SEO
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.
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:
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:
- Social currency – People share things that make them look good to others.
- Triggers – People share things that are top of mind.
- Emotion – People need to feel something to share something.
- Public – People tend to imitate others’ behavior if they can see or observe it.
- Practical value – People like to pass along practical, useful information.
- 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):
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Make your content visual – Visual content makes consuming content easier, thus increasing the likelihood that someone will share it.
- 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.
- Tell a story – Humans love telling and sharing stories. A good story that captures people’s attention can lead to more shares.
- 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:
It’s something we can consider adding to our content.
Learn more: What Is Link Bait? 7 Successful Examples
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:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
- Search for a relevant term (e.g., “beards”)
- Add a Referring domains filter to max. 10
- Add a Page traffic filter to min. 500
- 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.
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.
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
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:
- You mentioned that person (or their work) in your article.
- 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.
Assuming you’ve created something noteworthy, here’s how you can find people to potentially reach out to:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
- Search for your topic
- Click on the Authors tab
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)
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:
Why does this work? Four reasons:
- It is important to update older content—you don’t want outdated information, and updated content helps boost search traffic.
- Keeping track and updating old content are burdensome tasks. By offering to update old content, you’re offering to take it off their hands.
- 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.
- 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:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
- Search for your topic
- 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:
Click on the article to see the Page traffic chart in detail:
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
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:
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:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
- Select YouTube
- Enter a few relevant keywords
- Go to the Matching terms report
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:
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:
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:
And Twitter:
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.
SEO
Why Building a Brand is Key to SEO
For better or worse, brands dominate Google search results. As more results are generated by AI and machines start to understand the offline and online world, big brands are only going to get more powerful.
Watch on-demand as we tackle the challenge of competing with dominant brands in Google search results. We explained why big brands lead the rankings and how to measure your own brand’s impact against these competitors.
We even shared actionable strategies for improving your visibility by weaving your brand into your SEO.
You’ll learn:
- Why brands dominate Google (and will continue to do so).
- How to measure your brand’s impact on search, and what you should focus on.
- Ways to weave your brand’s identity into your content.
With Dr. Pete Meyers, we explored why brand marketing is vital to search marketing, and how to incorporate your brand into your everyday content and SEO efforts.
If you’re looking to have your brand stand out in a sea of competition, you won’t want to miss this.
View the slides below, or check out the full presentation for all the details.
Join Us For Our Next Webinar!
Optimizing For Google’s New Landscape And The Future Of Search
Join us as we dive deep into the evolution reshaping Google’s search rankings in 2024 and beyond. We’ll show you actionable insights to help you navigate the disruption and emerge with a winning SEO strategy.
SEO
How SEO Can Capture Demand You Create Elsewhere
Generating demand is about making people want stuff they had no desire to buy before encountering your marketing.
Sometimes, it’s a short-term play, like an ecommerce store creating buzz before launching a new product. Other times, like with B2B marketing, it’s a long-term play to engage out-of-market audiences.
In either situation, demand generation can quickly become an expensive marketing activity.
Here are some ways SEO can help you capture and retain the demand you’re generating so your marketing budget goes further.
There’s no right or wrong way to generate demand. Any marketing activity that generates a desire to buy something (where there wasn’t such a desire before) can be considered demand generation.
Common examples include using:
- Paid ads
- Word of mouth
- Social media
- Video marketing
- Email newsletters
- Content marketing
- Community marketing
For example, Pryshan is a small local brand in Australia that has created a new type of exfoliating stone from clay. They’ve been selling it offline since 2018, if not earlier.
It’s not a groundbreaking innovation, but it’s also not been done before.
To launch their product online, they started running a bunch of Facebook ads:
Because of their ads, this company is in the early stages of generating demand for its product. Sure, it’s not the type of marketing that will go viral, but it’s still a great example of demand gen.
Looking at search volume data, there are 40 searches per month for the keyword “clay stone exfoliator” in Australia and a handful of other related searches:
However, these same keywords get hardly any searches in the US:
This never happens.
Australia has a much smaller population than the US. For non-localized searches, Australian search volume is usually about 6-10% of US search volume for the same keywords.
Take a look at the most popular searches as an example:
Pryshan’s advertising efforts on other platforms directly create the search demand for exfoliating clay stones.
