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How to Promote Your Blog: 7 Proven Strategies

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How to Promote Your Blog: 7 Proven Strategies

Search for “how to promote your blog,” and you’ll see hundreds of strategies.

But not all of them work. Believe us—we’ve tried them.

These are the seven that have worked for us.

1. Build share triggers into your content

People are more likely to share content with unique insights. Data, experiences, opinions—anything they can’t find elsewhere.

Here’s an example that illustrates this. In 2015, our chief marketing officer, Tim Soulo, wrote a guide to strategic writing on his personal blog. He crammed everything he knew and thought he created a masterpiece.

Yet, when he asked marketing influencer Rand Fishkin to tweet the post, this was how Rand responded:

Email from Rand Fishkin, a marketing influencer

A few years later, Rand retweeted our post on podcast advertising without any prompting:

What was the difference? 

In Tim’s post, he rehashed the same advice from other articles on the topic. No doubt it was useful, but nothing was unique. In the latter article by our Rebekah Bek, everything was solely based on experience. 

I’m not going to simply just tell you to create “unique content.” You must have heard it a hundred times by now. So rather than repeating the same old advice, I recommend building share triggers instead. 

Coined by professor Jonah Berger in his book, “Contagious,” share triggers are psychological principles that make people want to share something. They are:

  1. Social currency – People share things that make them look good to others.
  2. Triggers – People share things that are top of mind.
  3. Emotion – People need to feel something to share something.
  4. Public – People tend to imitate others’ behavior if they can see or observe it.
  5. Practical value – People like to pass along practical, useful information.
  6. Stories – People don’t just share information—they share stories too.

Here’s how to put them into action (you’ll want to incorporate at least one or two):

  1. Make your content practical – Create something the reader can use right away. For example, our suite of free tools generates a lot of links and shares.
  2. Make your content opinionated – Give the reader something new to think about. Tim’s rant on email outreach and our post on podcast advertising are some examples of opinionated content.
  3. Evoke emotion – People used to share Upworthy articles because those made them feel awe, surprise, and happiness. Appealing to these emotions—alongside negative ones like anger and sadness—can compel people to share more. 
  4. Make your content visual – Visual content makes consuming content easier, thus increasing the likelihood that someone will share it. 
  5. Make your content newsworthy – Journalists and bloggers are constantly on the lookout for stories to cover. Data is one type of story. So if you have unique data to share, create a piece of content around it. 
  6. Tell a story – Humans love telling and sharing stories. A good story that captures people’s attention can lead to more shares.
  7. Include what other people are sharing – If people are sharing and linking because of certain reasons in competing pages, we can assume that those reasons are important to that topic.

For the final tip, here’s how you can find out why people are linking:

  • Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
  • Search for a topic you’re writing about
  • Look at the SERP overview
  • Find a similar article with lots of referring domains
  • Click on the number in the Backlinks column
  • Skim the Anchor and target URL column for commonalities

For example, if we analyze this post on the perfect kettlebell swing, we see that people are linking because of the benefits:

The common anchors when other websites are linking to this post on kettlebell swings, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

It’s something we can consider adding to our content. 

Learn more: What Is Link Bait? 7 Successful Examples 

2. Write about “easy to rank” topics 

You want traffic from Google. But if you’re new to the game, many topics are out of your reach—at least for now. They’re too competitive, and you’re outgunned by websites with more resources. 

But what if I tell you that you can find topics that are easy to rank for? Here’s how:

  1. Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
  2. Search for a relevant term (e.g., “beards”)
  3. Add a Referring domains filter to max. 10
  4. Add a Page traffic filter to min. 500
  5. Add a Domain Rating filter to max. 30

Since backlinks are an important ranking factor, pages that still get tons of search traffic without plenty of backlinks should be relatively easy to rank for. 

Pages that get search traffic without many backlinks, via Ahrefs' Content Explorer

In this example, you’ll see >2,000 pages that get >500 search traffic a month with fewer than 10 referring domains. 

