How to get your blog noticed

What you will read below are 10 proven ways to get your blog noticed quickly.

#1 – Set realistic expectations

Before to even start thinking about ways to promote your blog, you need to set your expectations correctly. Having realistic goals is important and it will help you create a plan that can get you results.

You need to understand that it will take time to get your blog noticed. Even you have the best content for your topics and even if you know what to do, it takes a lot of effort to get your blog in front of many eyes.

A realistic plan will help you stay focus on your goals and not get disappointed and quit (this is the case of the majority of new bloggers).

If you’ve read my previous article on how to grow your traffic to 400K visits per month, you know that the traffic didn’t grow magically from day 1 but it took 3-4 months to even get a few organic visits from Google.

What are realistic expectations?

There is no one answer that works for all cases but as a general rule of thumb, when it comes to organic traffic you should not expect too much before at least 6 months (especially if you are working on a brand new domain). After that and depending on how often you publish new content, the type of content and your promotion techniques, you will start getting better results.

#2 – Get noticed on Facebook

Facebook is perhaps the easiest and fastest way today to promote your blog. You can choose to do it in a structured way by setting up a social media campaign or by using Facebook’s ‘boost post’ feature and get your individual blog posts in front of many people.

I did this with my post “How long does it take for seo to work” and I got a decent amount of traffic and more than 700 likes. I have spend $10 per day for a 2 day period. Besides the likes and traffic benefits, by boosting a post you also increase your chances of getting natural links from other bloggers who will see the post in their timelines.

#3 – Get found on Twitter

Another way to speed up your blog readership is to use Twitter promoted tweets. It works in a similar manner as Facebook boost post but it also has the added advantage that you can target your tweets to specific twitter accounts. Here is a quick outline of how to make the most of twitter’s promoted tweets.

First find the influencers in your industry. These are the people that have a lot of twitter followers and tweet about topics related to your blog.

Create a spreadsheet and add the twitter usernames of influencers and the people they follow. Try to have at least 1500 accounts in your list. Add any other twitter accounts you think are likely to engage with your tweets.

Go to twitter ads and create a new campaign with the purpose of getting ‘Tweet Engagements’.

Create at least 3-4 tweets to use as ‘promoted tweets’ in your campaign.

Create a Tailored Audience’ and upload to twitter your list of influencers. Make sure that you also select the ‘Expand reach by targeting similar users’ option. This tells twitter to find users that are similar to the ones you have in your list.

Fill out the other campaign options, set a daily budget and run the campaign for a couple of days.

When you start the campaign, twitter will show your tweets in front of the people that matter and any re-tweets you get from them has a much bigger effect than a retweet from a ‘normal’ twitter user.

I will create a more detailed tutorial on how to setup a tailored audience and campaign in twitter but it is certainly an easy and low cost way to get your blog noticed on twitter.

Note: You shouldn’t use Facebook boost post and twitter promoted tweets for all your posts but only for your really good stuff. Spend some money and more time on the posts that make your blog stand out from the rest.

#4 – Grow an email list

Many people believe that email is dead. This is far from truth; money is still in the email list. Email is one of the most converting channels and one of the ways to get direct traffic to a new website or to a new blog.

There is a big chance that you are reading this post because of an email notification you received from me. In fact most of the traffic of this blog in the beginning was coming from the email list I created from my other blog.

There are many ways to get more email subscribers and having an email subscribe box in your sidebar is not enough. The best way to grow your email list naturally is to place the subscribe box either in the main content of your blog or as an exit popup.

When you try to leave this page, you will notice that a popup will appear asking you to subscribe in my email list. This technique works very well and I use it on all my blogs and websites. I managed to double my subscriber rate almost instantly and grow a decent email list in a short period of time.

#5 – Comments for traffic

Many fellow bloggers teach that you should regularly comment on other blogs because you will get links back to your website. In my opinion, this is a waste of time. I don’t use this technique because Google is more clever than that. Yes getting a link has some value but instead of commenting for the sake of a low value link, use your time wisely.

I don’t comment on any website but only on websites that can get me referral traffic. Getting targeted traffic from a related post or website has more value than a link. To give you an example of what I mean, I added a comment on quicksprout (a website with more than 700K visits per month) and the result was more than 200 visits to my website. The number is not huge but it’s a decent amount of referral traffic from an authority website.

