Many bloggers complain that they can’t draw flies to their blogs when they are failing in a very critical area: They are under-promoting their work! You can’t just sit back and expect readers to sift through the millions of blogs on the net to find the pearls of wisdom included in yours, you have to aggressively go out there and promote your blog! Here are some of the most effective audience-capturing strategies which will boost any blog.

Email marketing is a surefire promo method

One of the most time-honored and truly effective means of promoting your blog is through the establishment and maintenance of a quality email marketing list. The recipients must have clearly opted into receiving your emails (which means that buying a list of email addresses is strictly taboo), and you have to adhere to all the pertinent government regulations in each nation where your subscribers reside. If you conduct an ethical and proper email marketing campaign, you’ll find that the results in your analytics dashboard will certainly impress you.

Free Press Release sites provide fantastic exposure

Press release sites are a great way to get your blog’s URL out there and highly ranked by the search engines. You don’t have to go with the pay sites as there are more than enough completely free sites which will publish your press release and get you great exposure. The time you will invest will pay dividends in additional traffic to your blog. However, there are many more activities you can engage in to get your readership numbers zooming. These include:

  • Become an interactive participant on other related blogs and communities.
  • Aggregate content ravenously and provide your readers with compilations.
  • Make your blog SEO-friendly without resorting to keyword stuffing which handicaps readability.
  • Ask the other bloggers in your niche if they would like to exchange guest blogging opportunities.
  • Place your blog’s URL and a descriptive blurb into every single one of your email and blog signatures.
  • Join a blog carnival, and if you find the time for the manual submissions overwhelming, outsource it on Freelancer.com.
  • While you’re on Freelancer.com, get someone to design a killer logo for your blog for just a few dollars.

Give something for nothing & the world is at your feet

One of the most basic tenets of humanity is that everyone wants something for nothing. Some of the primary rules to running a successful giveaway promotion is to ensure that the prize has a significant value. You’re not going to make too many waves if you’re giving away a key fob with your face imprinted on it. At the same time most bloggers don’t have the funds to buy a new Mercedes S Class to give away. There can be a happy medium as you can solicit prizes from manufacturers and distributors in your niche in exchange for on-blog promotion. You can likely get a laptop or a designer handbag or something similar that fits your industry sector at no cost and then obtain considerable promotional benefit from giving it away.

Local promotion can be super-effective

If your blog deals with local issues, you have an entirely additional set of promotional opportunities presenting themselves. You don’t have to organize a flash mob at the airport, hand out blog stickers in a monkey suit, or hire some kid to wave a sign with your URL at a busy corner (although there is absolutely nothing wrong with those ideas) but you can do other promotional activities to get your blog noticed in your town or city. You’d be surprised how affordable it is to have your local movie theater show a slide about your blog to the audience as they’re settling in to watch the latest Hollywood blockbuster. You can also obtain affordable local promotion by sponsoring a kids’ sports team, volunteering to give a speech at a symposium or club meeting, buying bus and subway ads, setting up a mobile billboard on a busy street, or even placing flyers around your town (where it is legal to affix them).

So stop sitting around complaining that you’re a voice in the wilderness, and get promoting your blog!