The huge activity in the blogosphere is an opportunity, but it’s also a challenge. You’re allowed to publish whatever you want on your blog, but you have to beat the competition if you want to get enough attention. You cannot sit back waiting for readers to find you, so you need content promotion strategies that will make you a successful blogger.

You’re already aware of the common advice for content promotion: share on social media, communicate with the audience, provide high quality, and so on. We will spare you from the same old things you read on a daily basis, and we’ll provide you with practical tips that help you attract relevant traffic to your blog.

1. Promote your blog through Facebook ads

You don’t have to try hard to find a way to attract relevant traffic to your blog; Facebook has already figured it out for you. There is a huge audience on this social network, and Facebook has all information about their interests. Thus, it can serve the ads to the right target audience. Facebook advertising will get you plenty of visits on a daily basis.

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As many other bloggers, you may have one question on your mind: how much will Facebook advertising cost? The good news is that you can control your budget, so Facebook will not charge any more than you have planned for your campaign. According to The Facebook Ads Benchmark Report, the average cost per page like in the USA is $0.84.

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These ads will appear like usual posts on the users’ timelines, so they won’t even notice the heavy advertising.

2. Make the posts engaging

You know you have to make the posts engaging, but how exactly are you supposed to do that? Engagement comes in the form of likes, replies, favorites, and shares. That’s determined through few factors:

• Visual appeal

You always make sure to choose the right images for your blog posts. Are you doing the same when you’re promoting them? You need to add images to Facebook posts, so your followers will notice them more easily. It’s even better if you complement the posts with videos. Thanks to Facebook’s autoplay function, many people will see those posts and they will click on them to visit your blog.

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• Hashtags

Some people mock hashtags, but even they can’t ignore the fact that the hashtag method is effective in content promotion. Use few 1-2 relevant hashtags when promoting posts on Google+, Facebook, and Twitter. On Instagram, it’s okay to use more of them, but don’t get carried away with a huge block of hashtags.

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• The post length

There’s not much consideration about the length of a Tweet; you know you need to stick within the limited number of characters. However, you don’t have such limitations on Facebook, Google+, Instagram, and other social media networks, so the question is inevitable: how long should the posts be?

According to the information published by Buffer, the ideal character count is 71-100 for Twitter, 60 for Google+, and 40 for Facebook. Who would’ve guessed that Facebook users expect shorter updates than the ones they see on Twitter?

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It’s important to keep your social media updates to the desired length if you want to keep the audience engaged.

3. Mention and quote influencers

Bloggers who create a buzz with each new post they published are considered authorities in the online world. Everyone is recommending their content, but not all fellow bloggers do that the right way.

When you quote influencers, you have to make sure their words are relevant to your topic. Always include a link to the source of that quote, and make that part of your post tweetable. Why would you want to do that? – Because you’re not only trying to add value to your content through their words; you’re also trying to establish connections with influencers.

Once the blog post goes live, tweet those parts and tag the bloggers you’ve mentioned. You can expect their retweets and recommendations, so you’ll gain visibility in front of their target audience.

4. Be an active member of forums and communities

Forums are the perfect spot for attracting visitors who are interested in the content you have, so you need to make them an essential part in your content promotion strategy. If you don’t have time to write awesome blog content, promote it all over social media, and make valuable contributions in these online communities, then you use online services which offer great assistance in writing and editing, so you can rely on them regardless of the niche your blog is focused on.

Back to the forums and communities. These are the ones you can explore:

• Quora – that’s where everyone goes when they need an answer from an expert. You can target the questions related to your blog’s theme, provide awesome answers, and gain points that make you more visible.
• Reddit – you can find anything on this forum. Locate the relevant categories and become an active member of the community. Do not insult people and maintain a friendly, but authoritative approach that presents your blog in the best light.
• it – you only need to submit your content to 10-15 scoops to attract hundreds of visits to your blog.

5. Make the blog content easy to share

Content marketing involves more than promotional activities; it also includes the actual content you write. You need to develop share-worthy, easy-to-read content; otherwise you’ll be the only one sharing it on social media.

• The structure of the post is an important aspect of its ‘shareability’. How-to posts, listicles, and infographics are the types of posts the audience prefers.

• The headline has to be very appealing, since it’s the only thing most people will read before deciding whether or not to give the post a chance. Plus, the headline is the main point that attracts attention when the post is shared on social media.

• Write longer, elaborate posts. Although the attention span of the audience is not that great, SerpIQ found that the average length of posts that show up at the top of Google search results is 2000+. Longer posts also get more shares on social media.

Content Promotion Is a Process; Not an Activity

You need a precise strategy that will help you promote your content to the right target audience. Only a focused, well-planned approach will yield good results. This process will involve a lot of time and effort, but that investment will return with a greater number of visits to your blog, better engagement, and more conversions.

So what exactly is the Alexa Rank? It’s an estimation of the popularity of your website in comparison to all other sites.

Here’s how that’s being done: Alexa estimates the average daily pageviews and visitors to every website over the past 3 months. The estimations are provided on a daily basis, and the website that has the largest score based on the number of pageviews and visitors is ranked on the first position.