To use commenting to make your blog noticed follow these simple rules:

Comment only on websites that have visitors with the same profile as the ones you are targeting.

Add some value in your comments, don’t just throw a link but write meaningful comments.

Make sure that you are among the first people who comment. On blogs that get hundreds of comments, if you are not in the first 5 or 10, the chances of getting any attention are minimal.

#6 – Publish the right content

I have many times mentioned the importance of publishing good quality content so I won’t repeat myself, but I want to draw your attention to 3 other techniques that play a role in your blog’s growth rate and success.

First is to understand what is evergreen content and why it is important to publish content that will stay relevant for a long time.

Second, to know how long to make your blog posts so that they have more chances of getting higher rankings in Google

Third, how to interlink your pages together and boost your SEO.

These 3 techniques are the basic principles of successful blogging and in conjunction with the ideas discussed in this post, can guarantee your blog’s success. It may sound simple but that’s how blogging worked for the past 10 years and that’s how it will work for the next 10 years.

#7- Don’t forget your SEO

While working on your social media promotion and email marketing, don’t forget about SEO. A blog with good on-page SEO is more likely to get better rankings in search engines and when this happens it can really get noticed.

Good rankings will give you more organic traffic which is continuous, targeted and converting, and also will boost your blog’s reputation. A web page that appears in the first positions of Google for competitive keywords has a better reputation than other blogs. The owner knows that his/her practices are working and the readers know that the particular blog will probably provide an answer to their search queries. When this is done, the reader is happy and may share the blog through social media and even more attention.

#8 – Guest post on authoritative websites

My view on guest posting is similar to the one described for commenting. I don’t like to guest post on any type of website but only on authority websites that can get me traffic and exposure. I wrote posts on sites like social media today and business2community and the gains in social media followers and traffic worth more than the link in my author bio.

How you can use guest posting to get more exposure for your blog?

Guest post only on authority websites. Analyze your industry or niche and find websites that are in business for many years, have lot’s of content and traffic and accept contributions from other authors.

Read their contributor guidelines carefully and apply to become a guest author.

Write your best post and send it for approval.

Be patient. From my experience it may take a couple of months to get your posts published on established websites.

I know that the above process may not help beginners and people with no prior experience to guest posting but once you start with guest posting and have your first articles published, is as simple as that. Read the first part of this article for more tips on how to get your posts published on high quality websites.

#9 – Spy on your competitors

Why spy on your competitors? To find practices and techniques that they are using to promote their blog and use them as well. Maybe they get referral traffic from a website that you didn’t know that they accept guest posts, maybe they rank of a keyword you haven’t thought off, maybe they wrote a post about a topic that is easy to get high rankings. The answers that you can get from spying on your competitors are a lot.

How do you spy on your competition without spending too much time or effort?

Register to their newsletter so that you get notified when they publish a new post.

Analyse their website using tools like semrush. They are not free but the information you can get about your competitors is priceless. You can see for which keywords they are ranking, from where they get their referral traffic and many more.

I use SEMRUSH for a number of months now and it is probably the only tool you need. With SEMRUSH I can compare domains, track ranking positions, analyse backlinks, perform a site audit,  analyze how difficult a keyword is and view details about how a competitor is using adwords. I did my research before choosing semrush and it is a great digital marketing tool at a reasonable price.

Analyze their social media accounts. Check how many followers they have, how often they publish new content, how many people engage with their postings and everything else they are doing online.

#10 – Utilize every possible online or offline opportunity to promote your blog

Besides social, SEO, email marketing, guest posting and competition spy, there are other ways to get your website noticed and increase your traffic. A good blogger will use any possible medium like:

email signatures – add your blog url below your name so that every time you send an email below will see the link

Business cards – Give business cards with your blog address to people you meet offline

Attend conferences and seminars related to your niche – making personal connections with other bloggers in your niche is a great way to get established in your industry.

Create applications for android, iphone, chrome and amazon and publish them in the respective app markets.

Create a free kindle book and publish it in Amazon.

Conclusion and final thoughts

Whether you are a company or individual, when you maintain a blog or website online you are looking for one simple thing, attention. You want your work to get noticed and appreciated by other people, you want your content to be read and shared. You want your website or blog to generate leads, visits and revenue. What I described above are 10 of the ways to achieve this but the list is by no means complete. Whatever you choose to do, work on it consistently and have patience, it takes time to get noticed online but once this happens, everything becomes easier.