How to Promote Your Blog Posts?

Being relatively new to the "blogosphere", I am no expert on the best methods of blog post promotion. Firstly, I do not believe that quantity is necessary strongly correlated to quality blog posts.

I think that promoting your blog post can almost take too much time away from the actual writing. So it is a personal choice on how much time you devote to writing and promotion your blog.

Nevertheless I have read plenty of articles and hope the below can help you promote your blog posts.

Ways to Promote your blog posts:

Create Great Content:

More than anything else, are you producing quality content? If you’re selling something, do you go beyond being a simple brochure with the same information that can be found on hundreds of other sites? 

Do you provide a reason for people to spend more than a few seconds reading your pages?

Get your content right, and you’ve created a solid foundation to bring traffic on your blog posts. If your posts are really good, most likely people will link to, read, comment, and share it.

Be Active in Social Media: 

The vast majority of experienced bloggers will say use Twitter, Facebook, Google+ etc to share your posts. However this takes time and effort to build up a significant or valuable following. It takes time to maintain your presence across these sites. Read More about, How to Manage Your Social Media Efforts.

Submit to Blog Directories: 

Add your blog to directory sites like Best of the Web Blog Search, EatonWeb Blog Directory, and OnToplist.com. Here is a list of 23 Blog Directories To Submit Your Blog To.

Use Feeds: 

Utilise RSS feeds. RSS readers remaining a popular method of readers keeping track of news from various sources. There are some great directory lists like this one from TopRank Blog that you can submit your blog or RSS feed to.

Participate in Forums/Communities: 

Participate in online communities relevant to your blog is an highly effective strategy. Forums/Communities that are close to your market/niche and have an active community can be a great way to build traffic to your blog.

Being an active and useful member of niche related forums is a fantastic way to find targeted traffic for your site.

Use Tools: 

Use tools to Publish posts automatically to social media networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. For example, whenever you post a blog on Wordpress, Everypost can spread the word through all your other social channels automatically! Read More about Content Creation and Marketing Tools.

SEO: 

Use your blog content to appear in search engine organic results, and avid Pay Per Click Service. This can be achieved by simply being smart about your existing content and new content. Writing a well structured and informative blog post can achieve higher search engine organic rank.

Use Analytics: 

Use analytics to work out where your most of the traffic is coming from and Know your conversion rates. You are trying to make the most of those visitors who actually visit and stay on your site for more than 2 seconds.

Use Mailing lists: 

Good old fashioned email is still massively powerful in pulling in traffic. Email marketing is a very effective method in getting your blog articles seen and clicked on. Sending a email to your list as soon as you publish a new post is the best way to get a fury of traffic to it.

Branding: 

Be sure to include your blog URL in all your messaging (email, social media, business cards).

Guest Blogging:

Guest blogging has long been an effective tactic for building a community, a way of growing visibility for both your website and your byline, a means of driving traffic, increasing the exchange of ideas and a method of building inbound links to your website.

Follow these steps to ensure your guest blogging efforts are well-received by the search engines and new audience:

1. Only Post on High Quality and Relevant Websites
2. Contribute Original, Quality Content
3. Link with Value in Mind
4. Build Engaging, Long-Term Relationships

Deliver The Right Mix of Content: 

On your blog, you need to deliver the right mix of content Regularly. Include Images, Infographics, Audio and Video in your blog posts. It helps engage your visitors to your post and encourage them to share your posts.

Bend the Rules: 

Leveraged paid advertising, mass marketing (spam) and/or guerilla marketing to build early traffic.

Offline Activity: 

Get out the building. Attend conferences, meet people face-to-face. Often people read a blog because they discovered them in the flesh.

Good Writing: 

Writing and sharing personal and real experiences is always popular.

Ignore Frequency: 

I don't believe posting regularly is important. Many of the good blogs I find are from discovering brilliant articles published years ago.

Knowing how to promote your blog posts is essential if you want to get more blog traffic and build your audience. In summary you need to spend an extensive amount of time across many methods to successfully promote your blog.

You can't simply publish and hope for the best and only sharing with your email list and social media profiles is NOT enough as they are limited in numbers.

You have to reach out to authorities in your niche, syndicate your content, share with others and put in some work to get links, shares and new readers.

When you spend more time promoting you get rewarded with a more engaged community who in turn tell others about your site causing a snowball effect.

Following steps above is a good start but if you're looking for more advanced methods that can bring more visitors to your blog.