How to Promote Your Blog and Get Results

 

Having an internet marketing blog is an invaluable asset for any webmaster or online business owner who wants to go the whole hog to improve the bottom line of his or her ventures. This is why it’s important for you to know how to promote your blog in sundry ways and get the results you desire.

 

Blogging is a powerful tool to continually generate free targeted traffic from search engines if you invest time and/or money to do the needful. In our first article on how to create a blog, I started off to explain the basics of blogging for money and influence.

 

But as soon as you finish setting up your blog and publish your first blog post, the next onerous task is to promote your blog to your target audience. If you ask me, blog promotion is a Herculean task a lot of bloggers continually contend with on a daily basis if you don’t have the hang of it.

 

For you to succeed in blog marketing, you’ve to develop a plan and strategy and follow it to the letter in order to become successful at it. To get started, you’ve to first ensure that there are high quality blog posts published on your website worth reading, sharing and linking to.

 

Secondly, you’ve to optimize your blog so that your marketing campaigns and efforts will be minimal or at best result driven. If you research and aim at the right keywords, there is every chance that your promotional efforts will hit its target and bring in ideal prospects, leads and customers to your business.

 

Blog promotion can be done through paid adverts and free advertising methods. While free blog promotion is not entirely gratis, you’ve to spend quality time and energy to make it work. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in.

 

SEO is twofold i.e. on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On page SEO are activities you execute on your blog website to make it search engine friendly and highly findable for your target keywords related to your business, products or services.

 

This involves having your search query in blog post title, meta description, body of content, interlinking related blog posts and web pages, using LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords, and so on.

 

On the other hand, off page SEO strategies are digital marketing campaigns and content distribution efforts you do outside of your website in order to build backlinks and bring targeted traffic to your blog on a regular basis.

 

This could include guest posting, content marketing, blog commenting, video marketing, social media marketing, etc. The essence is to build authority, trust, popularity, credibility and expertise around your business blog, create brand awareness and ultimately attract ideal prospects, leads and customers in the long run.

 

With that being said, let’s go through some of the best ways to promote your blog and maximize your return on investment assuming you have stellar content already published on your blog.

 

Guest Posting

 

Guest blogging is a strategic method of creating brand awareness and building backlinks to your site by publishing content on other blog websites. The first step is to research and find blogs and websites with similar themed topics like yours and proposing guest post to the blogger or owner of the site.

 

If approved and accepted, you’ll publish your content on the blogger’s blog and then have the opportunity to include an author bio where you’ll embed an anchor text link to your blog for targeted traffic.

 

The greatest challenge of guest posting is getting accepted by bloggers who own the sites where you want to be featured. Successful bloggers hardly rub shoulders with upcoming bloggers. But you can increase your chances of getting approved by doing the following:

 

-Read and familiarize yourself with the blog you want to write for before cold pitching. You’ve to dig deep into the archives to read, learn and know what content has been published. This will help you to spot content gaps to fill and get quick approval.

-Be active at the blog comments section of your desired blog in order to familiarize yourself with the blogger through constant interaction. It’s easier to relate with a friend than a stranger.

 

Content Marketing

 

To start with, “What is content marketing?” It’s simply the planning, preparation, creation, distribution and marketing of content to an intended audience in order to attract qualified prospects, leads and customers to a business website.

 

Marketing content successfully on the internet to a target audience can be executed on various platforms where you believe your potential leads congregate.  And the best way to succeed with inbound marketing is creating high quality content both on your blog and outside of your blog.

 

Successful content marketing starts with good keyword research to uncover profitable long tail keyword phrases to focus on. You can also do competitor content analysis to discover gaps to further cover and write SEO articles to address immediately.

 

You can diversify your content distribution via videos, ebooks, podcasts, webinars, audio, infographics, blog posts, etc. The most important factor to get the desired result is the quality of your content which will help you to generate engagement.

 

Having a good handle on content marketing and guest blogging can be of immense value to your business bottom line.  The best you can do is to master different methods of promoting your blog at scale one at a time.