Click on any article and then on the Organic keywords tab to see what keywords they’re ranking for.

The keywords the page is ranking for, via Ahrefs' Content Explorer

If you’re running a blog about beards, you can target the same topics too.

Learn more: How to Find Low-Competition Keywords for SEO 

3. Run an outreach campaign

If you’ve published an amazing piece of content, why not show it to people in your niche who have a large audience?

It’s why Tim reached out to Rand. In digital marketing, we call this “outreach.” 

The key to successful outreach is to ask yourself this question each time you’re about to send a new email:

Why would anyone care about whatever I say?

There are two strong outreach reasons:

  1. You mentioned that person (or their work) in your article. 
  2. Your article has something groundbreaking that this person doesn’t know about but is genuinely interested in.

The latter reason is why strategy #1 works. There’s no trick to getting top people in your field to promote you. You have to do notable work.

This is also why whenever we send outreach emails to promote our content, we focus on pitching the article—not a sneaky request to tweet it. 

An example of an outreach email from Ahrefs

Assuming you’ve created something noteworthy, here’s how you can find people to potentially reach out to:

  1. Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
  2. Search for your topic
  3. Click on the Authors tab
The top 100 authors for the topic "link building," via Ahrefs' Content Explorer

These 100 people have written many articles on your topic, so it’s reasonable to assume they’re interested. Find their emails, reach out to them, and share your unique insights.

Learn more: Blogger Outreach: How to Do It at Scale (Without Feeling Like a Jerk) 

4. Update other people’s posts

Here’s another strong reason you can use for your outreach: You noticed someone’s blog post is declining in traffic, so you offer to help update it. 

In fact, this was what Irina Maltseva, the former head of marketing at Hunter, did:

An outreach email offering to update a post that was declining in traffic

Why does this work? Four reasons:

  1. It is important to update older content—you don’t want outdated information, and updated content helps boost search traffic.
  2. Keeping track and updating old content are burdensome tasks. By offering to update old content, you’re offering to take it off their hands.
  3. While guest blogging is a legitimate way to drive traffic, you’re oftentimes “guessing” the kind of topics they’re interested in. But you don’t need to guess if you’re updating their old content. 
  4. They’re more than likely to allow you to link back to your site and/or your content. 

Here’s how you can find content that’s declining in traffic:

  1. Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
  2. Search for your topic
  3. Set the Trends dropdown to Last year

From here, you’ll want to eyeball the list and look out for pages with declining page traffic:

Pages that are declining in traffic, via Ahrefs' Content Explorer

Click on the article to see the Page traffic chart in detail:

A particular page that has declining traffic, via Ahrefs' Content Explorer

Looks like this particular article has suffered a drastic drop in traffic. If you’re in this niche, you can reach out to the editor and see if they’ll be interested in updating the post. If they are, suggest doing the work for them—it’ll sweeten the ask.

Learn more: Republishing Content: How to Update Old Blog Posts for SEO 

5. Share barebones posts on Reddit

There is a subreddit for almost anything. That includes your niche too. There’s no doubt that Reddit is a great place to promote your content. Do it right, and it may even lead to a hug of death.

But let me throw a wrench in your plans. Redditors hate advertising and marketing. If your content smells like self-promotion, they will not hesitate to throw you out.

So you can’t just waltz in, drop a link, and wait for the flood of traffic.

Reddit, however, does love useful content. So to resolve this conundrum, you can share a barebones version of your content. Strip everything out, especially your internal and external links. Leave only a link back to the original at the bottom of your Reddit post, so anyone who’s interested can check it out. 

Here’s an example of it in the wild:

Tim Soulo's barebones post on Reddit

6. Repurpose your content into videos

We have a video on blog post templates you can swipe. But did you know that it was originally a blog post?

Not everyone wants to read. Some want to watch videos. By turning your articles into videos, you can potentially reach a new set of audience.

You’ve already created the content anyway. Why not take advantage of it and give it a new lease on life?

