Why do you think most marketing specialists recommend entrepreneurs having a business blog? The reason is crystal-clear:

Blogging is a multi-functional tool that allows us to build brand visibility, keep the audience updated about our business, promote products or services through content marketing, and get tons of traffic to our websites.

But all the above won’t come by itself. For traffic, exposure, and sales you need to work hard on blog posts promotion. Tactics are many, and millions of articles on this topic are available. It’s easy to get lost and confused, huh?

In this post, let’s stop wasting time and just focus on the proven steps to take for blog posts promotion. They are your best strategies to implement in 2020.

Step 1: Update Your Blogging Strategy

For the last few years, the formula for a successful blog was “compelling content + smart SEO + consistent posting.” In 2020, it’s still so, but content trends and optimization tactics continue to evolve.

Reasons:

• More content than ever goes live today, which makes it too challenging to engage readers and stand out with blog posts.
• Google continues updating its algorithms, and BERT (together with E-A-T) makes us emphasize originality, thoroughness, accuracy, accessibility, and professionalism in blog posts for them to perform well.

As a result, a great blogging strategy is about creating and promoting high-quality and long-form posts with outstanding design, narrative elements, and interactive media components. So, if you didn’t plan to include all the above into your blogging strategy, think again.

Consider the most prominent content trends for 2020:

• Long-form blog posts, based on facts and references
• Video and interactive content elements for better user experience and collaboration
• Frequent posting (but don’t sacrifice quality for quantity!)
• Mobile-optimized content
• Short-form content (aka snippets) for quick consuming through mobile devices
• Content creation by professional writers, who are experts in the described niche
• Writing on emerging and exploding topics (consider Google Trends and Exploding Topics to find content ideas for your blog posts)

So, don’t be afraid of spending more time on blog post writing, promoting audience interaction within your posts, and writing on the trends that work best for your readers.

Step 2: Analyze And Fill Content Gaps

For better traffic and, therefore, promotion, identify new keywords opportunities for your blog in 2020. What you need to do is analyze your competitors’ content gaps and see where you can overtake them.

Feel free to use Long Tail Pro to spy on competitors and see what keywords they are targeting and missing to target. Take your top three or five competitors, find their keywords in positions 11-20 (or, you can take the positions 1-10; it’s up to you), scan through that list, and choose those that seem relevant to your blog.

You can also mine your competitors by topics. Find their highest traffic-generating pages, check the primary and secondary keywords those articles are ranking for, and see if you can use any of them for your own content assets.

Step 3: Optimize Your Blog Posts Like A Pro

Given that 60-70% of the traffic comes to blog posts from search engines, it’s crucial to optimize your every article as pitch-perfect as reasonably achievable.

First and foremost, specify a core keyword for a blog post. Relevant to your niche, it needs to have the potential to generate traffic to your page. Here at Long Tail Pro, you can find hundreds of keyword ideas and identify their profitability for your blog.

Once a core keyword is ready, craft your blog post around it. Consider long-tail and LSI keywords, but do your best to avoid keyword stuffing. Here’s what to do for pro optimization:

• Add a keyword to the page URL, but make sure the URL is short.
• Add a keyword to SEO titles and meta descriptions.
• Include your target keyword in at least one H2 subhead of your blog post.
• The first 100 words of your blog post need to include a keyword, too.
• Add internal and relevant outbound links to the article to improve SEO and reduce the bounce rate.
• Consider keyworded alt-tags for the blog images.
• Structure your blog posts like a boss: short sentences and paragraphs, hooks in the introduction, power words, engaging visual elements — they all influence readability and overall content usability of blog posts.

Step 4: Focus On Influencers

Influencers in your niche can help you promote a blog by far! And here’s how:

Mention influencers in a post, and then outreach to them with the link, asking to share. Keep your outreach email short and personal, and make it clear what you want from them.

Publish link roundup posts at your blog, mentioning influencers as experts in their niches. It’s a great way to build relationships and produce traffic gains. Content assets such as “25 Top Bloggers With Awesome Instagram Feeds,” “40 Top SEO Experts to Follow in 2020,” or “55 Business Blogs to Read for Elevating Your Results” boost backlinks and social shares, promoting your blog like crazy.

Ask influencers for an expert quote to include in your blog post. Here you can kill two birds with one stone: enhance the article’s credibility and get exposure to their audiences. (The big chance is that they will share the article citing them as experts.)

And remember to mention all influencers from your blog post on social media when promoting it to your audience. It drives engagement and traffic to the blog as well.

Step 5: Collaborate With Fellow Bloggers

This one is not that fast to implement, especially if you have a new blog with low traffic, but it’s worth trying for long-term prospects. Networking with other bloggers in your niche may generate quality links, influencing your overall rankings in search engines. Given that a blog’s success depends on how influential it’s among the crowd today, the tactic of collaboration should become your must-follow in 2020.

For collaboration to work, think of the value you can bring to others. If you want top bloggers in the niche to share your blog content, give them a reason to do this. Follow them on Facebook or Twitter, comment on their content, share their blog posts, cite them in your articles, backlink to their websites, etc.