 

Personally, I started with content marketing and gravitated to guest posting before attempting other ways to promote a blog when I was actively advertising my freelance writing services.

 

List Building

 

If you want to ease your blog promotion efforts, you should start building an email list of subscribers as early as possible. All you need to build an email list of subscribers from scratch is to sign up with a reputable email service provider (ESP).

 

ESPs are a dime a dozen on the internet but GetResponse email marketing software have all the features you need to get started including autoresponder, broadcast capability, automation tools, just to mention a few.

 

You can create a lead magnet as quickly as you can from questions your target audience is asking by making use of keyword research tools and websites to discover them. Provide the answers and compile it as a PDF ebook to give away for free.

 

As soon as you start building your mailing list, you can send your subscribers a link to your new blog post every time you publish one.  This is how to promote your blog to a highly targeted readers and maximize your marketing efforts.

How to Monetize a Blog and Maximize Your ROI

 

 

As you may already know, creating a blog is just the bare bones of blogging for money on the internet. Until you start earning money from it consistently, you may not be completely happy running a blog because you’ll be spending cash on online business tools such as domain name renewal, paying for web hosting fees, hiring freelance writers to create content for you if need be, etc.

 

It’s when you start making passive income online from your blog, month in and month out, that you’ll become keyed up to invest money, quality time and energy to run and grow your business blog.  As you may be aware, there are many moving parts to a successful blogging career including:

 

• Choosing a niche market to focus on,
• Registering a domain name as your business website address,
• Buying web hosting to enable you host your blog website online 24/7,
• Installing a blog on your domain name,
• Optimizing your blog for SEO (search engine optimization), and
• Creating and publishing constant but high quality content on your blog.

 

The above steps and tasks are relatively easy to complete if you’re passionate about your blogging topic. But the hardest part is making money from your blog on a regular basis.  This is where the topic of today on how to monetize a blog always becomes a hard nut to crack for a lot of beginners. But I’ll provide you with the best answers and solutions for you to hit the ground running.

 

The first step you’ve to take to get on track is to conduct keyword research. Profitable blog monetization starts with deep keyword research so that you can discover the types of search queries related to your business to target which online shoppers are typing into search engines to find product, service or information as solution to their problems.

 

The essence of doing this task is to continually generate targeted traffic to your blog website especially from search engines such as Google.com, Yahoo.com, Bing.com, etc when potential leads and customers type keyword phrases related to the solutions you are providing from your business to solve their problems.  

 

As soon as you’re able to optimize your blog for profitable long tail keyword phrases, you may be able to get free targeted traffic to your blog website on a constant basis, holding all other factors constant.

 

You should not forget that without the right people coming to visit your website, your chances of making money from your blog is slim. You can always get keyword ideas from various sources by making use of keyword tools and websites dedicated to keyword research strategies.

 

After you’ve conducted keyword research and generated search query ideas, the second step is to optimize your website for these keywords so that it becomes easier for you to monetize your blog post content.  Website optimization involves a lot of housekeeping details. This includes having your target keyword in blog titles, meta description, the content of your blog post, page URL or path, alt text for uploaded images, having a web of internally linked keyword structure, and so on.

 

The third step is writing blog post that is worth monetizing. To be frank with you, a lot of bloggers fail at this. Making money online is all about giving out the best to your target audience in terms of creating high quality and unique content in order to prime them for further marketing and action taking.

 

If you have published EATable content on your blog, monetizing it is not going to be a problem. You should not forget the fact that Google expects website owners to demonstrate EAT (expertise, authority, trust) for published content on their blogs as much as possible.

 

The truth is that if you constantly create high quality content and have ways of generating targeted traffic to your blog, you’ll discover it’s easy and simple to monetize your blog. And this era of AI writing tools like ChatGPT and the rest, you should be able to generate content you can modify for uniqueness.

 

Here are some of the best ways to make money from your blog.

 

Method #1: Affiliate Marketing

 

Affiliate marketing business is one of the best ways to make money online for beginners. Your job is to create high quality content around themed topics and publish them on your blog regularly. From there, you can sign up with affiliate programs that align with your published content and embed their affiliate links at appropriate places in your blog posts.