Let’s be honest, though. Repurposing is hard work. It’s one thing to say, “Turn your blog post into a video,” and another to actually do it. So if you’re going down this path, you’ll have to prioritize. 

One way to do this is to focus on topics that people are already searching for on YouTube. That way, your repurposed videos can generate search traffic too.

Here’s how to find these topics:

  1. Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
  2. Select YouTube
  3. Enter a few relevant keywords
  4. Go to the Matching terms report
The Matching terms report, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Look through the list to see if there are any topics where you already have existing blog content. Those are the topics you should repurpose. 

For example, this was how we decided to repurpose our article on influencer marketing:

The search volume for the keyword "influencer marketing," via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Learn more: The Complete Guide to Content Repurposing 

Most people who are looking for ways to promote their blogs are actually looking for free promotion strategies. They don’t want to pay for promotion because they think they have no budget for it. 

But what they don’t realize is that, in reality, no blog promotion method is free. While it may not cost upfront cash, it takes time. And time is money. Even the richest person in the world cannot buy time.

So you actually do have the budget to promote your content with ads because they free up your precious time—time that could be better spent elsewhere. 

At Ahrefs, we run ads for all our newly published content. Facebook ads are our go-to:

An example of a Facebook ad

If you find Facebook ads too complex or too expensive, don’t forget that there are other platforms you can test too. For example, we also run ads on Quora:

Data on Ahrefs' Quora ads

And Twitter:

Data on Ahrefs' Twitter ads

Learn more: PPC Marketing: Beginner’s Guide to Pay-Per-Click Ads 

Final thoughts

Ryan Holiday writes in “Perennial Seller”:

Creating more work is one of the most effective marketing techniques of all. 

If you’ve published an amazing article and got tons of success, the best thing you can do to promote your blog further is to publish another amazing piece of content. 

A consistent output of great work is the foundation behind all your blog promotion strategies. It supercharges everything. 

Any questions or comments? Let me know on Twitter.



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State Of Marketing Data Standards In The AI Era [Webinar]

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State Of Marketing Data Standards In The AI Era [Webinar]

Claravine and Advertiser Perceptions surveyed 140 marketers and agencies to better understand the impact of data standards on marketing data, and they’re ready to present their findings.

Want to learn how you can mitigate privacy risks and boost ROI through data standards?

Watch this on-demand webinar and learn how companies are addressing new privacy laws, taking advantage of AI, and organizing their data to better capture the campaign data they need, as well as how you can implement these findings in your campaigns.

In this webinar, you will:

  • Gain a better understanding of how your marketing data management compares to enterprise advertisers.
  • Get an overview of the current state of data standards and analytics, and how marketers are managing risk while improving the ROI of their programs.
  • Walk away with tactics and best practices that you can use to improve your marketing data now.

Chris Comstock, Chief Growth Officer at Claravine, will show you the marketing data trends of top advertisers and the potential pitfalls that come with poor data standards.

Learn the key ways to level up your data strategy to pinpoint campaign success.

View the slides below or check out the full webinar for all the details.

Join Us For Our Next Webinar!

SaaS Marketing: Expert Paid Media Tips Backed By $150M In Ad Spend

Join us and learn a unique methodology for growth that has driven massive revenue at a lower cost for hundreds of SaaS brands. We’ll dive into case studies backed by real data from over $150 million in SaaS ad spend per year.

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GPT Store Set To Launch In 2024 After ‘Unexpected’ Delays

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GPT Store Set To Launch In 2024 After 'Unexpected' Delays

OpenAI shares its plans for the GPT Store, enhancements to GPT Builder tools, privacy improvements, and updates coming to ChatGPT.

  • OpenAI has scheduled the launch of the GPT Store for early next year, aligning with its ongoing commitment to developing advanced AI technologies.
  • The GPT Builder tools have received substantial updates, including a more intuitive configuration interface and improved file handling capabilities.
  • Anticipation builds for upcoming updates to ChatGPT, highlighting OpenAI’s responsiveness to community feedback and dedication to AI innovation.

