You’ve launched your blog and you slave away every week creating epic content. You’re proud of what you’ve created.

But there’s a problem…

You’re not sure if anyone’s reading it. Besides your mom, that is.

How do you let people know your blog is here?

Quick: what’s the number one thing you can do to promote your blog and grow your readership?

Simple answer: write guest posts. But you knew we were going to say that – didn’t you?

But why is guest blogging so much better than the myriad other ways to get people over to your blog. Let’s take a look at some of these different promotion techniques – and their limitations.

Five Promotion techniques (other than guest blogging)

• Commenting
  Although commenting on other blogs gets your name out there, it’s easy to get lost in a sea of comments. You don’t have much room to give useful information that will attract others, plus a lot of people are swamped with stuff to read, and so don’t even read the comments. At most you’ll get a half dozen or so new visitors from any one comment, and even that would be unusual. It also takes a lot of time to go to different blogs and comment every day. Now, this isn’t to say that commenting is not an effective strategy for getting your name in front of other bloggers – it’s just not the best way to bring new readers and potential customers over to your site.

• Networking
  This is actually a pretty effective form of promoting your blog, but it’s a slow, long-term strategy that will (usually) pay off in opportunities down the road — including guest posting on other blogs.

• Social media and bookmarking sites
  Sharing our posts on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google Plus, and promoting them on bookmarking sites such as Digg and Delicious are great ways to grow your blog, except for two things: 1)many of the readers you get from social media aren’t ideal readers and won’t be interested in your blog or products; and 2) it’s nearly impossible for a small blog to get popular on bookmarking sites such as Digg, Delicous and Reddit.

• Forums, blog carnivals, emailing links to other bloggers
  These are low-payoff strategies involving a lot of work. They’re not horrible, but they don’t always result in a lot of new readers.

• Advertising
  Who among us has the money? And even if you do, lots of people tend to ignore ads, which can only have a few words to promote your blog anyway.

And so we’re left with guest posting — why is it the most effective way to promote your blog?

Ten reasons why guest posting is the most effective promotion strategy

1. You reach a lot of new readers (especially if you do it on bigger blogs, or on blogs in a different, but overlapping, niche).
2. These readers can be your ideal readers.
3. You get a space to write about yourself and provide a link to your blog, thus enticing these new readers over to your site.
4. You can show off your best content, and have a lot of space to do so.
5. You boost your credibility as a writer and a blogger.
6. You improve your SEO and your blog’s search rankings since you will usually get to include a backlink to your own blog on the guest post.
7. It’s free (as opposed to advertising).
8. You can do it as often as you like.
9. You establish a relationship with other bloggers.
10. You begin to be seen as an authority in your field.

Although according to established wisdom content is king,  blogging experts agree that connections may be just as important, if not more so, to your ultimate blogging success.

Leo Babauta, owner of the popular blog Zen Habits and co-founder of A-List Blogging, could be considered a pioneer of the guest posting strategy. By devoting himself to the art of the guest post he drew hundreds of thousands of loyal subscribers to Zen Habits. Here’s what he has to tell us about his own guest posting efforts:

“When I was a new blog — the first year of my existence — I famously wrote a lot of guest posts. As many as I could, actually, which turned out to be 2-3 per week on most weeks. At the minimum, I did one per week. I emailed a lot of bloggers, all of them bigger than me, all of them with readerships I was trying to reach.

This strategy paid off in a big way. I exposed my brand and my best writing to a lot of readers, some of whom came to visit my blog (and some of those subscribed or kept visiting for more), while others would just remember my brand after being exposed to it several times. With each guest post, I was building a little momentum, until people who read blogs in any niche related to my content could no longer be unaware of Zen Habits.”

Leo now has more than 280,000 subscribers to Zen Habits.

Okay, you’re convinced. Guest posting will most certainly get you new subscribers who become ideal readers and customers on your blog.

Now let’s move on to where. Which blogs will you write guest posts for?

Author: A-List Team