3 Efficient Ways to Promote Your Blog

‍To make your social media account profitable, you must build a strategy, prepare content, and build traffic. In this article, we tell you how to promote your blog so that it brings in customers and does not lie as a dead weight.

‍It is important to prepare your blog properly before you start promoting. Attracting an audience is no point if they don’t stay on your pages. Therefore, take this stage responsibly. Before discussing how to market a blog, let’s talk about preparation.

Set a Blog Goal

‍We often meet specialists who write blogs “because they have to” or because another specialist said so. Instead of gradually leading readers to purchase, the specialist simply fills the account with publications — so there are more. This approach has no goal. Therefore, there are no results either. If you think, “I have to promote my blog,” ask yourself why.

‍We look at social networks—this is a tool with which you can communicate with your audience, find new clients, and sell services. Therefore, accounts and communities solve four tasks: increase coverage, increase trust, showcase, and sell services.

• Increased coverage. Social networks increase the reach of potential customers. They bring awareness. The content you create is distributed across platforms and shown to friends and relatives. They follow the account, subscribe, listen to the expert, and sooner or later, turn to services.
• Increase confidence in work. The work of many specialists is too complex to find a contractor easily. Ordering a design or architectural project is not the same as going out to buy bread. Clients spend a long time looking closely, analyzing, and comparing different specialists. It takes a lot of time to prove that you can be trusted.
• Showcases. The easiest way to convince a potential buyer is to show the results you have already achieved. Tell us what work you have already done, what happened as a result, and how much time and money it took to implement it. A potential customer will come across the post, and if his desires coincide with your portfolio, he will seek advice.
• Sell services. Through social networks, you communicate with potential clients: first, you hook them with publications, then you motivate them to subscribe. When people follow a blog for a long time, they gradually become imbued with it and begin to trust your opinion. Ultimately, they write for a consultation where you sell them a product. The scheme looks simple, but it is important to build the strategy correctly – we’ll talk about this later.

‍A blog promoting business gives an additional effect – recognition in the community. Other specialists follow you and mention you in their accounts and public pages. Specialized stores and marketplaces often invite authors of thematic blogs for interviews. They post articles and interviews with your participation, offer their products for testing, and provide personal discounts.

Choose a Social Media Approach

‍In total, I identify two approaches to how specialists manage social networks. I like one because I don’t need to bother, and the second attracts me with its efficiency:

Collect Portfolio

‍In this, the expert simply saves his projects to an account or community. Social networks are turning into a warehouse where a specialist brings already warmed-up buyers. When, during negotiations, the customer asks about work experience, the contractor simply provides a link to social networks.

Build Content Marketing

‍In this case, the specialist maintains a full-fledged blog that collects subscribers, builds a loyal community out of them, and sells services. Social networks are becoming a marketing tool: attracting customers, convincing them, and closing deals.

Select Social Networks for Promotion

‍If you want to succeed on any social network, it is important to choose the right approach. Assess where your competitors are currently moving and what results they are achieving. It is important to look not only at successful accounts but also at the market as a whole. If there are only a few well-promoted specialists on a social network, the platform is probably not well-suited for blog promotion.

Prepare Content

‍The basis of any blog is useful content. It is why users log into your account—each person tries to find a solution to their problem. Let’s take interior designers as an example again. From the specialist’s blog, they are looking for advice on how to make repairs convenient, what colors of wallpaper are now in fashion, what double-glazed windows to choose from, and how to repaint the legs of chairs.

‍The relationship between you and the subscriber is a partnership: you help him with everyday tasks, and he likes you and buys services. Therefore, you should not tell how you spent your day – this is interesting only to your loved ones.

‍Globally useful content can be divided into “how to do it well” and “how not to do it badly.” It is what every reader wants: it’s unlikely that anyone deliberately wants to ruin the renovation. Start from this need and divide the content into categories.

‍Additionally, it is worth publishing engaging and outreach posts:

• Engaging. Those who are motivated to interact with the content, like reposting and writing comments. This way, you build a dialogue with the audience and, at the same time, get additional organic coverage using the smart feed. For example, arrange a survey on a debatable topic, ask to evaluate the result of the work, and conduct a quiz.
• Coverage. Posts for a wide audience. Such content is designed for users to distribute—this is how a new audience learns about your account. For example, these could be jokes in which many people recognize themselves, competitions, or practical jokes.

Structure Your Content

‍Ready content can be linked to funnels. This system allows you to gradually immerse a person in your product, from acquaintance to sale. In this case, the content acts autonomously – you immerse the user in reading, and then he gradually becomes loyal to you without your direct participation. The scheme looks like this: attraction → entertainment → sale. How to advertise your blog? Here are a couple of examples:

• You run an advertisement for a free mini-course on design, the user registers, and you receive his contact. Your subscriber gradually goes through lessons and gets acquainted with the products. In one of the lessons, invite him to join the chat with his classmates. They can chat about the course topic, including talking with you. In the chat, you can announce events and offer closed discounts – due to the feeling of a “closed club,” there will be more trust in the speaker, and the subscriber will be more likely to buy the product.
• Another example is when you make a reel on a popular topic, giving three tips on interior design. In the publication description, you write even more about the current GUIDE. In the compilation, give a couple more tips to entice the reader, and at the end, provide a link to the PDF file in exchange for an email. You can launch a newsletter on it, gradually introducing the subscriber and bringing him to the point of purchase.

