If you have a blog and are eager for the rest of the world to discover it, then a roadmap on how to promote your blog is probably what you are looking for. And not just any roadmap, a detailed and descriptive roadmap, so you know exactly what to do, right? Here’s an easy-to-follow plan just for you …

Actually, focusing more on the topic of how to promote your blog effectively is an even better plan. Because effectiveness is key when looking for the best ways to promote your blogging efforts.

You work hard on your blog, so you want to implement promotional strategies that get the most out of your investment, right?

But exactly what to do and how to promote your blog can be a daunting task. Believe me, I know, I have tried almost all of them.

I’ve paid hundreds of dollars on all kinds of bookmarks, directory submissions, not to mention social media and extensive “google search.”

But what I have discovered is that there are a handful of tried and true methods that can attract a ton of visitors to your blog. And you don’t have to pay money to promote your blog, they are all FREE!

You can learn to promote your blog very quickly and easily with these 5 simple steps.

Don’t worry if they seem long, they are actually very easy and will bring you more readers than you ever imagined.

Step 1 – When looking at how to promote your blog, the first step is to identify what your goals are for your promotional efforts.

Imagine a business – Businesses don’t just buy ad space or hire sales people without a clearly defined plan. They have a goal in mind and everything they do is related to that goal.

The same goes for your blog. Write down some goals you want to achieve with your promotional efforts: Do you want to hit the 100, 500 or 1,000 visitors / day mark or get 500 new subscribers to your newsletter or sell $ x dollar amount in your Amazon store? Why are you promoting your blog? This is a crucial step, one that cannot be ignored. Having a goal guides you when deciding where to send all your blog visitors.

You don’t want to send readers to your blog without having it structured to receive those visitors. Imagine getting a ton of new readers, new leads to your blog, only they leave within minutes of arriving (check this percentage on how to use Google Analytics) or get sent to a page that is not relevant to what they expected. . . All of their promotional strategies flew out the window! Setting goals and clearly defining what the customer should do next is critical to any promotional strategy. Key question here: Why are you promoting your blog?

Step 2 – Once you’ve reached a specific goal, it’s time to put the wheels in motion. I will use the well-known dog training example to help explain this step. Dog training is a very broad niche, imagine that your niche is more specialized, training dogs in a laboratory.

Your blog, Dog Training a Lab, is set up and you’ve been posting quality content for a few weeks. You want to promote your blog with the goal of selling items from your Amazon links. That is your ultimate goal: to sell articles that you will recommend to your readers, via Amazon links from your posts.

Since we have defined a goal, we can move on to putting a plan into action.

And as with any marketing or promotional effort, the question to ask is: how do I get in front of people interested in what I have to offer? Where are all these people hanging out? Where do people who want to talk about dog training meet …

Well, they meet in forums:

People who want to know about dog training are in community forums discussing dog training with others.

I googled dog training forums and several websites came up, then I googled dog training forums and some forums came up that are designed for labs only.

Sparkly!

Go where the people are: There are people interested in training dogs in a laboratory in community forums. Go and participate. Contribute and you will get visitors to visit your blog to buy your latest and greatest dog leash or some other article that you are blogging about.

Step 3 – Next time is the time to enter Twitter and start tweeting, notice that I said start tweeting. Just being on Twitter does nothing for your business, you have to say something.

If tweeting is too far out of your comfort zone, try tweeting someone else’s posts or re-tweeting what someone else has said to begin with. You keep gaining popularity because your name is in the tweet. Keep using it and you will gain followers. Take a big leap of faith and tweet something – spread the word in a new dog training video you just watched. You’ll start tweeting, which will send people to your blog, getting your sales going in no time.

Step 4 – Configure Facebook for your business. Tell your friends about a dog toy sale or mention a new blog post you just published. The point is to be as exposed as possible so that visitors can find you anywhere and everywhere. Generating friends on Facebook will be covered in another post, but for now put a button on your blog to encourage others to find you on Facebook.

At the bottom of your blog posts, put a social connect button with a Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, and Google+ button so readers can simply click a button to post to Twitter or any of the others; Again, this makes it easy for visitors to share a great post with others and it will drive more traffic to your blog. If you use WordPress there is a plugin for this, Blogger will have an option in its settings as well.

Step 5 – Comments make the world go round. You may have heard this from me before, but the comments really are like gold. Find other blogs in your niche or a little outside of it. Let’s look at the example of a dog training laboratory. I’d jump to other lab dog training blogs and read their posts and make a smart comment. Then I would scale up and jump to some general dog training blogs and read their posts and comment there. Do you see where this is heading?

Treat the comments you receive with care, they do a lot more than just take up space on your post page. Comments show interaction: Visitors like to see and read comments. Comments build your report with search engines. They provide links that enter your website; they build links from your website. Comments mean you have an interactive and responsive blog and that’s what the difference between a successful blog and a failed blog means.

Five easy steps on how to promote your blog, right?

In fact, these steps are very easy to implement – take one night and set up these accounts and you will be amazed at the difference it makes.

Finding out how to promote your blog is further simplified in my latest book, Profitable Blogging Made Easy. Grab your copy today!

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