Unless you are very rich, a celebrity or have a lot of influential friends, gone are the days where you could simply write a post and expect it to pull it’s weight in terms of attracting visitors to your blog or website.
Are You Relying Solely on Luck?
Sure, you might get lucky every now and then when somebody with some influence stumbles across one of your best articles and decides to share it, but are you really going to hope for that elusive „luck” to find you? Not if you seriously want your blog to start performing anytime soon. The bottom line is, you NEED to promote every single one of your best posts — not just your blog’s homepage.
But now for the good news: there is a simple, step-by-step „strategy” you can follow with each of your pillar (aka „evergreen” or „cornerstone”) articles that will help transform each one of them into „workers” that will serve to improve your blog or website in a number of ways (for example: better search engine rankings, high quality traffic, more comments,…).
1. Ping Your Blog Post
A „ping” is just a way of letting specific search engines and other websites know that you have updated your blog. This does not cause a noticeable difference right off the bat, but it will attract search engine spiders to your blog/website and will help get your new blog post indexed more quickly. And it only takes about 30 seconds - so it is well worth the effort. Two of the most popular pinging services are Ping-o-Matic! and Pingoat (both free and easy to use).
2. Twitter, Facebook, or Both
If you are active on some of the popular social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, be sure to announce your posts, and do it several times a day. For example, on Twitter, your followers may be active at different times of the day and a large majority might miss your updates, so it will help your posts enormously if you announce them at different times throughout the day. For a free service that allows you to schedule tweets to be posted at a later date or time, visit SocialOomph.
3. IMAutomator
Social bookmarks do not have a huge impact on their own, and frankly, are quite a pain to submit. Thankfully, there is a free service called IMAutomator that will allow you to fill out ONE form, submit it ONCE, and have your post sent to no less than15 different social bookmarking websites over the course of a month (drip-feed submissions look more natural to the search engines, and therefore help your posts even more). It takes about one minute to usean dit is free, so there is no excuse NOT to use it for every one of the pillar articles you publish to your blog. Visit the IMAutomator website to sign up for a free account.
4. Even More Social Bookmarks
The service mentioned above will only submit to 15 social bookmarking websites, so it helps if you manually submit your post to another 8-12 social bookmarking websites to give it that extra push. Once again, social bookmarks do not do a whole lot on their own, but they do provide your post with some initial backlinks and an opportunity to get voted up and ranked highly (which could theoretically result in a virtual avalanche of traffic - if you are lucky).
Also, think of how many people publish posts to their blog and DO NOT submit them to a handful of social bookmarking sites. By taking ten minutes of your time (or less), you are putting YOUR post way ahead of the competition. To make the task of submitting your new blog post to 8-12 more social bookmarking websites easier, visit Shareaholic (also free).
5. Online Niche Communities
Do a search on the internet to see if there are popular communities that are specific to your niche. Usually these websites allow you to submit a new link, much like a social bookmarking website, but more targeted to your niche. For instance, if you are in the blogging, internet marketing, or make money online niche, some communities you should consider submitting your posts to are: MMOSocialNetwork.com and Blogengage.com. Tip: Make friends and build professional relationships in these communities and you will get even more traffic from your submissions.
6. Blog Carnival Submission
A blog carnival is a scheduled blog post that groups links to other blog posts about a specific topic. Those who are running blog carnivals submit their website to Blogcarnival.com to be listed. Likewise, you can go to that same website and find upcoming relevant blog carnivals to submit your posts to.
It can be a rather time-consuming process, but if you go through with it and submit every one of your pillar articles to relevant blog carnivals, it can result in not only a handful of good backlinks to your posts, but often a spike in traffic on the day the blog carnival goes live. Imagine if you submitted and got each one of your best articles approved at ten different blog carnivals?
7. Blog Comments
You should already have a list of established blogs in your niche that you post comments to regularly, and if you do not, you should definitely start right away. Immediately after you publish your new pillar article and go through steps 1-6, you should go through your list of „blogs to comment on” and post a comment on each one (especially on the more recent posts). But do not SPAM!
What this will do is drive some traffic from your comment to your blog where your brand new post is sitting at the top position on your homepage. This helps to increase your new post’s comment count, and can result in some new readers and subscribers as well.
Conclusion
The above process, though somewhat of a drag and somewhat time-consuming, should be the bare minimum effort you put into promoting all of your best posts.
You put a tremendous effort in writing amazing articles to publish to your blog - so wouldn´t it be a shame if your effort was wasted and those articles get pushed further and further down your archives without ever seeing the light of day? Go the extra mile and promote all of your blog posts using the simple, but effective 7-step strategy I described above and the blood, sweat, and tears you put into writing your pillar articles will be well worth it.
Related articles you may also like:
How to Write Great Blog Content – The Concept of the Pillar or Cornerstone Article
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