If you’ve recently started a new blog, you might be looking to grow your blog in 2019. I’ve been building blogs for over three years and have amassed millions of pageviews on single articles. In this article, I’m going to share my 13 best blog marketing tips to grow your blog so you can also achieve some content marketing success.
13 Blog Marketing Tips to Grow Your Blog
1. Pinterest Group Boards
One of the easiest blog marketing tips for beginners is to join group boards. You can use a tool like PinGroupie to find group boards in your niche. For example, if you own a yoga blog you can search “yoga” to find relevant yoga group boards you can join. Group boards are great for growing your blog when you don’t have an audience because they often already have thousands of members. With only a few hundred Pinterest followers, I was able to join group boards with over 60,000 members. And it’s really helped me grow free traffic from Pinterest. And hey, if you can’t get into certain group boards, check out my Pinterest account and if there’s a match, I’ll let you into some of my group boards no questions asked. There’s enough room online for all of us to win.
2. Instagram Stories
Brands are constantly sharing their successes with Instagram Stories. And if it works for them, it can work for you too. You’ll need to build a sizeable audience to grow your blog traffic from Stories. You can create videos or post attention-grabbing pictures to convince people to swipe up to read your blog. If you have a compelling headline you’ll want to share it to excite people to read your post. This blog marketing tip can really drive some big numbers, especially if you’re an influencer or big brand with a loyal audience. People want to hear your thoughts so promote your content on Instagram Stories. You can also get influencers with massive audiences to promote your content.
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3. Quora Marketing
To grow your blog, you’ll need to find people where others hang out. Quora is a great place to start. You can use an SEO tool to find Quora’s best ranked articles for specific keywords. For example, if you’re a fashion blogger, you can use various fashion keywords to find high ranked fashion discussions that rank high in search results. This allows you to get some easy search traffic even if your business is only a few days ago. If you can’t rank in Google because your website is too new, try your best to get in on content that is already ranking. And with Quora, you can get a head start since you can add a comment yourself without needing admin permission, all you need to do is create an account.
4. Search Engine Optimization
SEO is the number one way to grow your blog (and our favorite of these blog marketing tips). The secret to a successful SEO strategy is to produce new, optimized content consistently. You’ll want to have a main keyword and a few secondary keywords that show up throughout the article that help you rank for those keywords. In the beginning, you’ll want to start with less competitive, long-tail keywords with smaller search volume. And as time goes on, you go after keywords with higher search volume. You’ll also need to make sure that your articles read naturally and provide value (like 2,000 words worth of value).
5. Email Marketing
One of the most powerful weapons a blog can have is a massive email list. Top blogs have millions of subscribers on their email list and that can be kind of intimidating but what you don’t see is that they all started with zero. But what happens if you’re just starting out and don’t have an email list yet? Well, in that case you can use a tool like Linkiro (that’s us) that allows you to add an email opt-in form to every link you share on social media. And you can even add an opt-in form on other people’s blog posts for when you’re too busy to create your own content. That way, even when supporting other bloggers with free traffic, you’re still able to get new email opt ins on your website. With blog marketing tips like this one, you’ll be able to build an audience while curating content.
6. Backlinking
One of the most important blog marketing tips to grow your blog is to build backlinks on your website. You can do this through an outreach strategy. SEO tools can help you create lists of relevant blog posts to get backlinks from. You can reach out to brands or bloggers through their contact form (or dig around for an email in the privacy policy of their site). Those backlinks help give you a higher domain authority so that you’ll grow your blog traffic. It’ll also give you traffic as well if the blog post that links out to you gets traffic.
7. Consistent Strategy
While this isn’t a blog marketing tip per se, it’s still one of the most important parts of running a blog. The secret to success in blogging boils down to consistency. Everyone hates this advice because it sounds generic. But the thing that you don’t realize is that if you only post once one month and twice in another and nothing the month after people feel like they can’t trust or rely on your content. However, if you only have time to post once a week but do that consistently for three years, you’ll build a loyal audience. It’ll allow you to grow your traffic because Google knows to crawl your website each week. And people will come back to read your posts. The problem that deters consistency, is that results don’t happen right away. And so you feel like you’re not getting visibility so you give up too soon. But the magic of Google takes time so keep building even when you wanna quit.
