Three Free Ways To Promote Your Blog

Photo by:  Website Traffic

Now that you have created your blog and added a few posts you can sit back and watch the traffic come flying in, right. Wrong! As great as it would be to think this was true there is a lot of work involved in increasing the amount of traffic to your blog. It is important to remember that there are more websites than people so competition is huge.

Photo by: Jason A Howie (via Flickr)

If you want to increase website to your traffic there are three relatively easy and free techniques which can get you started quite quickly. They all involve making use of social media. Social media is an excellent tool to help you increase awareness about your blog. If used effectively you will find that it is one of your biggest traffic referrals.

Photo by: Metin Fejzula (via Flickr)

Facebook is a great way to increase social awareness about your blog. Every time you write a new blog post share it on Facebook. If you are comfortable in doing so ask your friends to like and share the link too.

What you really need to take advantage of is a Facebook fan page. If you haven't started one yet then you will probably want to. Add your blog and website links to it and invite your friends to like your page. You can also advertise with Facebook to get more likes. However this is a personal choice which you will need to make. Facebook also offers you with the option of promoting individual posts. So if there is a particular post that you really want to share with others then you may consider this. When promoting a post Facebook offers useful stats regarding clicks to your link and likes as a result of the promotion. You can set a specific budget and if you are unhappy with the promotion you can 'pause' it at any time.

Similarly to search engines Facebook's algorithms also favors updates. However you need to ensure that your updates are unique and not spam. As people that have liked your page may not appreciate you clogging up their newsfeed with useless information. So keep it interesting, unique and necessary. Don't just use your Facebook page for blog and website links try and share useful information, hints, tips and advice.

Photo by: Rosaura Ochoa (via Flickr)

Twitter is another essential social media tool for increasing awareness about your blog. Although if you don't yet have a Twitter account and you set one up you may find that it takes sometime to build followers and find that it helps with traffic referrals. However you may find that it is worth trying and who knows if you offer enough useful and unique information you may be happy with the number of followers you gain.

Although Twitter does not offer the same number of options as Facebook for promoting your blog it is still a very popular social media platform and shouldn't be ignored.

Photo by: Bernard Goldbach

The last social media platform which I like and will discuss in this post is StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking site that suggests sites to its users based upon their likes and interests. It suggests websites as you stumble. The great thing about StumbleUpon is you can add pages from your blog to StumbleUpon for users to, well, stumble upon. It is necessary to note though that it is best to not just use StumbleUpon for self promotion. Use this as a proper tool by joining in making use of StumbleUpon as it is intended. If StumbleUpon is used effectively it can be an excellent source for traffic.


I hope you have found this post helpful in your quest to become a successful blogger. Please remember that all of the above is my opinion only and based upon my experience of blogging.

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