Screenshot 1, source: http://blog.alexa.com/improving-your-alexa-rank/

Maybe the overall ranks are too general, but Alexa still is the best metric for comparing two sites. If you have a better score than competitive websites, you’re better than them. This simple logic works in practice: when you want to beat your competition, you should work towards improvement of your Alexa Rank in comparison to theirs.

We’ll tell you how to do that.

1. Install the Toolbar

Before getting any further, you should install the Alexa toolbar, which allows you to see the rank for different websites, and it gives you links to related sites. That’s great for monitoring your competition, so you’ll analyze their success and you’ll plan the development of your site accordingly.

This Chrome extension also lets you see how a website looked in the past. You can see what changes it admins made and how they resulted on the overall rank. Finally, the search analytics feature of the toolbar gives you info about the queries that drive traffic to a website.

Screenshot 2. Source: http://www.alexa.com/toolbar

2. Install the Alexa Rank Widget

There’s a problem with the Alexa toolbar, though. It really helps you increase your ranking, since it’s the tool that sends the hits to Alexa servers. Unfortunately, not many visitors of your site have such a toolbar, so the ratings based solely on this strategy are not realistic. Although in one blog post Alexa explained that the toolbar is only one of the many browser extensions that include Alexa data, it still remains the main tool for measuring visits.

There’s a way to change that: install the Alexa Rank Widget to your website. It won’t directly improve your ranking; it will just showcase the current rank to your visitors. If, however, it inspires your visitors to download the Alexa site widget, then Alexa will have the data from more people that land at your site. It’s a strange strategy, but it works in practice.

Plus, if you have a good Alexa Rank and you display it on your site, it will surely give you bonus points in the eyes of visitors.

Screenshot 3. Source: https://wordpress.org/plugins/alexa-rank-widget/

3. Write Guest Posts

One unusual way to improve the Alexa Rank is to write as many guest posts as possible. They have to be high-quality posts that include backlinks. Having a great number of successful backlinks will help you get more visitors to your site, and the rank will be naturally boosted with that.

You can rely on another successful method related to blogging: comment on influential blogs. Make sure to provide value to the discussion and include a signature that links to your site.

4. Publish Awesome Content

When you read about the way Alexa Rank works, you might think it’s a superficial system that doesn’t reflect the realistic popularity of a website. If you see the actual ranks, you’ll realize that only great websites achieve high positions. In fact, the quality matters, and it matters a lot.

Writing great content helps you increase the traffic towards your website. When you infuse search engine optimization strategies in the content creation process, Google will drive even more traffic towards you. Needless to say, the content should be not only attractive, but unique as well.

If you’re trying to think of ways to improve your Alexa Rank, give it some thought: it basically measures the traffic, so that’s the point you should work on. So, you need to publish great content to boost the traffic, and you need to do that as often as possible, since no one likes passive sites and blogs.

Try writing at least 2 great posts on a weekly basis and monitor your Alexa Rank. It will certainly go up.

5. Certify Your Site Metrics

This is the best way of getting a more accurate (but not necessarily better) Alexa Rank. The usual way Alexa estimates websites is based on information from its data panel. When you certify your site’s metrics, they will be directly measured by Alexa.

The certification will give you few benefits in addition to the 100% count of your real traffic: more detailed analytics, close monitoring of your site’s performance, and public showcase of your metrics (this is really important for attracting advertisers to your site).

Screenshot 4. Source: http://blog.alexa.com/benefits-certified-metrics/

6. Get Inbound Links

It’s important to encourage other websites to link to your own site. These links should be natural, though, and they need to come from reputable websites related to your niche. High-quality inbound links will help search engines to determine your niche, but it will also tell them that you’re a reliable source they should list in the results.

How exactly can you get inbound links? By producing authoritative content, of course. You need to provide information that other bloggers and websites will want to link to, since it will add value to their own posts.

You Want to Improve Your Alexa Rank?

Well, then, you need to improve your traffic. And you already know what to do if you want to improve the traffic at your site: provide high-quality content. That’s the logical conclusion we can draw from all tips provided above.

As a result of producing great content on a regular basis, your Alexa Rank will grow and that can mean only one thing – the reputation and advertising revenue of your website will grow as well.

One of the major mistake online marketers do is the fact that they neglect an important part of their business: setting everything they can on auto-pilot mode. You see, when it comes to making money, time is the most important aspect of the equation. If you focus your time and attention towards making things work by themselves, you’re saving a huge amount of time, which can be used for different (and more important) actions.

Social media is the new “thing” nowadays, as most of the people spend their time on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and many more social media networks. That is why most of the big names marketers turn their attention towards it. Branding and sales are easier than ever now, when you can directly connect with your potential customers through social media channels, where you can directly pitch them your product or service.

Today, we’re going to take a look at how Pinterest, a very promising social network, can be automated with the use of some specific tools. These tools are meant to help you save time with replacing the tedious work you must put up every single day in order to maintain your Pinterest campaign.

