10+ Best Ways of Promoting Your WordPress Blog

As search engines look more closely at social signals, I always recommend that bloggers focus on social media and networking. You want to engage your community and keep it manageable so that you develop avid fans. All the other stuff is great and has it’s place but, if you have good content, the next step is cultivating a community and curating that content accordingly. As many others have suggested, there is no one-size-fits-all solution here but I try to explain some basics of them.

The most important thing has got to be the content itself. Yes link building, social media interaction, blog networking and everything else listed above is important, but if your content is great then your WordPress site will perform well. One of the great things about WordPress is that whilst there are loads of great plugins to help it’s pretty good straight out of the box. Just make sure you’ve got a good theme and clean URL’s and you’ll be sinning.

On Site

• Use an exceptional theme to provide a world-class user experience
• Fix your permalinks so they provide contextually keywords in the URLs
• Add All in one SEO plugin (along with Google Sitemaps XML and Robots Meta) to clean up your SEO
• Add Facebook Like and Facebook Comments to pretty seamlessly integrate social marketing with your posts. Encourage you add the widget for your Page to the sidebar
• Add WP Greet Box to increase engagement from first time readers and add messaging to repeat visitors
• Create compelling unique content that fosters growth: contests, reviews, controversy, etc. “Link bait”
• Link from your posts to other blog posts. Not other websites, not other blog homepages. Link to blog posts which often automatically link back to you while pinging the author to which you are linking.

From then on, it depends on your business and the expectations you want to set with the audience. Do you use twitter? Does it make sense to customize pages to various user segments? Would you benefit from social network like profiles? Is a Q/A system similar to this worthwhile?

Answering all those questions will determine how to set up the blog so it best promotes itself via SEO, social marketing, and word of mouth

Off Site

• Paid search marketing is the first place to turn being performance based, relevant, and limited to your expectations
• Email marketing integration to foster greater adoption by existing readers is next. Plug in MailChimp or something to clean up your distribution of content to reader and encourage sharing
• Affiliate marketing is the next paid channel I’d encourage, assuming you have an order form for products or services against which you can pay for leads

Start there. Then you can look to list rental, PR, display advertising, local, etc. as is appropriate for your blog. Let me know what works for you!