 

As long as your content is helpful, you should expect blog readers to follow your call to action (CTA) which should be a referral link to a merchant’s landing page. And when your referrals buy product or service from the vendor’s website, you’ll earn affiliate commission.

 

However, you’ll be more successful if you start affiliate marketing and integrate list building system with it your digital marketing campaigns. Also, for you to really make money with affiliate marketing, you should be able to find products and services that solve pain points and problems of your target audience.   

 

You may also want to look into CPA marketing to monetize your blog. Cost per action (CPA) marketing does not require you to close sales before you earn affiliate commission. Your task is to generate targeted leads to your vendor’s website and earn referral commissions.

 

You can fast track your affiliate marketing business success by signing up with reputable affiliate network programs such as CJ.com, Impact.com, Amazon.com, ShareASale.com, Clickbank.com, etc. It will help you to focus on the marketing side of your affiliate websites while getting affiliate products and services in one place.

 

Method #2: Provide Freelance Business Services

 

One of the ways to monetize your blog is by providing freelance business services to webmasters and online business owners who are willing and able to hire freelancers such as content writers, virtual assistants, web designers, freelance bloggers, etc.

 

Some years back, I started a successful online writing business career by creating freelance writer website and using it to get high paying clients from search engines. All I did was to focus on writing high quality and unique content around low competition long tail keyword phrases related to my target niches.

 

I discovered that starting a blog around my target niche market is one of the best ways to make money online without spending a fortune. The truth is that a lot of people out there are ready to outsource any type of online jobs including graphic design, web design, content writing, virtual assistance, and so on where they have no time or requisite digital skills to execute such tasks.

 

You can create a dedicated page on your blog to showcase your web business services with a “contact us” page for your potential clients to reach out to you. If you’re able to engage in regular blogging targeting long tail keyword phrases, you’ll be able to get website visitors who are eligible for further communications and monetization.   

 

Method #3: Ad Network Revenue Monetization

 

For you to make money from ad networks, you’ve to generate avalanche of targeted website visitors on a monthly basis. This is a major criterion to generate and earn revenue from ad network that will be enough to pay the bills.

 

As soon as you build a website or create a blog, your top priority and focus should be how to get targeted traffic consistently which you can monetize with reputable ad networks. In case you don’t know, an ad network is simply an online advertising technology platform that aggregates, brokers and sells ad inventory between advertisers and digital publishers.

 

Some of the most reputable and popular ad networks you can look into include Google Adsense, Media.net, PropellerAds.com, etc.

 

Method #4: Sponsored Post

 

For you to start a blog and make money with sponsored posts, you’ve to optimize your blog and make it super attractive to sponsors. Your blog optimization should be mobile friendly with dynamic theme. 

 

As long as you’ve themed topics discussed on your blog, you’ll be able to get targeted sponsors if your domain authority is high or above 20 or so. Also, you’ve to build authority backlinks over time. In addition, make sure you create essential web pages including About Us, Contact Us, Advertise With Us, Write For Us, etc, pages.

 

You will do well and better with sponsored posts as a blogger if you’re an influencer or even as a micro-influencer.  You can get sponsors from inbound marketing by blogging regularly or by making use of cold pitching strategies and outreach tools to find ideal sponsors.

 

Method #5: Write an Ebook and Sell It Online

 

Ebook writing is one of my favorite ways to quickly monetize a blog and make money. However, you’ll get the best results if you integrate list building strategies with it. By building traction around your book launch, you’ll be able to discover if it will sell in the first place.

 

There is nothing complicated about how to write an ebook and sell it online. The first step is to research ebook ideas that will sell in your niche market and create an outline to serve as your guide. Every chapter of your ebook should focus on solving a problem for the buyer.

 

Apart from writing and selling ebooks from your own website, you can use Amazon KDP to increase your reach and become more visible to global market. Self publishing has become income generator for a lot of bloggers today. You can write non-fiction and fiction books depending on your writing skills and ability. 

There are so many ways on how to monetize a blog and make money blogging online. The above 5 ways can get you started in earnest.