It doesn’t matter where or how you educate people about the product you sell. What matters is shifting their perceptions from cognitive awareness to emotional desire.
Emotions trigger actions, and usually, the first action people take once they become aware of a cool new thing is to Google it.
If you’re not including SEO as part of your marketing efforts, here are three things you can do to:
- minimize budget wastage
- capture interest when people search
- convert the audiences you’re already reaching
If you’re working hard to create demand for your product, make sure it’s easy for people to discover it when they search Google.
- Give it a simple name that’s easy to remember
- Label it according to how people naturally search
- Avoid any terms that create ambiguities with an existing thing
For example, the concept of a clay exfoliating stone is easy for people to remember.
Even if they don’t remember what Pryshan calls their product, they’ll remember the videos and images they saw of the product being used to exfoliate people’s skin. They’ll remember it’s made from clay instead of a more common material like pumice.
It makes sense for Pryshan to call its product something similar to what people will be inclined to search for.
In this example, however, the context of exfoliation is important.
If Pryshan chooses to call its product “clay stones,” it will have a harder time disambiguating itself from gardening products in search results. It’s already the odd one out in SERPs for such keywords:
When you go through your branding exercises to decide what to call your product or innovation, it helps to search your ideas on Google.
This way, you’ll easily see what phrases to avoid so that your product isn’t being grouped with unrelated things.
Imagine being part of a company that invested a lot of money in re-branding itself. New logo, new slogan, new marketing materials… the lot.
On the back of their new business cards, the designers thought inviting people to search for the new slogan on Google would be clever.
The only problem was that this company didn’t rank for the slogan.
They weren’t showing up at all! (Yes, it’s a true story, no I can’t share the brand’s name).
This tactic isn’t new. Many businesses leverage the fact that people will Google things to convert offline audiences into online audiences through their printed, radio, and TV ads.
Don’t do this if you don’t already own the search results page.
It’s not only a very expensive mistake to make, but it gives the conversions you’ve worked hard for directly to your competitors.
Instead, use SEO to become the only brand people see when they search for your brand, product, or something that you’ve created.
Let’s use Pryshan as an example.
They’re the first brand to create exfoliating clay stones. Their audience has created a few new keywords to find Pryshan’s products on Google, with “clay stone exfoliator” being the most popular variation.
Yet even though it’s a product they’ve brought to market, competitors and retailers are already encroaching on their SERP real estate for this keyword:
Sure, Pryshan holds four of the organic spots, but it’s not enough.
Many competitors are showing up in the paid product carousel before Pryshan’s website can be seen by searchers:
They’re already paying for Facebook ads, why not consider some paid Google placements too?
Not to mention, stockists and competitors are ranking for three of the other organic positions.
Having stockists show up for your product may not seem so bad, but if you’re not careful, they may undercut your prices or completely edge you out of the SERPs.
This is also a common tactic used by affiliate marketers to earn commissions from brands that are not SEO-savvy.
In short, SEO can help you protect your brand presence on Google.
If you’re working hard to generate demand for a cool new thing that’s never been done before, it can be hard to know if it’s working.
Sure, you can measure sales. But a lot of the time, demand generation doesn’t turn into immediate sales.
B2B marketing is a prominent example. Educating and converting out-of-market audiences into in-market prospects can take a long time.
That’s where SEO data can help close the gap and give you data to get more buy-in from decision-makers.
Measure increases in branded searches
A natural byproduct of demand generation activities is that people search more for your brand (or they should if you’re doing it right).
Tracking if your branded keywords improve over time can help you gauge how your demand generation efforts are going.
In Ahrefs, you can use Rank Tracker to monitor how many people discover your website from your branded searches and whether these are trending up:
If your brand is big enough and gets hundreds of searches a month, you can also check out this nifty graph that forecasts search potential in Keywords Explorer:
Discover and track new keywords about your products, services or innovations
If, as part of your demand generation strategy, you’re encouraging people to search for new keywords relating to your product, service, or innovation, set up alerts to monitor your presence for those terms.
This method will also help you uncover the keywords your audience naturally uses anyway.
Start by going to Ahrefs Alerts and setting up a new keyword alert.
Add your website.
Leave the volume setting untouched (you want to include low search volume keywords so you discover the new searches people make).
Set your preferred email frequency, and voila, you’re done.
Monitor visibility against competitors
If you’re worried other brands may steal your spotlight in Google’s search results, you can also use Ahrefs to monitor your share of the traffic compared to them.
