is a message you highlight from your article and design to be shared on Twitter while a “Sharable” can be shared on any social network.

You’ve probably visited your favorite blogs to see “Click to tweet” embedded inside the article? Well, that’s a Tweetable.

Highlight key points all through your article and use sites like Click to Tweet to get people to share your key points. Below is a screenshot that shows a Click to Tweet in one of Michael Hyatt’s articles.

38. Pursue Media Syndication Opportunities: Many top publications and media sites thrive on publishing a lot of content, and it isn’t unusual to see these sites publish 50 or more articles in a single day; of course, this is difficult to pull off and they have to rely on content from guests and other sources to meet their content schedule. To get around this, top media sites like Lifehacker and Business Insider republish quality content on other sites; often, they only feature content from experts but you can try to reach out to them to see if you can be a part of their content syndication program.
39. Convert Your Blog Posts into PDFs and Submit to PDF/Document Sharing Sites: Convert your blog posts into a PDF and submit it to PDF sharing sites; make sure that the final PDF file includes your bio and a link to your site so that people know how to find your blog after they finish reading the PDF. Here’s a list of PDF/document sharing sites to start with.
40. Start a Podcast: Data from Edison Research shows that there are more than 46 million podcast listeners in America; podcasts are quickly becoming the best way people consume content, because it makes it easy to consume content on a commute, while exercising and in a lot of comfortable positions. Boost your blog traffic today by starting your own podcast.

Here’s a good case study from someone who created a podcast that was downloaded by over 1,000,000 people; screenshot of his stats below.