This way, you’ll bring your blog to their attention, and they are likely to return the favor. Therefore, you’ll build a community of influential people, promoting each other for a win-win partnership.

Step 6: Repurpose Blog Posts Whenever Appropriate

Your target audience hangs out in multiple places online, and they have their preferences for content formats. Please don’t limit yourself with texts: repurpose them into other formats to reach a wider audience and promote your blog among them.

Depending on the channel where you are going to promote a blog, consider the following:

• Turn a blog post into a SlideShare presentation.
• Reimagine a section of your blog post into a bright infographic to increase its shareability.
• Convert the content into videos. Videos are on the rise today, as they bring up to 10x more reach and engagement. Launching a YouTube channel for blog content promotion would come in handy, too.
• Make it an audio for the audience to listen to as a podcast.
• Consider interactive formats such as surveys, games, quizzes, or tests for your blog content to go viral.

Step 7: Consider Smart Republishing And Social Sharing

The more (relevant) channels you consider for blog posts promotion, the better results you get. In 2020, a smart tactic would be to use niche communities for driving traffic and republish some of your content at Medium for encouraging sharing.

All this helps to extend your reach. So:

• Take one of your top-performing blog posts.
• Republish it on blogging platforms like Medium, GrowthHackers, Inbound, etc.
• Remember to mention a link to the original version.

Social media is your powerful weapon for blog posts promotion in 2020 too, but make sure to use them smartly. Here is what you can do:

• Promote content via LinkedIn posts. Don’t only share the URL to your blog but write a mini-post with a hook, outline, link for further reading, and CTA. Or, you can repost some of your best blog posts as LinkedIn articles, especially if your blog is in a business niche.
• Share blog content in relevant and active Facebook groups.
• Master Pinterest. Post around 10 pins (images) for every new content asset you publish on your blog and make sure they are visually appealing.
• Answer relevant questions on Quora, inviting visitors to your blog for more information.
• Online forums like BizSugar or Blog Engage are good options to introduce your content to the community, too.

Step 8: Try Strategic Guest Posting

Yes, many believe guest blogging is a tool for SEO link building. Yes, it’s time- and energy-consuming. However, it’s a powerful instrument to promote your blog in 2020.

First, you will generate tons of referral traffic from the link in your author byline.

Second, guest blogging on top publications in your niche establishes you as an expert, gathering more attention to your blog.

Third, you build authority, network with influencers, and get shares for better promotion of your blog.

Here’s your strategy for guest posting in 2020:

• Choose websites that are not only relevant to your niche but also have high DR and UR, as well as a lot of organic traffic and social engagement. (Tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz, and others will help here.)
• Pitch your guest post on the topic their audience will love, but remember to include a contextual link back to your target blog post. Rumors have it that the higher you place the link, the more potential traffic it gets.
• Write a high-quality guest post. Focus on the content rather than backlinks. And yet, try to use some of your long-tail target keywords when anchoring your blog post from the article.

This way, your guest post will use the site’s authority to rank higher: The page will collect traffic and funnel some of it to your website through the internal link you included.

Step 9: Update Old Blog Posts Regularly

Updating the old content of the blog, you can boost traffic and page views by far. It doesn’t mean you need to rewrite every post for the sake of freshness. Consider updating after a page is 6-12 months old, has enough backlinks to compete, matches search intent, and its content is outdated.

There’s no need to update blog posts that are in the SERP’s top three. Your goal is the articles in the top 15 so they can still reach the first page of Google search.

So, analyze your old blog posts rankings by keywords and choose the article for an update. Optimize it:

• Repair everything that’s broken: outdated links, old-fashioned visuals, out-of-date statistics, poor spelling and grammar, etc.
• Add more words if needed: long articles perform better, but don’t sacrifice quality for quantity. And make sure to maintain the same keyword when adding more paragraphs to your blog post.
• Add a table of contents to a post: It’s an excellent opportunity to get into Google’s featured snippets!
• Update internal links.
• Change the title: make it more keyword-focused and engaging to boost clicks and page views.
• Update the publishing date. In 2020, both users and search engines will hardly care about something from 2015.

Bottom Line

Hundreds of new blogs go live each month or, what’s more likely, each day. Search engines change their algorithms, new social networks emerge, our niches transform — and it seems that we need to bite more than we can chew to stand out from the sea of competitors. 

The good news is that we still have proven tactics to deliver value through content, therefore influencing its performance. So, watch the latest trends, analyze, update and optimize your blog content regularly, network with fellow bloggers and influencers in the niche — and you’ll succeed.

And last but not least:

Don’t be afraid of changes. Adapt to them, grow, and seize the opportunities coming your way.

About The Author

Lesley Vos is a seasoned web writer who helps peers develop the confidence and skills for better content creation and promotion. She is a regular contributor to Bid4Papers and publications on digital marketing, SEO copywriting, and social media. Feel free to follow Lesley on Twitter or LinkedIn.

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