12 Simple Ways to Promote Your WordPress Blog
1. Create Great Content
Obvious, yes. Hard, yes. Need inspiration? See my guide to getting inspiration for your blog posts. But really, good content is not enough. Create and publish great content so your blog becomes an authority for your chosen topic. Doing original research is a great place to start. It’s hard but the rewards can be great and your audience will appreciate it.
2. Format your content well
Use H1, H2, H3, quotes, bold, italics and colours for formatting, add graphics and make your post easy to read and attractive to the eye. To see all your formatting options make sure your “kitchen sink” option is selected, it’s the icon to the left of the TV icon. The shortcut is Alt+Shift+Z
3. Social Media
If you’ve not already got a Facebook profile, Twitter profile and a LinkedIn profile setup then do so ASAP. You can then add feeds into all these to automatically add your post (or with Twitter send a tweet to say there’s a new post with a link) to your profiles when you create a new post. This saves time and the requirement to remember to do this for every post. This is then put in front of all your connections.
Also include your social media icons on your WordPress blog.
4. Add The ShareThis Widget
ShareThis is a free, all-in-one widget which can be added to the end of every post, allowing users to share your content across a wide variety of social platforms.
5. Install All-In-One SEO
We install this plug-in on every blog we deliver and it helps the client define the components of the page that deliver strong SEO results such as Title, Description, Keywords and more.
6. Keyword optimisation
This is just as important for a blog as it is for your web site. Remember each post is a web page so make sure your keyword research is done before posting and that your post is optimised for those keywords. Not sure how? Just go to Google’s Keyword Tool and it’s easier than you think.
7. Guest Blogging
Create an original and completely unique blog post and do a search for “Write a blog post for us” and you’ll find a lot of free and paid opportunities to get your work published with backlinks. Make sure your post is as good as possible as this will reflect on your reputation.
8. Get your personal details on the site
We like to see who we are following so make sure a photo is included and it appears on your posts and make this clickable back to your WordPress bio if possible. Create your Bio at USERS > EDIT. Keep the bio brief. I have a link to my LinkedIn profile in case user want to connect worth me and see more about me.
9. Put your blog URL in your email signature.
This might seem obvious but it’s something far too few people do. Here’s my email signature IMAGE HERE. Are there really that many social media platforms! Is social media getting unmanageable? That’s for another post. Encourage people to follow your blog by telling them how. Many people just don’t know.
10. Get your site onto blog consolidation sites
In SETTINGS > WRITING go to the bottom and add this URL into the update services box https://rpc.pingomatic.com/ There are many more PING based services, search for WordPress pings
11. Submit your address to blog search sites and directories
People look for blog content on sites like Technorati every day, are you on their list? You should be. Technorati will email you a token like this one YFTGFJDAXPF7 that you need to add to a feed to get authorised.
12. Be an active commenter, get involved
BLOG COMMENTING – Try and add comments to blogs in your field, make the interesting and if possible incisive and include a link back to your blog or web site. When people read this they will be inclined to have a look if the think your comment is interesting. Being the first to comment is best but make the comment incisive and / or interesting, not just “great post”. Also use Gravatar (https://www.gravatar.com/ ) to create an image associated with your email address. An image offers more credibility and it’s good for people to see who they are talking to.
FORUMS – Find forums in your businesses area and become a member, they are almost always free. When you become a member setup a good signature explaining what you do and how to get in touch. Never spam, always add value.
