Blogging is a great way to position yourself and your brand as a thought-leader in your industry. You can show your expertise, build authority, attract traffic, generate new leads, and, eventually, convert them into clients.
However, to that end, your posts have to reach an audience of interested readers. Unless you are already an industry leader, for this to happen, you need to invest the time and effort to make your blog popular – you need a blog promotion checklist.
Why a checklist and not simply a strategy, you’re asking?
Well, because following a checklist implies consistency, and to generate incremental traffic, build a loyal audience, and grow, this is a top priority.
Furthermore, publishing high-quality content on a regular basis and keeping your audience engaged is a time-consuming endeavour that may require a large investment. Without the proper promotional campaign, the ROI of blogging can be questionable at best.
In this article, we provide the ultimate blog promotion checklist for 2022. Keep in mind that you don’t need to implement all of these tactics at once, especially, if you are just getting started with blogging. Choose only the ones you find the most achievable and work your way up to the rest.
The point is to keep pushing until you see measurable results!
The checklist is divided into three overall phases that directly affect your blog’s promotion efforts – preliminary work, active promotion, and follow-up efforts.
Let’s have a look at what each of these involves.
Preliminary Work
The preliminary phase of the blog promotion checklist enables the next stages and ensures that you will maximize the impact of your campaigns. Without it, you may still obtain results, but they will be at a smaller scale. So why not amplify them?
1. Audience Research
The goal of running a blog is not only to share your thoughts with the internet, but to create an audience of potential clients and build a connection with them. To be able to achieve this, you need to know who those people are, where they hang out online, what their pain points are, what types of content they like, etc.
This information allows you not only to create content that serves their needs and makes a difference, but also to know how to promote your blog to them.
2. SEO Optimization
Even if your posts focus on topics that interest your target audience, they may not be able to find your website if your content is not SEO optimized.
Organic traffic is a powerful tool and to utilize it in your blog promotion efforts, you need to pay attention to:
- Keyword Research
- On-Page Optimization
- Technical SEO
- Backlinks
Managing these, combined with other promotional tactics, will allow you to increase your blog’s online visibility, boost your digital presence, and build a brand in the SERPs. All these assets are imperative to your success, because the more people see your links in relevant search results, the more they will click on them, and the more they click on them, the more often the algorithm will show your links.
And right now, nothing beats being popular in the SERPs!
3. Write Quality Content
Regardless of how much effort you put into blog promotion, if your content is not well-organized and your posts are mediocre, you are bound to fail.
To that end, you should write on topics that you are an expert in, research each post well, and rely on solid facts. You can back up your statements with links to industry-grade studies and reports, quote renowned figures that your audience considers credible, and, if possible, express a unique and interesting point of view.
Ultimately, whether your content is for education or entertainment, you should be able to provide real value to the reader.
Pro Tip: Write engaging and original titles, but make sure that the content delivers on what the title promises. Otherwise, you risk disappointing the reader, increasing your bounce rate, and hurting your blog’s online reputation.
4. Build an Email List
Email is still one of the most powerful promotional tools nowadays, but to benefit from it, you need a robust email list. This is usually done via various lead generation methods, including:
- Lead Magnets
- Exclusive Content
- Strategically Placed Opt-in Forms
- Industry Research
- Discounts and Promotions
- Personalization Offers, etc.
All in all, if there is something of value for the user, they’re interested in the topics you cover, and you ask nicely, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t sign up to your list.
Email leads are, more often than not, of high quality, because they are people who willingly provide you with their contact information. This makes them more likely not only to convert, but to promote your blog by sharing it with friends.
Furthermore, the more people you have on your list, the better the chances are that they will engage with your emails and your content.
5. Be Active on Social Media
When researching your audience, you should pay special attention to the social media networks they favour, and strive to build a presence and following there. This way, when you start promoting your blog, there will be people who see what you share.
If you are just starting out with your blog it may be challenging to build your social media branding, because it, generally, comes with publishing content. However, you should at least have a social media strategy – what types of posts to publish, how often, which communities to be active in, what budget to allocate to paid posts, etc.
