(Guest post)

I work in a small digital marketing agency in Ireland (Digital Trawler) and to be perfectly honest we’ve only just found our feet.

The real reason I’m telling you this is that I was and still am, in a position probably similar to a lot of the readers of this post. 

That position is: a time strapped, cash conscious and overworked small business owner. 

Today I hope to share something that will help you:

1. Win back time
2. Bring in a bit more cash 
3. Reduce stress a tiny little bit 

Blogging Sounds Like A Waste Of Time

Our clients are always a bit skeptical of blogging, they 100% won’t try it at the onset and even 6 months in they still won’t commit and it’s frustrating. 

By the time I’m finished with a site generally less than 10% of the traffic comes through the homepage, it’s all about in depth content that answers people’s questions and solves a problem.

It’s this content that will drive people to your site, not some award you’ve won or your sales page. 

Why Write In Depth Content?

Your job as a blogger is to help them along their journey to finding a solution and if your product is a good fit they might come back and purchase from you. 

The objective, once you’ve gotten a visitor to your blog, is to get them to sign up, download or a social media follow, or, at the very minimum, drop a remarketing pixel on their browser. 

From here you can start selling or building trust.

Done That, Didn’t Work

It’s not just about creating the content, it’s about having good valuable content and putting it in front of people who are looking for it. 

As a small business it’s really difficult to find a foothold in the world of organic SEO especially if your site isn’t the most authoritative as it’s relatively new. 

So where does one start with blog post promotion when you’ve a site with no authority?

Well here’s my real-life story of how to do it – Step By Step.

BTW: Discover what Domain Authority is and how you can improve it in our guide. 

Finding A Niche, Low Competition Topic

The topic you choose will vastly determine how well you can promote it, how easy it will be to get backlinks, how likely admins are to let it through into social media groups. 

In our example we jumped on a trend, it was a piece about How The Google BERT update works. 

I went out of my way to do in depth research about how exactly it worked and broke down these steps in simple bite sizeable chunks that made it easy for people to understand. 

I would recommend making your post about a new trend, why you ask?

1. There is less organic competition, 
2. People are more willing to read about trends 
3. Admins are more likely to let this content in their groups / forums. 

You Need To Be Quick

A Mistake You Can Avoid

My next step was actually a bit of a mistake. 

I wanted to get this featured on a renowned SEO site, like Search Engine Journal. I initially reached out to them along with a few other well known search engine publications but no avail. 

I knew that if I didn’t get my content out fast enough the window to grow momentum for my site would close along with the opportunity to increase my site’s authority. 

I panicked and instead of waiting, I decided to publish my article on my own site, figuring the content was strong enough to make an impact and potentially get multiple links instead.

What You Need To Be Quick

So 24 hours after creating the content we published it on our site and gave up on getting it published on external sites. 

In hindsight we should have been more prepared, we should have had the right contacts in place to be able to share our content and publish it in a relatively speedy manner. 

If we had been more prepared the chances of getting a publication on these larger sites would have been a lot more realistic.

Lesson Learned, What To Do Next

So there it was, probably one of the most in depth algorithm articles I’d ever written- sitting on my blog, waiting for users to come and read it. 

I wasn’t going to wait around for them to find it. After all we, we all know the phrase “build it and they will come” is as believable as Santa or the tooth fairy. 

I was going to have to get down and dirty and do a bit of grafting. So how was I going to promote my article to get users to read it?

Index Your Content

The first thing I did was go to Google to index my blog. You can do this in search console, a free platform provided by google. 

This informs Google that your content is live and that they can begin the process of indexing. 

The main reason I indexed it was to make sure that Google recognised the content as mine and that it wasn’t stolen by someone.

Social

I’m involved in a number of groups in Linkedin & Facebook where my niche audience resides. 

I knew I’d have to get my blog into these groups. 

Luckily I was fortunate enough to be part of a number of groups before I published this article which made it slightly easier. 

Through my various social media groups we managed to get 320 to our site. In total it probably took 2 hours of promotion.

Blog Commenting

Blog commenting was our next strategy, this strategy has been shot down by many SEO’s as a spamming tactic but done correctly it should be worthwhile. 

The aim isn’t to get a ranking boost, it’s to add your authoritative opinion and add to the conversation.

We did a simple search for {Google BERT “comments” } and this revealed multiple blog posts that have written about BERT and allow you to leave comments. 

From our blog commenting campaign we got a further 144 sessions:

Link Generation

In the end I did very little link generation for this post bar the few links I left in comments, I think maybe around 4 or 5 links were left in comments in total. 

I wouldn’t even count these as links, they are all no follow (meaning Google does not take note of them). 

Our Search Console data is telling me that this blog has the second highest number of links now pointing towards us, without doing any outreach. 

I think this is a good result for any site starting off.

Total Tally

Between organic search and unidentified traffic (direct) with no attribution as well as the other tactics mentioned above.

The total number of sessions to the blog came to 707 after a little promotion.  

What You Need To Do

Go and find that niche or trend in your industry or your potential client’s industry. Write something informative that adds value to the community. 

Know industry relevant blogs you can leave comments in. Have a list of publications you can send it to. Be active in groups that you submit to. Know industry relevant blogs you can leave comments in.

Don’t be afraid to get out there and do this, it will take time but the reward is well worth the effort.

Want more content marketing tips and strategies? Check out:

• How to Creates Blogs That People Love
• The Keyword Strategy That Has Increased Our Organic Traffic By 1,312%
• How to Get More Traffic: A Back-to-Basics Approach

• About the Author...

Ronan Walsh

Digital Trawler

http://www.digitaltrawler.com

ronan@digitaltrawler.ie

Ronan originally started out in SEO by optimising a site for his own business which he later sold. From here he became a freelance digital marketing consultant which lead him to opening his company Digital Trawler 2 years ago. Ronan is also a lecture at his local college in digital marketing, Limerick Institute of Technology. Feel free to email or reach out him.