Creating and maintaining a blog has become synonymous with content marketing in recent years. It provides a great medium for publishing industry articles, promoting products and improving your overall exposure online through SEO. But getting your blog noticed is no walk in the park.
Actually starting a blog tends to be the easy part. Working out how to get your blog noticed online is where things can get a little tricky. After all, you want to generate as much traffic – with relevant audience – to your blog as possible. Effectively.
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This way you’re exposing them to not only your content but also to your product or service. And this is the basis of content marketing.
The thing is, virtually millions of people, companies and corporations of varying sizes have caught the blogging bug. They have noticed that this is an effective way to reach their specific audience and engage with them. This poses challenges when the time comes for you to appear on the radar of your desired content consumer.
I’m sure that by now you see where this blog post – of all things – is heading. We are talking about improving the visibility of your blog on the web.
Here’s where to begin.
Decide on the niche you’re blogging about
You may already have done this, but if you haven’t, I want to reiterate just how important it is to find a content niche that aligns with your desired audience. As you progress with content creation, you’ll start establishing yourself as an industry expert that people can rely on.
Creating content about topics that have no relevance to one another is not a great method of projecting your authority on a specific industry.
Take this blog for example. Our primary product is an online invoicing software. Our blog revolves around the people that would typically use our provided service – entrepreneurs, small business owners, freelancers.
If you look closely, you may notice how our blog lacks in-depth movie reviews or assembly instructions for IKEA furniture. That’s not what the audience is looking for when they come to a small business development blog.
Try to blog around a specific topic, or a group of closely related topics. If you’re using a blog to promote your business, create content that aligns closely with your industry and stick with it.
Blog regularly
A blog is a medium for content – typically written. If it’s not constantly updated, a blog can quickly fade out of the hearts and minds of your audience. As I have mentioned before, there are virtually millions of different blogs online that can take your place if you slack on content regularly.
Consider creating a content calendar for yourself. This will help you examine all possible topic ideas that would fit the theme of your blog as well as potential publishing dates.
Content calendars are there to make sure all the content you create is fresh, has minimal overlap with your previous work, and to enhance consistency.
Get involved in the community
Your work doesn’t stop once you have pressed the “publish” button. Yes, the blog post may be live, but you also need to get yourself involved in the industry community. An active community, of which you’re a part of, can be used to your advantage to effectively elevate the status of your blog.
Here is how you can easily get involved within your desired niche community –
1. Be active and promote on social media
As we all know, social media platforms are busting out the seams with business pages, groups, events, etc that you should get acquainted with. It’s a great way to understand the intricacies of your potential audience and build valuable relationships.
Not to mention social media is just another tool that you can use for blog promotion.
Build a following here too. A large portion of your community will be present on social media, so it’s your best interest to stay up to date on what’s happening here. A big part of your content promotion will actually unfold on social media.
Now on your actual blog – where the content resides – be sure to include “share” buttons. I am sure you know what the “share” button does so I won’t go into too much detail on that. Including this, gives your audience a chance to spread the word on your behalf.
Can you believe this? Your readers will be there helping you promote the blog. If they like what you’re writing, they will share it.
2. Interact with the audience
While operating in an online forum, you give people the chance to communicate with you. You need to get yourself involved in the conversation – when the audience is reaching out to you.
Being involved in the community also means following up on comments and feedback that is left on your blog – as well as the aforementioned social media profiles. Make sure your audience knows that they are being listened to.
Your readers are capable of offering valuable advice or may just lift your confidence with a few words encouragement.
Be prompt to address comments, critique and feedback. Believe it or not, people truly appreciate content creators who interact with them. This involvement builds positive rapport and shows the reader that a conversation is developing.
If you were the audience, which content creator would you prefer: one that engages with your thoughts and ideas or one who makes you feel like you’re talking to a brick wall?
Link to other relevant content
I have mentioned to you the need to permeate the community of your industry. That’s where the audience and collaboration opportunities lie.
As you begin discovering all the actors that are engaged within the said community, you’ll discover the abundance of content that can supplement your blog – with quality links.
As you create content, add links to other people’s content within the text. Now I am not suggesting you include random links in the text for the sake of linking – that actually works against what you’re trying to accomplish. Especially in terms of developing an SEO game plan.
The links you add must be relevant to the anchor text – the words that are “housing” the link – and the topic at hand. These backlinks are there to support a specific claim you may be making, confirm statistics, or perhaps expand on a particular subject.
In addition, when you create backlinks to other sites, those publishers will be informed about it. It’s called a “pingback“. This may turn into a great icebreaker for you to start building blog networks within your niche which you can leverage for more exposure.
Feel free to reach out to the content creator whose link you’ve included and see if any collaboration opportunities are available with them.
Collaborate
Working with other publishers and content creators is another great way to improve blog visibility online.
One method of starting a blog or content collaboration is by looking at other similar industry operators online. Chances are they have a blog too – or some other similar content publishing platform. Reach out to them via email or through social media.
Collaboration can start as a simple blog post exchange. You may also propose to provide a quality blog post to be published on their platform. In this regard to can bolstering your industry reputation.
As your content becomes more readily available – like on other publisher sites – the audience will assess you as more credible.
If and when you do send off a guest post for others to publish, include links within the text to relevant topics that you’ve written about in your blog. These backlinks will help improve SEO performance.
Getting your blog noticed won’t be instant – don’t worry
Developing a quality blog, with the right content takes time. Building up traction and improving your blog’s online visibility takes time too. It’s easy to get discouraged when all the effort put into boosting online visibility is to no avail.
Consider this – steps you take to generate traffic to your blog don’t typically foster overnight results.
Keep producing quality content that corresponds to your chosen niche. Apply the tips we have provided and most importantly – don’t stop promoting your blog.
In a little while, once all the content you’ve produced has had time to marinate, you’ll notice the online traffic start pouring in.