6. Competitor Research
Keeping an eye on your competitors will show you how they approach promoting their blogs and to what success. You should check how often they publish new content, what channels they distribute it on, whether they successfully encourage engagement and how, etc.
Furthermore, in your research, you may identify keyword silos on your blog, and topic gaps on theirs, which will provide you with ideas on what content to create and new angles to explore.
Active Promotion
The next phase of the blog promotion checklist focuses on what you can do to actively promote your blog and the new posts you are creating.
Generally, these revolve around sending emails, posting updates on social media, and building connections with other experts, brands, and influencers that can help you out.
7. Send Emails
Each new post that you publish should be distributed to your email list. Make sure to A B test different subject lines, email structures, and copy until you find what drives the most engagement with your audience.
For example, although some people respond better to emails with images, others prefer only text.
A good rule of thumb when A B testing is to give the email some time, let’s say a few days, and analyse it to see which test group responded better.
Once you have the results, you can apply the winning formula to the users who didn’t even open the email, and see if their behaviour changes.
8. Create a Newsletter
Depending on how often you publish content and on what topics, you can set up weekly or monthly newsletters to keep your audience in the loop. In these, you can group related articles, curate an editor’s pick, share recent content updates, pillar posts, etc.
The point is that these should provide additional value to the user by giving them organized information about the topics that they are interested in.
9. Post and Repost on Social Media
Social media is one of the most prominent places to promote your blog and generate traffic. There, you can stay in touch with your audience, learn how they feel about your content, and build a relationship. However, your efforts shouldn’t end with sharing your articles on your profiles.
You should create engaging posts to accompany your links and use the proper format, copy, and style to make the content relevant to the respective platform.
- Short videos work best on Facebook, as well as excerpts and highlights from the text, posted together with a link. (Just keep in mind to double-check the link preview, title text, and image that the algorithm generates when you share your posts, as these may need to be manually edited to look well in your follower’s newsfeed.)
To ensure that your links look great, consider using a plugin that applies Open Graph tags to your content – this will, actually, improve your link preview not only on FB, but on other platforms as well.
- While it’s not impossible to post links on Instagram, it is just not the type of content that works best there. You should consider creating images, graphics, carousels, or reels that capture the essence of your articles and present it in a visual way.
However, if you have above 10K followers, you can still add links to your posts. Aside from that, the best you can do is to feature your blog in your bio and mention that at the end of pertinent posts, so users know where to find more information.
- LinkedIn favours native content, which means that one of the best strategies to promote your blog is to repurpose a selection of your articles for the platform. You can rewrite the content into a shorter version, provide a link to the original, and mention that it offers more detailed information and added value.
Also, slides are quite popular there and can be used to visualize the information, similar to Instagram carousels.
- When it comes to sharing links, attracting traffic, and creating engagement, Twitter is one of the best places to build a following for your blog. You can tweet quotes from your article, launch engagement games, share visuals, publish larger portions of content split into threads, and add links to your blog in practically any relevant post.
Furthermore, people are used to turning to the platform for news, business information, and professional networking and your content will not feel unnatural there.
- Pinterest is probably the most underestimated social media platform when it comes to business. However, it’s quite popular for visual searches and provides an opportunity to reach more people with your original graphics and infographics.
The great thing there is that you can not only share the image but add a link to the pertinent blog post and drive traffic to it. To boost the visibility of your content, make sure to optimize the image description with the proper keywords.
- While mature audiences are still skeptical about the merits of TikTok, younger generations simply love it. If you can come up with short, fun, and engaging videos relevant to your blog’s topic, your team’s day-to-day, or anything else industry-related, by all means, create an account and start posting.
Also, make sure to repost the articles a few times with different content – you can change the copy by putting an accent on a different section, making a video, publishing one of the unique creatives, and so on. The point is to give different users a reason to engage, comment, and click on the links.
Another thing to take into account is the time of the day and week. There’s a nice article by SocialPilot that can give you clues on when to post for maximal engagement. However, if you have an international audience, these hours may not be totally relevant. In this case, it’s best to stick with the time zone of the majority of your followers.