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96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here’s How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]

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96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]

It’s no secret that the web is growing by millions, if not billions of pages per day.

Our Content Explorer tool discovers 10 million new pages every 24 hours while being very picky about the pages that qualify for inclusion. The “main” Ahrefs web crawler crawls that number of pages every two minutes. 

But how much of this content gets organic traffic from Google?

To find out, we took the entire database from our Content Explorer tool (around 14 billion pages) and studied how many pages get traffic from organic search and why.

How many web pages get organic search traffic?

96.55% of all pages in our index get zero traffic from Google, and 1.94% get between one and ten monthly visits.

Distribution of pages by traffic from Content Explorer

Before we move on to discussing why the vast majority of pages never get any search traffic from Google (and how to avoid being one of them), it’s important to address two discrepancies with the studied data:

  1. ~14 billion pages may seem like a huge number, but it’s not the most accurate representation of the entire web. Even compared to the size of Site Explorer’s index of 340.8 billion pages, our sample size for this study is quite small and somewhat biased towards the “quality side of the web.”
  2. Our search traffic numbers are estimates. Even though our database of ~651 million keywords in Site Explorer (where our estimates come from) is arguably the largest database of its kind, it doesn’t contain every possible thing people search for in Google. There’s a chance that some of these pages get search traffic from super long-tail keywords that are not popular enough to make it into our database.

That said, these two “inaccuracies” don’t change much in the grand scheme of things: the vast majority of published pages never rank in Google and never get any search traffic. 

But why is this, and how can you be a part of the minority that gets organic search traffic from Google?

Well, there are hundreds of SEO issues that may prevent your pages from ranking well in Google. But if we focus only on the most common scenarios, assuming the page is indexed, there are only three of them.

Reason 1: The topic has no search demand

If nobody is searching for your topic, you won’t get any search traffic—even if you rank #1.

For example, I recently Googled “pull sitemap into google sheets” and clicked the top-ranking page (which solved my problem in seconds, by the way). But if you plug that URL into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, you’ll see that it gets zero estimated organic search traffic:

The top-ranking page for this topic gets no traffic because there's no search demandThe top-ranking page for this topic gets no traffic because there's no search demand

This is because hardly anyone else is searching for this, as data from Keywords Explorer confirms:

Keyword data from Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer confirms that this topic has no search demandKeyword data from Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer confirms that this topic has no search demand

This is why it’s so important to do keyword research. You can’t just assume that people are searching for whatever you want to talk about. You need to check the data.

Our Traffic Potential (TP) metric in Keywords Explorer can help with this. It estimates how much organic search traffic the current top-ranking page for a keyword gets from all the queries it ranks for. This is a good indicator of the total search demand for a topic.

You’ll see this metric for every keyword in Keywords Explorer, and you can even filter for keywords that meet your minimum criteria (e.g., 500+ monthly traffic potential): 

Filtering for keywords with Traffic Potential (TP) in Ahrefs' Keywords ExplorerFiltering for keywords with Traffic Potential (TP) in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Reason 2: The page has no backlinks

Backlinks are one of Google’s top three ranking factors, so it probably comes as no surprise that there’s a clear correlation between the number of websites linking to a page and its traffic.

Pages with more referring domains get more trafficPages with more referring domains get more traffic
Pages with more referring domains get more traffic

Same goes for the correlation between a page’s traffic and keyword rankings:

Pages with more referring domains rank for more keywordsPages with more referring domains rank for more keywords
Pages with more referring domains rank for more keywords

Does any of this data prove that backlinks help you rank higher in Google?

No, because correlation does not imply causation. However, most SEO professionals will tell you that it’s almost impossible to rank on the first page for competitive keywords without backlinks—an observation that aligns with the data above.

The key word there is “competitive.” Plenty of pages get organic traffic while having no backlinks…

Pages with more referring domains get more trafficPages with more referring domains get more traffic
How much traffic pages with no backlinks get

… but from what I can tell, almost all of them are about low-competition topics.

