Basic And Effective Ways to Promote a Blog for Businesses

What are the most effective ways to promote blogs? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

My blog is relatively young(ish). It was very frustrating at first, as I thought getting people to read it would be fairly easy – boy, was I wrong! So, I read and I read countless articles on how to drive traffic to my blog, and, honestly, I very rarely stumbled upon something actually helpful. Most of them just repeated each other, or only gave some very unadequate advice – nothing that can help you when you are just getting up to 10–20 pageviews a day. So, here I am still experimenting and finding my way. I am having some peaks here and there, with some days up to 2000 pageviews. Once I even had 10k for a day! But usually I range between 300 and 400/day. It’s probably minor for a lot of blogers out there, but for me so far it is progress.

So what works the best for me so far?

No doubt – Pinterest! Here’s what I learned so far:

1. You need to be crazy patient with Pinterest – building a following there is an incredibly slow process – no matter how often you pin. But that’s fine. You don’t need a ton of folloers to create a viral pin or to have an extensive reach. When I had about 250–60 followers, my reach was over 1.6million – much bigger than what other people with thousands of followers have.
2. Switch to a business account (it’s really easy) and activate rich pins for your website (there are tons of explanation out there how to do it).
3. Create a bunch of boards with SEO-optimized titles (think: terms that people search for). Over time, keep creating more boards. Add description for each one of them. Most importantly – create a board with the name of your blog.
4. Every time you create a pin for your new blog post – pin it on your blog board first. From there – pin on every other board that you find relevant.
5. Join group boards. Usually, you can find directions how to join the board in its description. It’s not gonna work every time though, but don’t sweat it. Also, not all group boards are worth joining, even if they have thousands of followers, they could still have a very low repin rate.
6. Pinterest is all about the visual appeal. You have to create very clean, beautiful, and capturing pins in order to get repined. Use only vertical pins. I use PicMonkey (paid version) and Canva (free) to create my pins and they work great. Always put the name of your website on your pins (like with small letters on the bottom of the pin for example).
7. Pin like a madman/madwoman. Not just your stuff, but find popular, credible, and nicely looking pins that are relevant to your boards and pin them. They say that Pinterest likes team players – I guess there’s truth it that. But at the same rate – repin your own content. See what are your most visited hours and repin around those times. Repin on your own content on your own board. A.lot.

There’s a lot more little details about Pinterest that you get to notice the more you use it. To be honest, I really only use it, because it’s such a great traffic provider. I actually don’t get the appeal of it at all and don’t understand why someone would waste their time on there…but hey, whatever brings me traffic..

Of course, I also optimize my blog post for search engines. Thanks to that, I know get more and more visits coming from Google or other SEs.

I believe that Instagram could be a big traffic booster as well but there’s a whole new algorithm to figure out and fight through and I am still not that far yet.

So, in short, that’s my two ways of driving traffic to my baby blog – Pinterest and SEO.

Hope that that helps someone.

Contributed by Lily Stoyanova. Personal Trainer, Blogger