How To Promote A Blog Post & Explode Your Traffic Once And For All

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Tired of the crickets that greet you every time you publish a post?

Your blog is properly set up. Your content is well-researched, well-written and just plain awesome and still, no one would read it – except maybe your mother (and you’re even beginning to doubt that). You’ve been at it for weeks now. Surely, Google doesn’t take that long to index you? Surely, someone human is out there just waiting for your own special content.

What is going on?

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My dear, if you’re a new blogger, the answer is most likely to be something incredible simple: Nobody probably told you that you had to promote the life out of that blog post after you publish it.

But I do share it on Facebook and Twitter, you wail – ready to tear your heart out. Sometimes, even Instagram and Pinterest.

I even use hashtags. No one cares!

Ahem.

Okay, first of all, take deep breaths. Trust us, you do not want blogger overwhelm because it can induce you to quit.

We know the feeling. It might not seem like it but every single blogger out there – even those who are now getting thousands of pageviews a day – started where you are just now: with a brand new blog and zero traffic. So, what can you do to get from where you are to where you want to be?

When you’re just starting out, you look for traffic because it’s not going to automatically find you. Not at first. And that is what this article is about: how to promote your blog post after you publish it so you finally get the traffic you want.

Ready?

Perfect!

But before we begin, just a quick caveat here: We can give you all the tips and tricks we’re using but if you don’t actually implement them, they won’t do you any good at all. Okay? Remember what they say, “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t get it to drink.”

Ummm…Not that you’re a horse but you get what we’re trying to say, right?

Awesome!

So, after you hit publish, you now have the live link to your brand new blog post. Yay! Remember that a live link is an important tool that many bloggers underestimate.

We’ll show you exactly how to use it to promote a blog post in the list below. It’s not in order of priority, though we like to start with Google URL inspector as either a first or second step.

Internal Links

The moment your post goes live, you need to copy the URL and then scour your own website for relevant posts that you could insert it in. For example, after this post was published, we went to the finances section in our blog and looked at all of our blogging posts (there are only three so far as we have a few categories) and inserted our live link to these new posts.

We then went to the Beyond The 9-5 Series and inserted this link on some of the posts there too.

And so on.

Why is this important exactly?

The magic word: SEO.

According to Yoast, “Before your content can rank, it needs links. Google finds your posts and pages best when they’re linked to from somewhere on the web. Internal links also connect your content and give Google an idea of the structure of your website. They can establish a hierarchy on your site, allowing you to give the most important pages and posts more link value than other, less valuable, pages.“

In other words, Google uses links the way Theseus used Ariadne’s thread – as a guiding map. Make sure Google doesn’t get lost.

Google Search Console

Speaking of Google, we all know the importance of blog posts getting indexed, right? If your post or your site isn’t indexed, there’s no chance it will rank. And if it doesn’t rank, well, guess what? It’s not going to appear even when someone starts googling the exact keyword you were going for (you are going for a keyword, right?).

For established blogs and other websites, this isn’t much of a problem. They already have other posts that are ranking anyway, Google already knows the way their sites are structured and how often they get updated.

You’re a new blogger (READ: under 1 year old) with no other website and zero experience? Then you really want (need, even) all the help you can get.

Enter Google Search Console, where you can do all sorts of really cool stuff that we won’t get into just now (like submitting a sitemap).

What concerns us immediately after publishing a post is actually Google Search Console’s URL Inspection so we can “fetch and render” your post (see the image below):

You copy your live link again (see how incredibly useful it is?) and paste it into the bar and hit Enter.

You’ll get this message:

It can take a good few minutes for it to go through its checks and then Google will tell you whether your post has been indexed or not. If you do this within minutes of publishing, chances are Google hasn’t had the chance to crawl your site yet and you get this:

Click Request Indexing and wait until Google tells you that this link (your brand-new blog post) has been added to a priority crawl queue, like so:

And that’s it.

For a more in-depth explanation as to why you need to fetch and render every post, feel free to go through this FREE tutorial. Don’t worry, it’s not too technical a tutorial and we promise, your head will not be swimming with too much info after.

