It’s the question every new blogger has (and many not-so-new bloggers as well):

So how do you promote your blog and get those readers?

You’ve got a blog, but you have barely any readers. You’re writing great stuff, but no one is noticing.

Part of the problem is that while you want to promote your blog and get readers, so do tens of thousands, if not millions, of other bloggers. Everyone is clamoring to be heard … how do you get heard above the din? How do you get noticed? How do you attract readers to your blog, when there are so many others trying to attract the same readers?

The first step is really the biggest: create powerful content that people want to bookmark, link to from their blogs, and share on social media such as Twitter and Facebook.

We’ve covered that step, but just realize that this is by far the best way to promote your blog — without the content, the next step is wasted effort.

So let’s talk about step two: getting out there, getting visible, and reaching new readers.

Your Target Audience

The first thing you really need to think about — and think hard about — is who are the people you’re trying to reach. If you don’t have a clear idea in your mind who your target audience is, you could end up wasting a lot of effort on ineffective tactics.

So give this some thought: who would be interested in your content? What kind of people are they? What problems do they have? What interests do they have? What other blogs do they read? What online services and forums do they use?

If you know their interests and what else they read and where they hang out online, you know where to go to reach them.

If you do a blog about blogging, you know your potential audience is bloggers, and you want to go where bloggers go: to the big blogs about blogging, such as Problogger, Copyblogger and Daily Blog Tips, as well as social media such as Twitter and the like.

If you do a blog about parenting, you need to find out where the parents go online: perhaps to the big parenting blogs, parenting magazines or parenting forums.

Promotion Strategies: Cream of the Crop

Now you know where to go to find your target audience … but what are the best ways to reach them? I’ve tried and tested a whole host of promotion strategies, and have found the ones that work the best for me.

I recommend this group of strategies the most, but I definitely think you should try others to see if they work better for you. Remember, blogging is an experiment — you have to try things out and see what works best for you, your readers, and your goals.

Here are the best strategies in my experience:

• Guest posts. I believe this is the No. 1 strategy for promotion. It’s unbeatable because it’s free advertising, you can really showcase the quality of your content, and you are reaching new readers in the best way possible — by giving them the great content they’re looking for. No other method matches guest posts in these areas.

• Interviews. Interviewing more popular bloggers is a great way to promote your blog. Email your favorite bloggers within your field, and ask them for a quick 3-5 question interview. Publish their interview on your blog, link to them and maybe to some of their best posts, and you’ve just promoted them to your readers. Lots of bloggers will be appreciative and will link back to you somehow — maybe from their blog, maybe from Twitter. Some won’t link back to you, but at the least you’ve started a relationship with them that could lead to a guest post or links to some of your best posts in the future. At the very least, you’ve provided great content to your readers from an excellent blogger.

• Commenting. This is one of the most common ways that bloggers promote themselves, mostly because it’s the easiest — you don’t need to get approval from another blogger to submit a guest post on their site — you just leave a comment. Commenting on other blogs won’t get you a lot of readers — most people reading a blog don’t click through to a commenter’s blog. However, it could get you a few readers, and that’s important when you first start. And more importantly, it will do two crucial things: 1) get you some visibility among the readers of blogs in your field, and 2) start a relationship with a bigger blogger. However, you don’t need to comment on 10 blogs a day to achieve these two things — I think a couple blogs a day, rotated among your favorite blogs, is good enough. And don’t do it in a spammy way — do it to have a conversation with other bloggers.

• Social media. Sharing your posts on Social Media is a great way to extend the reach of your blog. Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon and Pinterest are all great ‘outposts’ for your blog. A great little app is Hootsuite.com. You can set it up so that your blog posts are shared automatically on the social media of your choice.

Other Promotion Strategies

The strategies above have been my bread and butter, but they’re not the only things that work. Let’s take a look at some other good strategies.

• Ebooks. One of the reasons I released copyright on my ebooks is that I would love for people to share them with others — spreading my ebooks is a great way to promote my blog. Seth Godin takes this one step further and releases some fantastic ebooks for free, basically reaching new readers and promoting his blog, building his brand and showing what great content he creates. Other bloggers have followed suit, and releasing an amazing ebook for free is now one of the best ways to promote your blog. I highly recommend it — the only reasons not to do this is if 1) you don’t have the time to create an ebook or 2) you want to sell an ebook to make money. A great ebook should be full of very useful content that aims to solve a reader’s problem(s).

• Link resources. This is something I did early on and it was a great way to get incoming links — by creating a list of resources or great blogs or posts for my readers to read on a certain topic — fitness resources, simplifying resources, and so on. It’s actually a very useful tool for your readers, and it has the potential to do well with social media such as delicious.com if it’s really useful. What’s more, bloggers to whom you link from this resource post often appreciate it, and will sometimes link back to you. Spread the link love, when appropriate, and you’ll eventually get some in return.

• Networking. This is a very effective strategy — although it’s a long-term one. Remember that the blogging community has always been, at its heart, a group of people having a large discussion about ideas on the web. We talk about each others’ posts, link to each other, do guest posts on other blogs, and so on. So it’s important to become a part of the community, and not be isolated. That means you should do many of the things listed in this post, such as commenting on other blogs and engaging other bloggers on Twitter and Facebook, simply to be a part of the community, to participate in the larger discussion, to form relationships. Email other bloggers, do guest posts for them, link to them, do projects with some of them. You can call all of this “networking”, but really it’s being part of a larger group, having a larger discussion, forming online friendships, participating in a community. The side benefits of getting links to your blog and good guest posts submitted to your blog and so forth … those are just side benefits. They’re not to be ignored, but don’t do it exclusively for those benefits.

• Forums. There are a million different forums on the Internet, and if you let them, they can suck up all your time. But if you’re just starting out and would like to reach new people who are interested in your type of content, it might be worth your time to find the largest forums in your content area, and participate. I would try to gauge the effectiveness of this strategy, based on how much time you put into it and what the benefits are, to see if it’s something that’s really worth your time.

Author: Leo Babauta