‍This way, you can get the most out of free blog promotion.

‍There are three blog promotion techniques to expand your audience on social networks: organic promotion, targeted advertising, and seeding. The first method is slow but completely free. If you want to develop a blog and turn it into a sales tool, it is better to use all three methods and allocate money for the advertising budget. You can also use blog promotion services. It is more expensive but usually more effective.

Method 1. Targeted Advertising

‍It is a promotion within a social network. You set the audience settings: gender, age, place of residence, and interests. Then you write an advertising publication and send it to promotion. Targeted advertising on each platform has limitations, but it is still worth developing each social network evenly. This way, you can stimulate the natural growth of subscribers.

‍Externally, targeted advertising looks the same as regular publications in the feed. The only difference is the mark that the entry is being promoted. To make an advertisement stand out among other posts, you should make it more attractive: for example, add a personal appeal to the user, describe a familiar problem, or describe the main benefit of your product or service.

Method 2. Advertising with Bloggers

‍You agree with a large account or blog owner and offer to discuss your product. There are three ways to do this: pay for publication, offer a swap in exchange for services, or mutual PR. Then, the blogger will write about you, and you will write about the blogger.

‍Advertising publications for purchase are built on a similar principle as targeted advertising. Sometimes, they are compiled by the blogger so that the entry in the account looks natural.

‍A few subtleties worth considering:

• You need to select bloggers carefully. Check their coverage statistics and evaluate how loyal the speaker’s audience is. It happens that a specialist gains subscribers, so there is almost no profit from advertising.
• Advertising can be served directly or natively. Native advertising is when a blogger pretends to recommend a product himself to share interesting information. Sometimes, this approach is appropriate, but often, subscribers reveal the fraud and accuse the blogger of deception.

Method 3. Collaboration

‍You can promote a blog on social networks through co-authored publications. An expert posts a blog post, and another expert does the same. Interaction formats can be different: for example, you can divide a post into two parts and post it in different communities, organize a special project, or even swap blogs for a couple of days.

‍Publications in collaboration work best on Instagram – there is a special button for this on the platform. When you specify a co-author, the post appears simultaneously in the feeds of two accounts. This could be a paid promotion with the help of a larger blogger or a free arrangement with an author with a similar audience.

‍How to promote a blog post? Combining different promotion methods can help increase subscribers constantly. It will reduce the cost of advertising and find profitable channels to attract readers. Then, you will be able to update your blog audience and maintain high coverage and engagement.

‍Most of the time, social media requires just three metrics: reach, engagement, and conversion. These metrics need to be tracked for the account as a whole and for each individual publication in particular. This way, you will understand which decisions were the most successful and which were the opposite, and you should not repeat them.

Coverage

‍Reach shows how many unique users saw your post or account. One person only adds one coverage unit to the statistic. They will add ten views and only one reach if he views ten posts. Using this indicator, you can evaluate how effectively you expand your audience.

‍Blog statistics divide coverage into several types. This way, you can track how actively your subscribers are following you and what kind of audience growth advertising provides.

Engagement

‍This is an index of your audience’s activity. The more often subscribers like repost, and comment on posts, the higher the engagement. It is designated as ER and is calculated using the following formulas:

• ERview — engagement per number of views: (likes + reposts + comments) / total views;
• ERday — engagement for the period: (likes + reposts + comments) / number of subscribers on the day of measurement;
• ERpost – engagement per post: (post likes + post reposts + post comments) / a number of subscribers on the measurement day.

‍The indicator reflects how interesting your content is to your audience. The higher it is, the more often the algorithms consider your posts interesting and show them to new users.

Conversion

‍This metric shows how many users clicked on your link. It is the percentage of the audience that read the post and then clicked on the link to the product you are offering. This way, you can track how effectively the publication worked and how many sales or subscribers it brought.

‍CTR is calculated using the formula: CTR = number of clicks/number of impressions × 100 For example, if 150 people saw your post and 3 of them clicked on the link, the CTR would be 3 / 150 × 100 = 2%.

‍You can add UTM tags to your links to track conversions more effectively. These special designations help record statistics of conversions from a specific link, resulting in more detailed analytics.

‍In the link, you can specify the site and traffic source, indicate the advertising campaign, specific post, and date, and later analyze which publications attracted more requests for services. For example, you can see how many clicks to the store came from a post published on Friday. Then, the results of publications in this account and on the site as a whole will be compared.

‍A blog can be an excellent tool for promoting your business. However, the blog needs to be properly promoted in the selected social network. It’s pretty easy. However, it is worth considering the need for financial investments. Besides, it is essential to remember to prepare your blog and track promotion results properly.