Tool #1: Buffer

If you’re serious about any type of social media marketing, you should definitely check out Buffer tool. With this tool, you can do the following things in a matter of minutes:

• You can access any website and extract all the images that you like into your Pinterest schedule (using the browser extension)
• You can pin automatically the content that you’d like
• Post to multiple networks – you can connect all your other social media accounts and add the same picture to each and every one of them simultaneously

Among these features, you’ll have many more pleasant surprises. This tool offers a lot of time-saving features, and it’s a definitely must-have for every online marketer that uses Pinterest as a marketing source.

Tool #2: Pinvolve

Facebook is still the biggest social media player around, that is why you should take advantage of it and adopt the necessary tools that will help you “harvest” it as easy and as fast as possible.

Pinvolve is a great tool which helps you automatically pull in your pins into your Facebook timeline. Alongside that, it can also do the opposite: converts your Facebook photos and posts into personalized, beautiful pins. Helps your fans share your photos on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter…how cool is that?

The software has a free and a paid version. If you decide to invest in the PRO version, you will take advantage of more automated tools and features that will save you a lot of time, and will make your results more efficient.

Tool #3: Picmonkey

Since pictures are the main format when it comes to Pinterest, having a handy free-to-use online tool for editing is your best choice. Okay, there are those marketers that also have Photoshop Skills – good for you boys and girls. For us others, image editing could be a nightmare if we don’t have the necessary tools at our disposal.

Picmonkey isn’t created just for Pinterest. It is an online image editor, very easy to use, and extremely resourceful when it comes to editing options. You can turn your customer’s testimonials, ads, case studies, and so on…into great images that you’ll instantly post on your Pinterest page.

Tool #4: Snappa

Again, most of us are good marketers, but lame graphic designers. We must do everything we can to take advantage of our strengths instead of focusing on our weaknesses. Image creation, which is basically content creation when it comes to Pinterest can get really tedious and can make us waste a lot of time on things we’re not good at.

Snappa is a great graphic design tool that can be used by any inexperienced person that has trouble creating quality images. The best part is that Snappa is actually designed for marketers. It offers great pre-made templates, editing tools, and an easy drag-and-drop feature, which will all allow you to create awesome content for your Pinterest campaigns.

Tool #5: Pinalerts

This is one great Pinterest tool that helps in so many ways. Basically, whenever someone around the world pins something on your website. Compared to the Pinterest’s e-mail notification that’s being sent to you only when someone repins something, Pinalerts lets you know directly when something has been pinned for the first time.

You can then track back those persons, and connect with them. This can lead to many awesome communities and helpful connections for the future of your business.

 Tool #6: Pingroupie

If you want to diversify your traffic generation tactics on Pinterest, you should really start focusing on joining a lot of targeted group boards. Look at Facebook for example… They are such a great source of traffic, because you own that group, you can post whatever you want, and then make it appear to the top by “featuring it”. Many Facebook marketers use it, and they will continue to do so because it just works.

When it comes to Pinterest, you can easily use Pingroupie, a software that allows you to find groups so much easier and faster than ever before. What it is basically: a big database of highly active Pinterest groups. With the help of the tool, you can personalize your search according to your needs and filter the characteristics right until you find whatever you targeted group you need.

Tool #7: SumoMe Image Sharer

People are lazy. Most of the times, even if they wanted to share something, blog owners don’t offer them the quick tools to do so. In order increase your shares of your content, you need to offer your traffic the easiest ways to perform the actions you want, and also set up great Call-To-Actions elements throughout your web page.

SumoMe Image Sharer is a helpful tool that will allow you to place floating share buttons over all your images. You can choose where they can be shared – Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram. This tool basically provides your traffic with an easy click that will make them share your content way more frequently than that they would normally do.

Tool #8: Tailwind

Let’s not forget about statistics. Every online marketer should know by now that tracking your stats is a one-way go to your business success. Statistics are extremely important because they can show us where we’re at, how we’re doing, and what we need to modify in order to get better results. Luckily, we have great tools at our disposal that can make our analytics jobs way easier than we’d ever expect.

One of those helpful tools we’re talking about is Tailwind. This tool allows you to track your Pinterest and Instagram performance by letting you track your fans growth and your content actions that are performed on your account. Tailwind also offers scheduling features, and optimizable ways of advancing your Pinterest marketing journey. This one is definitely a must!

Conclusion

Pinterest climbed its way to the top extremely quickly, and it seems that the network is nowhere near decline. It will remain an extremely important social media preference for a lot of people (especially US female audiences) for a long time.

One great tip would be to follow the market. The market doesn’t care about you…it continuously evolves, and it evolves fast. You shouldn’t waste time on things that used to work. Watch what’s happening now, and take action immediately – Yeah, we would really recommend you jumping on this awesome social media network, and taking advantage of all the tools at your disposal in order to optimize your Pinterest campaign.

In this article we’ve shown you some of the most useful Pinterest tools that many successful entrepreneurs and marketers use in order to leverage their businesses. Get ahead of the game, and start scouting for other helpful tools that fit your business goals the most, and automate everything you can!