I like to use the Share of Voice graph in Site Explorer to do this. It looks like this:
This graph is a great bird’s eye view of how you stack up against competitors and if you’re at risk of losing visibility to any of them.
Final thoughts
As SEO professionals, it’s easy to forget how hard some businesses work to generate demand for their products or services.
Demand always comes first, and it’s our job to capture it.
It’s not a chicken or egg scenario. The savviest marketers use this to their advantage by creating their own SEO opportunities long before competitors figure out what they’re doing.
If you’ve seen other great examples of how SEO and demand generation work together, share them with me on LinkedIn anytime.
SEO
Google Explains How Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) Is Measured
Google’s Web Performance Developer Advocate, Barry Pollard, has clarified how Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is measured.
CLS quantifies how much unexpected layout shift occurs when a person browses your site.
This metric matters to SEO as it’s one of Google’s Core Web Vitals. Pages with low CLS scores provide a more stable experience, potentially leading to better search visibility.
How is it measured? Pollard addressed this question in a thread on X.
For Core Web Vitals what is CLS measured in? Why is 0.1 considered not good and 0.25 bad, and what do those numbers represent?
I’ve had 3 separate conversations on this with various people in last 24 hours so figured it’s time for another deep dive thread to explain…
🧵 1/12 pic.twitter.com/zZoTur6Ad4
— Barry Pollard (@tunetheweb) October 10, 2024
Understanding CLS Measurement
Pollard began by explaining the nature of CLS measurement:
“CLS is ‘unitless’ unlike LCP and INP which are measured in seconds/milliseconds.”
He further clarified:
“Each layout shift is calculated by multipyling two percentages or fractions together: What moved (impact fraction) How much it moved (distance fraction).”
This calculation method helps quantify the severity of layout shifts.
As Pollard explained:
“The whole viewport moves all the way down – that’s worse than just half the view port moving all the way down. The whole viewport moving down a little? That’s not as bad as the whole viewport moving down a lot.”
Worse Case Scenario
Pollard described the worst-case scenario for a single layout shift:
“The maximum layout shift is if 100% of the viewport (impact fraction = 1.0) is moved one full viewport down (distance fraction = 1.0).
This gives a layout shift score of 1.0 and is basically the worst type of shift.”
However, he reminds us of the cumulative nature of CLS:
“CLS is Cumulative Layout Shift, and that first word (cumulative) matters. We take all the individual shifts that happen within a short space of time (max 5 seconds) and sum them up to get the CLS score.”
Pollard explained the reasoning behind the 5-second measurement window:
“Originally we cumulated ALL the shifts, but that didn’t really measure the UX—especially for pages opened for a long time (think SPAs or email). Measuring all shifts meant, given enough, time even the best pages would fail!”
He also noted the theoretical maximum CLS score:
“Since each element can only shift when a frame is drawn and we have a 5 second cap and most devices run at 60fps, that gives a theoretical cap on CLS of 5 secs * 60 fps * 1.0 max shift = 300.”
Interpreting CLS Scores
Pollard addressed how to interpret CLS scores:
“… it helps to think of CLS as a percentage of movement. The good threshold of 0.1 means about the page moved 10%—which could mean the whole page moved 10%, or half the page moved 20%, or lots of little movements were equivalent to either of those.”
Regarding the specific threshold values, Pollard explained:
“So why is 0.1 ‘good’ and 0.25 ‘poor’? That’s explained here as was a combination of what we’d want (CLS = 0!) and what is achievable … 0.05 was actually achievable at the median, but for many sites it wouldn’t be, so went slightly higher.”
See also: How You Can Measure Core Web Vitals
Why This Matters
Pollard’s insights provide web developers and SEO professionals with a clearer understanding of measuring and optimizing for CLS.
As you work with CLS, keep these points in mind:
- CLS is unitless and calculated from impact and distance fractions.
- It’s cumulative, measuring shifts over a 5-second window.
- The “good” threshold of 0.1 roughly equates to 10% of viewport movement.
- CLS scores can exceed 1.0 due to multiple shifts adding up.
- The thresholds (0.1 for “good”, 0.25 for “poor”) balance ideal performance with achievable goals.
With this insight, you can make adjustments to achieve Google’s threshold.
Featured Image: Piscine26/Shutterstock
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