Pinterest

Oh, Pinterest!

Seriously, it’s like Taylor Swift’s song Blank Space:

via GIPHY

Unless you’re in a highly specialised niche and you’re certain that your audience is nowhere near it, then you need to make sure that your new blog post makes an appearance in Pinterest.

If you don’t know how to work Pinterest, you’re at a serious disadvantage, and we highly recommend at least going through this FREE training so you have a basic grasp of it and can pin an image.

But what’s your strategy, Kevin and Jade?

Now, we won’t even attempt to explain exactly how we do Pinterest because everything we do, we learned from Pinteresting Strategies, which saw our stats take off in a shockingly effective way (from 19k monthly views to over 100K and nearly double the number of followers).

By the time we came across this course, we were already a few months in, struggling with getting traffic and have already been banned by Pinterest twice (yes, they ban accounts and they’re very quick about it too).

Sheer desperation got us buying the course and our traffic tripled in 3 weeks. It’s that good! So, if your budget allows, buy it now. If you really don’t have the money to buy anything now (and we’ve all been there), you can get by with Crystal Fogleman’s strategy.

Now, a word of caution. Carly’s course is based on the strategy called manual pinning. That means you pin everything yourself. And if you’re just starting out, then you really need to manually pin so you can see how Pinterest works and how it works for you. We can personally verify that if you follow her strategy consistently, your traffic will soar.

But what if you don’t have the time?

Then you’d probably be better off going with a scheduler. And Pinterest’s current favourite scheduler is Tailwind, which you can try for free for up to 100 pins.

But seriously, get into Pinterest.

Social Media

If you’re wondering why Pinterest is in a category of its own whilst Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are here lumped together in one spot, it’s because Pinterest is actually not a social network. It’s a visual search engine. Think Google but for images.

Anyway, when you’re brand new, social media is your best bet for getting traffic. You very likely already have social media presence and if you don’t, then it’s time to learn.

Facebook

As far as we’re concerned, Facebook Pages are dead unless you’re an already well-established company or famous public figure.

For the new blogger, the blog’s Facebook page hardly brings any traffic – maybe one or two a day so we don’t really focus on it. We still have it though because people do still check your presence, how long you’ve been active as a page, how many times you post, what you already post etc. They just rarely click over to your actual blog from Facebook.

And clicks to your site – that’s what we’re really after, isn’t it?

No click, no pageview.

That said, we try to post at least twice a day and if we’ve just published a post, you can bet your last dollar that it’s going up on our page.

Perhaps more important than putting things up on our page is putting our blog posts up in relevant Facebook groups. Pages might be dead when it comes to clicks but groups are very much alive.

There are different types of groups you can join to get traffic. You can join other blogger groups or you can join niche groups. The blogger groups are great for support and for their share threads.

What are share threads?

Well, most blog-specific groups have a rule in place that prevents anyone from just dropping their blog links on the wall (AKA self-promotion and the slightly harsher spam) and only limit such promotion to certain threads, called share threads. When you’re new, you want to drop your links in one of those.

Just remember, reciprocity is expected in most share threads so you can’t just drop your link and run, you need to click on other links too and maybe even comment. Admins check to see if you’ve complied and they’re quite thorough about it. They will boot you out of the group for non-compliance.

What about niche groups?

These are the mental health groups, parenting groups, breastfeeding groups etc. You can join the groups relevant to your niche and (here’s the really important bit), provide as much value as you can to members of the group. Same rule regarding self-promotion and spamming apply here. Don’t do it!

What we do is we go look at our niche groups and see if there’s anyone we can help. For example, if we have someone requesting strategies for coping with anxiety, we answer with the tips we use – regular exercise, long soak in the bath, meditation and tapping therapy. Now, we actually have a post on tapping therapy so we’ll drop our link there.

We comment, “This is how we cope with anxiety. We make sure that we do some cardio exercise at least 3x a week, enjoy a long soak in the bath (with a few drops of essential oils), do some meditation and if all else fails, follow along with Brad Yates’ tapping therapy. Here’s the link if you’d like to check it out. We find him very effective.”