#8. Have a Niche Focus
One of the most important blog marketing tips is to have a niche focus. To build that loyal, tight knit following, you want people to know what they can expect from your blog. In the beginning, go after really small keywords with low search volume of 1,000 monthly searches. As your SEO skills get better, go after bigger keywords of 30-40,000 monthly searches. And then keep broadening the keywords. You’ll still want to serve your key audience throughout. However, by doing this strategy, you set yourself up for long-term success. If you go after big keywords too soon, you might not be able to write it well and you’ll ruin the keyword on your blog because you didn’t have enough experience to optimize it the right way.
#9. Write a Mix of Content
While you still want to have a niche focus, you want to diversify your content for different purposes. For example, writing content for different goals. You’ll want to create content designed to bring in a ton of traffic. But you also want to write content that generates emails or customers too. Each keyword or topic you write about on your blog serves a different purpose. Sometimes the article with the most pageviews doesn’t bring the most customers. When coming up with your content strategy, it’s important to create pillars of topics. You might choose topics that are focused on traffic (such as high volume keywords or influencer posts), one that focuses on generating emails, or another that focuses on getting comments (comments help make sure people stay engaged with you and your brand).
#10. Share Your Experiences
Most writers research other articles to know what to write about. However, the best writers don’t do research at all. They share their experiences. By doing this, people begin to look at you as an industry expert instead of a person who knows how to use Google. You don’t want to be the person who compiles the best stuff. You want to be the person who shares the best kept secrets. By doing that, people will keep coming back to you. They’ll want to reach out to you, book you for speaking gigs, and invite you to exclusive events. You become a real and true expert. So if you blog about business, build a business. If you blog about blogging build a powerhouse of a blog. The more you actually do what you teach, the better your content becomes. And people really can spot a phoney from a mile away.
#11. Guest Posting
If you’re starting out, guest posting is a great way to grow your blog. You can use SEO tools to find websites that allow guest posts to help make the process a bit easier for you. The benefit of guest posting is that you get a backlink to your website (domain authority boost) and you’ll be able to trickle in some traffic. Keep in mind that guest posting is best when you’re starting out. If you can afford to outsource your guest posting that might be more helpful since freelancers may have connections for outreach from built up relationships. Keep in mind that you should save your writing expertise for your own blog. It’s better to build your own asset instead of helping someone else build theirs. The little bit of traffic you get from someone else is not as much as the amount you could get long-term for the same topic on your own website.
#12. Master Your Headlines
One of the most powerful blog marketing tips comes down to nailing your headline. If your title isn’t attention-grabbing, it’ll be a lot harder to get the click. If your goal is to get SEO traffic, sometimes your title needs to be a bit boring so that it’ll rank well in search results. You want to make sure your main keyword is near the beginning of the title. However, when it comes to promoting your blog on Pinterest, you can literally alter your title to make it more compelling. Here’s an example of two very different headlines (one for search and one for social):
SEO: 10 Dog Training Tips: How to Train Your Dog
Social: 10 Steps to Raising a Calm Dog or How to Train Your Dog in One Month
Write your headline based on where you’ll be driving traffic from. If you’re writing an SEO piece, make sure it’s optimized. If your article is a social play, do some keyword research on platforms like Pinterest to see which titles get the most repins and model your headline after that.
#13. Promote on Twitter
Twitter is one of the few platforms that doesn’t limit reach when it comes to posting. You can post your own content several times a day without being penalized for spam too. Using hashtags, you can drive more visibility to your posts allowing you to get eyeballs on your articles even when you don’t have a following. When I was running an online store, a little trick I did to get traffic to my website was write articles on yoga quotes. Each article was centered around a yoga influencer. I’d then reach out to the yoga influencer on Twitter. We successfully had influencers share the article which helped drive hundreds of pageviews to our two-day old website.
Conclusion
To grow your blog you’ll need to follow some or all of these blog marketing tips. Success will boil down to executing the right strategies and doing it for the long haul. Those first few months may be underwhelming and there will be times you’ll want to quit or give up. But if you can push through those moments to continue producing content, you’ll start seeing big wins by the end of your first year. You know what you need to do, now it’s time to put your content out there and start your first blog.
