You have a blog and you want to reach a wider audience? There are plenty of ways to do it, even if your budget is limited. As a matter of fact, some methods may even be completely free in the financial sense, and you will only have to do a bit of work instead.
We’re talking, of course, about submitting guest posts to other blogs and trying to reach your competition’s audience and draw its attention to your articles. One effective way to promote a blog is by engaging with online communities related to your niche, where you can share your expertise and subtly introduce your blog.
Guest posts
First of all, not all guest posts are free. Some will charge you for the privilege of publishing on their website. However, there are blogs and other websites that will accept your written content for free, so just do a little bit of digging and you’ll find them easily enough. Obviously, if you’re willing to pay, you can go for that too, all in accordance with the budget you have.
Now, you are looking to expand your audience with your blog post, so look for a blog or a website that generally covers the same topics you do. However, try to find one that hasn’t covered your area of expertise a lot so that you can provide additional value to them with the text you write. It will be much more interesting to their readers.
For example, if you’re specializing in something like cryptocurrency, you may want to try and find a blog that deals with finances in general and then offers some new info to its readers by analyzing some aspect of these virtual currencies and comparing that to the real-world money.
Be careful with how you write, too. You want to establish yourself as an expert, to show the reader you know very well what you’re talking about and that your advice should be listened to. However, you need to do so in an engaging, interesting way.
Don’t get too technical if you think the reader may not like it, try to keep it simple because once the reader is done with your guest post, the goal is to make them want to read more of your texts. That’s why a well-written guest post is so important. And when they finish reading, they will come to the part of the guest post where you can make the most of their attention.
Author biography
Almost all guest posts have a short author biography at their bottom (sometimes it’s at the top of the article, but the point remains the same). This is another thing you submit when submitting a guest post, and almost always you’ll be allowed to put a link to your blog here. This is your chance!
As we said, the goal is to make the reader want to read more from you. So, if you’ve written the post well, you can show them where they need to go to do just that. However, do not think that your author bio should contain just the link to your blog. You have a chance to write something about yourself here, so try to once again deliver an entertaining text (albeit much shorter this time) to connect with the readers even more and win over those who are on the fence about pursuing your blog any further.
If people can connect with you, if they can see that you’re just a regular person who happens to be an expert in the field they’re reading about, not some detached snob, they will be much more likely to engage with you.
Furthermore, you can often also put links to your social network accounts in your author bio, which makes it very easy for the reader to start following you. You could also maybe insert links to the products you want to sell, whatever the goal of your guest post is. The bottom line is that, after writing a good article, the author bio is where you convert the reader’s interest into something beneficial to you.
Other methods
Obviously, guest posts are not the only way to promote your blog content for free, but they are probably the most important one (links from other websites to your blog can also help your SEO rank). The aforementioned social networks are a great option too because you can easily share links to your articles in a group that focuses on the topic you cover. Also, don’t forget about e-mail marketing because you can easily form marketing lists from your subscribers with free tools.
Try to engage with the community as much as you can and comment on posts on other blogs, forums, or Q&A websites like Quora. That’s also a great way to connect to your potential readers for free. Don’t be pushy, though, but try to actually provide helpful insight on a subject instead of just blatantly promoting your blog.
One thing you can always do to promote your blog for free, without anyone’s help, is to check on the keywords you’re focusing on and optimize your pages properly. A good keyword strategy can do wonders for your SEO rank and bring in loads of organic traffic, so it pays to invest a few minutes of your time to make sure everything is as it’s supposed to be.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are plenty of ways to promote your blog content for free, but guest posting is certainly among the most important ones. Through a well-written guest post, you show that you are someone who can give good advice on the subject you’re covering, and you can also reach a whole new audience who may not even be aware that your blog exists.
An author bio in those posts is key, and if you can entice the reader to click the link in it once they’re done reading, you will be able to bring in new readers to your blog in no time.
