5 Surprisingly Easy Ways To Promote Your Blog For Free

Want to promote your blog for free? But don’t know how to get traffic to your new blog?

In this article, we will cover 5 surprisingly easy ways to promote your blog for free. Follow the ideas in this post to generate blog traffic to your site without spending a dime.

Here are the topics we cover in this blog post:

More than half of the traffic is generated by search engines. As search engines form the major chunk of free web traffic. So, optimising a blog for search engines should be our topmost priority. 

Apart from optimising a blog/website for search engines. Provide your users with a good user experience. A good user experience boosts your rankings in search engines.

Before you start optimising your site for search engines. You should have a few things in place. As these things indirectly boost your search engine and keyword rankings

If you choose an unreliable web host. It will be slow and may break down often. This will lead to a poor user experience for your visitors. Visitors will leave your blog and never return again. You should be very careful while selecting a web hosting service. If you are planning to change your web host. I recommend Bluehost. It’s one of the most reliable web hosting service providers 

A few other things that will give your SEO efforts a good boost are:

1. Optimise your site for speed on mobile and PC. Nobody likes a slow-loading website. That’s why the selection of good web hosting is essential. Even if you have top-notch hosting in place. Tweak it further to optimise it for speed. For e.g installing a cache plugin like W3 Cache etc.

2. Security is another major factor. If your website is hosted on a popular blogging platform like WordPress. Your site can be targeted by hackers with malicious intent. Even if you have robust web hosting you should add a second line of defence using security plugins

3. Ensure your website is discoverable by Google and other search engines. Check the Settings >> Reading >> Search engine visibility is unticked in your WordPress Admin Area.

4. Search engines crawl your site using the directives in your Robot.txt file. Check whether your robot.txt file is configured properly. Google Search Console help you find resources blocked by the robot.txt files. If you don’t have a robot.txt file create one for your site.

Let’s start with the first free tool that will provide you traffic free of cost. 

SEO or search engine optimization is the process of making it easy for search engines to find and index your blog or website.

As search engines are the major contributors to website traffic. You must carry out on-page SEO and off-page SEO on your website. 

On-Page SEO is a set of activities you carry out on your website. These activities include:

• Headlines – A compelling post headline
• Title Tag – HTML tag in the head section of all webpages.
• Meta Description – Meta tags that provide the description of the webpage.
• Header Tags – HTML tags H1-H6 used for headings and subheadings
• Website Content – Should be written for visitors and search engines
• Images – Appealing at the same time small in size

You can check out the on-page SEO guide by Backlinko

Off-page SEO is the set of activities to improve your search engine rankings. These activities are off the page which means away from your website. Some of these activities include

• Guest posting – Post your article on other blogs or websites.
• Q&A sites – Answering questions relevant to your niche on Q&A sites like Quora.
• Commenting – Leaving valuable comments on articles related to your niche.
• Forums – Contributing to online forums in your niche.
• Link Building – Finding broken links on other sites and replacing them with your own article.
• Social Media – Join social media groups to promote your blog for free.
• Influencer Outreach – Reaching out to other influencers in your niche.

This method gives the highest return on investment. A dollar spent on email marketing gives you a return of $44.

Reasons, why email marketing has such a high ROI, are

• Email is highly Personalized
• It is highly targeted
• You can scale it easily.

The best thing with email is you own your list. Being highly personalised email converts better than any other form of traffic.

The first thing that you need is to put an optin form on your site. So that people can sign up for your email list. 

Just putting a signup form will not work; you have to attract the visitors’ attention with a compelling offer using a lead magnet.

Here is the list of the lead magnet that you can use on your site.

• Ebooks
• A useful resource like an excel or sheet.
• Case studies
• Free trials or samples.
• Webinars
• Free Consultation
• Free samples

If you want a comprehensive guide. Check this guide on Email Marketing by Optinmonster.com

Every visitor that comes to your site will not opt for your email list. They may not like to type in the information into the optin form. 

You can give them the option of Web Push. Web push sends a notification via the web browser whenever you publish new content on your site.

If your site is hosted on WordPress, you can use a web push plugin like Onesignal 

The majority of traffic to your site is from mobile devices. So, it is sensible to target mobile devices using push notifications.

Push notifications show up on mobile devices just like any new social message. Every time you publish a new article it will send a notification to the subscribers’ mobile devices. 

There are a lot of tools that are easy to set up e.g Pushbullet

Youtube has over 2 billion monthly users worldwide. Moreover, video consumption has increased over the years. This makes youtube a lucrative place to drive free traffic to your site.

You can get started on Youtube with a Brand Account on Google. With a brand account, you can create multiple users for your channel.

If you have published articles on your site. You can convert your article into a video and upload them to your channel. Include the link to the article in the description box. So that referral traffic can be routed to your site.

Don’t forget to carry out a basic Youtube SEO before publishing your video. It will help you reach more people in the shortest time.

If you want a thorough guide you can check out the complete guide to youtube marketing in 2020

Though there are numerous ways to promote your blog for free. But all methods are not equal. Some will be more fruitful compared to others.

If you are a complete beginner, I recommend picking up 3-5 methods at a time. Experiment with them and find out and capitalize on the ones that generate more traffic.

In this article, we have discussed the 5 surprisingly easy ways to promote your blog for free. These methods are

• SEO or Search Engine Optimization
• Email marketing.
• Web Push
• Push Notification for mobile
• Youtube

These methods are entirely free; you don’t have to spend a single penny. So what are you waiting for? Get busy driving traffic to your site.

How do you find this article, please let me know by dropping the comments below? I would love to hear from you.