For example, this lyrics page for a Neil Young song gets an estimated 162 monthly visits with no backlinks: 

Example of a page with traffic but no backlinks, via Ahrefs' Content ExplorerExample of a page with traffic but no backlinks, via Ahrefs' Content Explorer

But if we check the keywords it ranks for, they almost all have Keyword Difficulty (KD) scores in the single figures:

Some of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks forSome of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks for

It’s the same story for this page selling upholstered headboards:

Some of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks forSome of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks for

You might have noticed two other things about these pages:

  • Neither of them get that much traffic. This is pretty typical. Our index contains ~20 million pages with no referring domains, yet only 2,997 of them get more than 1K search visits per month. That’s roughly 1 in every 6,671 pages with no backlinks.
  • Both of the sites they’re on have high Domain Rating (DR) scores. This metric shows the relative strength of a website’s backlink profile. Stronger sites like these have more PageRank that they can pass to pages with internal links to help them rank. 

Bottom line? If you want your pages to get search traffic, you really only have two options:

  1. Target uncompetitive topics that you can rank for with few or no backlinks.
  2. Target competitive topics and build backlinks to rank.

If you want to find uncompetitive topics, try this:

  1. Enter a topic into Keywords Explorer
  2. Go to the Matching terms report
  3. Set the Keyword Difficulty (KD) filter to max. 20
  4. Set the Lowest DR filter to your site’s DR (this will show you keywords with at least one of the same or lower DR ranking in the top 5)
Filtering for low-competition keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords ExplorerFiltering for low-competition keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

(Remember to keep an eye on the TP column to make sure they have traffic potential.)

To rank for more competitive topics, you’ll need to earn or build high-quality backlinks to your page. If you’re not sure how to do that, start with the guides below. Keep in mind that it’ll be practically impossible to get links unless your content adds something to the conversation. 

Reason 3. The page doesn’t match search intent

Google wants to give users the most relevant results for a query. That’s why the top organic results for “best yoga mat” are blog posts with recommendations, not product pages. 

It's obviously what searchers want when they search for "best yoga mats"It's obviously what searchers want when they search for "best yoga mats"

Basically, Google knows that searchers are in research mode, not buying mode.

It’s also why this page selling yoga mats doesn’t show up, despite it having backlinks from more than six times more websites than any of the top-ranking pages:

Page selling yoga mats that has lots of backlinksPage selling yoga mats that has lots of backlinks
Number of linking websites to the top-ranking pages for "best yoga mats"Number of linking websites to the top-ranking pages for "best yoga mats"

Luckily, the page ranks for thousands of other more relevant keywords and gets tens of thousands of monthly organic visits. So it’s not such a big deal that it doesn’t rank for “best yoga mats.”

Number of keyword rankings for the page selling yoga matsNumber of keyword rankings for the page selling yoga mats

However, if you have pages with lots of backlinks but no organic traffic—and they already target a keyword with traffic potential—another quick SEO win is to re-optimize them for search intent.

We did this in 2018 with our free backlink checker.

It was originally nothing but a boring landing page explaining the benefits of our product and offering a 7-day trial: 

Original landing page for our free backlink checkerOriginal landing page for our free backlink checker

After analyzing search intent, we soon realized the issue:

People weren’t looking for a landing page, but rather a free tool they could use right away. 

So, in September 2018, we created a free tool and published it under the same URL. It ranked #1 pretty much overnight, and has remained there ever since. 

Our rankings over time for the keyword "backlink checker." You can see when we changed the pageOur rankings over time for the keyword "backlink checker." You can see when we changed the page

Organic traffic went through the roof, too. From ~14K monthly organic visits pre-optimization to almost ~200K today. 

Estimated search traffic over time to our free backlink checkerEstimated search traffic over time to our free backlink checker

TLDR

96.55% of pages get no organic traffic. 

Keep your pages in the other 3.45% by building backlinks, choosing topics with organic traffic potential, and matching search intent.

Ping me on Twitter if you have any questions. 🙂



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