See? We’re actually helping someone out and not spamming a group with our link.

That’s why Facebook is still our second largest source of traffic.

Twitter

Full disclosure: we are not Twitter fans.

But we’re on it because some, if not all, of the movers and shakers in our niche, happen to be on Twitter.

When in Rome, remember?

So, we have an account that we post our links to and where we share other bloggers’ posts if they’re relevant to our niche. We like to use Triberr to make the process easier and all we did was to link Twitter to Triberr (learn how to do that here), check out our stream and start sharing a good mix of ours and other people’s content. They all go straight to our linked Twitter account.

It’s pretty fab.

Of course, we still need to engage with our audience and no scheduler or content curation tool can do that for you.

Unfortunately, all we really do is post as many links as we can and then leave it at that. Not much of a strategy as you can see and yet we see some very minimal traffic from our very minimal effort. We highly recommend going through some proper training on how to leverage Twitter to gain more traffic because that’s really our main point: it would be best to have a presence on Twitter because it’s pretty massive.

We’re eyeing this totally FREE training here and will definitely do this when we have more time to spare.

Instagram

Another full disclosure: we have a love-hate relationship with Instagram. Sometimes, we’re proper besties and other times, we’re like this:

via GIPHY

So, what do we do? We create Instagram-worthy photos on Picmonkey, load them all up on the Tailwind scheduler, write the captions and add hashtags and that’s it. A few times a day, we engage with other IG users and also participate in IG threads on Facebook.

To be honest, we haven’t done this the past month because we have too much on our plate, not enough time and the ROI was pretty abysmal. We know that some bloggers get pretty big on IG and get celebrity influencer status but we only got a handful (literally) of PVs from IG so it’s quite low on our priority list. But this could just be our niche. You might be a travel or fashion blogger, in which case, IG just might be your castle.

For in-depth and totally FREE training on Instagram from someone with over 20k followers, click here.

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SiteComments

Okay, so this one would only really work if you’re a Wealthy Affiliate (the only affiliate marketing course we recommend) Premium Member. According to Kyle Loudoun, one of the founders of Wealthy Affiliate, it’s basically a “revolutionary comment platform available uniquely to the Premium members at Wealthy Affiliate. With SiteComments you are going to be able to get high-quality engagement on your website simply “requesting” comments. This will lead to better rankings in search engines, more engagement on your website, a higher level of content trust by your audience, and more conversions ($$$).”

You also earn some money if you leave quality comments. Since we’re premium members, this facility is available to us. And we make full use of it. As soon as we publish a post on our blog, we jump onto SiteComments and make a request.

Of course, Wealthy Affiliate is built on helping each other and in true pay-it-forward fashion, you can only request for comments once you’ve earned 2 credits.

How do you earn 2 credits?

You comment on someone else’s blog. But it can’t be just any old comment, it needs to be relevant and shows that you actually read the post. In other words, none of that “good job” kind of comment that actually doesn’t bring any value.

Not a Wealthy Affiliate Premium Member and don’t want to become one?

Then you can adapt this strategy by going to other blogs in your niche, reading relevant posts and making relevant comments.

Remember that blogging is a collaborative effort. You succeed by lifting others up.

To Recap

The key takeaway from this particular post is that, as a new blogger, you need to be proactive when it comes to attracting traffic. Actually, in the early days, you shouldn’t be content with just being attractive, you need to go out and put yourself out there.

If you spent 5 hours writing your post, you should be spending at least double that time promoting it and not just sitting back whilst refreshing your Google Analytics dashboard wondering why the numbers aren’t pouring in.

They’re not going to just yet. You’re new, remember?

It takes time quite a bit of time before that happens (about a year is actually quite common) and even then, it pays to be proactive.

So, you need to make sure that you have well-developed internal links, you’re getting indexed by search engines, you’re present on social media and you’re commenting on other people’s site in relevant niches.

That’s it.

Simple yes, but a lot of work.

But hey, it’s worth it, right?

What about you? How do you promote a blog post after publishing it?

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