10. Enable Content Syndication
If done properly, content syndication allows you to build backlinks to your blog, boost your SEO, and grow your traffic.
It involves republishing your articles on third-party syndication websites, where, depending on the platform, the whole piece of content can be featured or only the title and the link.
While this tactic sounds great, it should be executed with caution, because, technically, syndicated posts are duplicate content and may create SEO issues. As a result, because these websites have more traffic and, potentially, authority, there is a risk that the replica of your content may rank better than the original. To avoid this, both you and the third party should use canonical tags to indicate which page should the algorithm prioritize.
11. Repurpose Your Posts into Video
Regardless of whether you are considering creating videos for your social media profiles, YouTube, or to enrich your blog, repurposing your posts is a promising way to reach new audiences.
Furthermore, videos are highly shareable content and drive far more engagement than other formats. In fact, 62% of marketers use them because of the high number of shares, likes, and comments they generate.
Nowadays, there are multiple free and paid tools that allow you to convert your content into videos without any special equipment. However, if you want to go the extra mile, you could start by shooting completely original videos featuring yourself in them.
Whatever you decide, make sure to not only republish your content on all your channels and feature them in your blog, but create a YouTube channel as well. There, you can publish links to your blog and posts in the description of the channel and the videos, and boost additional awareness and traffic.
12. Repurpose Your Post into a Podcast
Creating a podcast or at least an audio version of your posts nowadays is easier than ever. There are free tools and WordPress plugins that allow you to record your shows and feature them on your website.
You can also upload them on Spotify and iTunes, where you can provide links to your blog in both the channel description and the transcripts of the individual episodes. This way, you can drive traffic and acquire backlinks at the same time.
In addition, if you decide to launch a podcast (as opposed to simply recording audio versions of your articles) you can invite guests for interviews and discussions, and repurpose the episodes’ transcripts into blogs.
Furthermore, you should encourage guests to post on their socials, tag you, and link to your website. They will be more than happy to share their appearance with their audience and this will drive fresh traffic to your channels.
On top of that, adding a “listen to this article” option will make your blog more accessible to people with disabilities which is a great way to show that you welcome and care about all audiences.
13. Repurpose Your Posts into Infographics
Similarly, to videos, infographics are a great way to visualize your articles and transmit information to your followers in an easy to digest and engaging way.
Infographics tend to receive a lot of likes, shares, and comments, and, if you provide an embedded link, they can even be republished by other websites.
In addition, when optimized with the proper tags and meta information, they can drive traffic from image search.
14. Engage with Your Audience
By actively engaging with your audience, you can build a meaningful connection to them. Furthermore, you can better understand them and learn how they feel about your blog. Leveraging this information, you can improve your content, come up with new topic ideas, and stay relevant.
In addition, when you interact with people, you show them that they matter and you value their opinion. This automatically cuts the distance between you and paves the way towards turning them into brand ambassadors. They may share your content more often, recommend them to their peers, and, overall, create positive word of mouth.
To that end, make sure to answer comments both on your blog and social networks; ask people what they think about your articles, implement their suggestions; create polls, and discuss the data.
15. Join Discussions on Industry Forums
While it is important to be loved by your audience, it’s imperative to be respected by other experts in your industry. Building connections or even partnerships with them allows you to generate valuable backlinks and mentions, build credibility, and boost your authority.
To that end, you need to promote not only your blog in particular but your personal brand as someone who knows their stuff.
You can use social listening tools and Google Alerts to track relevant topics and search terms and join discussions on industry forums. This way, you will be able to show your knowledge and insight and build relationships with other people in your industry.
However, avoid directly advertising your blog, because this may discredit you – remember you are there to show off your expertise and make friends, the rest should come naturally.
Bottom Line
The greatest advantage of a blog promotion checklist is that it allows you to keep your efforts streamlined and organized. Based on it, you can build a workflow and a process and never miss important steps. This consistency is bound to pay off in incremental traffic growth and more efficient reach out.
However, to serve its purpose, your checklist should be relevant and up-to-date. Each audience is unique and what may work for one brand can be useless to another. Furthermore, people’s behavior and habits change over time, and so should your approach.
