Online success is a game of attention—the more you draw it towards your business, the fuller your pipeline will be. No matter what type of business you run, you want to bring people closer to your brand’s website and blog—and you want to do it as affordably as possible.

Want to start a blog, but not sure how to do it—and how to attract quality traffic for free?

Here are the top five ways to promote your blog that even those who don’t like to self-promote will find easy to implement—and maybe even kind of fun.

What To Do Before You Promote Your Blog

Before you start promoting your blog, make sure you run through this quick checklist:

  • Quality content: Does your website answer questions visitors may have, entertain, and/or inform them? If not, it may be time to revise your content strategy.
  • User-friendly design: Nobody likes navigating a site that feels like an endless maze, so make sure it’s intuitively designed and easy to navigate.
  • Site speed: Most site visitors don’t want to wait too long for their pages to load. The average loading speed for a website on the first page of Google is 1.65 seconds. Consider this when running your last check-up.
  • Mobile compatibility: More than 58% of all online traffic comes from mobile sources. This means your website must be compatible with smartphone and tablet navigation.
  • Updated “About Us” or Bio section: if you want visitors to trust you and your content, you need to ensure your blog looks legit—and that means an honest “About Us” or Bio section that provides plenty of trust signals. Tell them your story and why you’re qualified to offer the products and/or services you provide.
  • Technicalities: Run a last check through all your pages and ensure your content shows up correctly, your links resolve, and your images load. These may all seem like small details, but they can make a world of difference in terms of trustworthiness, user experience, and, ultimately, revenue for your business.
  • Set up Google Analytics: You want to understand more about your site visitors, traffic sources, and overall performance, and Google Analytics is the best tool for that. If you already have Google Analytics, double-check to make sure everything’s in order. (And remember to update to GA4, as the older version has been phased out.)
  • Social media channels: If you haven’t already, create a business profile for your brand on all major social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn) and link back to your blog or website.

Top 5 Free Ideas To Promote Your Blog

Telling your friends you have a blog is a great idea—but it’s unlikely to bring you the traffic and revenue you’re aiming for. So once your blog’s up and running and you have a solid roster of content published, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and push your project out in broad daylight.

Here are some of the best ways to promote your blog—without spending a dime.

Guest Posting

Guest posting is one of the cheapest, smartest, and most efficient ways to get your brand in front of more eyes.

Publishing guest posts refers to writing articles for other websites, usually in a similar niche to yours, and comparable in terms of traffic and audience. There are multiple benefits to doing it:

  • You get your name (and your blog’s) out there
  • You get backlinks (which helps with SEO)
  • You build new relationships
  • You might even get an article in return to publish on your own website, which means more valuable content to add to your blog

The key to doing guest posting right is to make it genuine. Don’t just cold-email every blog owner in the world and ask to write an article for them. They have all the reasons in the world to ignore you:

  • They don’t want spam in their inbox
  • They don’t want low-quality content on their sites
  • They don’t want you to place shady links on their blog
  • They simply don’t know you

Instead, focus on providing genuine value. Search for something their website really needs, whether that’s an insightful piece of content or an in-depth analysis of their business. Show them you know what they need, and offer to write it for them. Remember to write a subject line that reflects your interest in helping them, as opposed to being another opportunity-taker.

Also, keep in mind that guest posting can be a very good source of traffic, but only if it comes from domains relevant to your industry. You can’t publish an article about nails and hammers on a baking website. Nobody will click on it, and you risk getting penalized by search engines.

Run a Newsletter

Newsletters are getting a lot of traction these days, for good reason:

  • They are a personalized means of communication
  • They help you build relationships and rapport with your audience
  • They can be, on their own, great sources of income
  • They are a great way to distribute your blog content
  • They help you understand your audience better

Just like your website, a newsletter is owned media. That means you don’t rely on moody algorithms, paid ads, or other people’s favors to get your content in front of your readers.

All you need is your subscribers’ email addresses, and you can start communicating with them via email. (We’d caution you not to send too many emails, though, or you risk them hitting the Unsubscribe button.)

A list of email contacts is an open door to marketing your blog and products more efficiently.

Think of it this way: even if they absolutely love your content, people tend to forget about websites or creators they don’t interact with often. When you have their email address, however, you can remind them of your content and how much they like it. This means they’re more likely to visit your site, which means more traffic for your blog.

To run a successful newsletter, you must continuously work on growing your email list, re-engaging inactive contacts, and maintaining list hygiene. But more than anything, you have to provide people with valuable content.

When you’re just starting out, creating some sort of lead generation asset can be a great way to collect more email addresses. Make sure it’s a resource your target audience would be actually interested in, like a mega-list of workouts if you’re a trainer, a unique crochet pattern if you’re into DIY, or a list of SEO resources if you’re an agency.

Last but not least, be sure you follow GDPR, CCPA, and other digital privacy laws. Don’t buy email lists, don’t use shady forms, and don’t send emails to people who never asked for them—those could be very costly mistakes.

Be Active on Social Media

Is social media a time-consuming and sometimes unpredictable tool for promoting your blog? Yes. But is it also potentially a powerful way to get more attention to your website? Absolutely.

The key is knowing that you can’t simply push blog links and wait for a miracle.

Most social media channels want to keep people scrolling for as long as possible. And this should be your goal, too. The best way to do this is by creating valuable content that people will want to engage with.

So how exactly do you use social media to drive traffic to your blog? Provide your audience with the main gist of your blog posts straight in your social media post.

To get them to click on your blog post, you need to give them a reason to keep reading. You can do that by creating curiosity, tension, and/or interest, or by showing them the value they’ll receive from your content.

Aside from helping you distribute your content, social media is also a great way to build relationships with other content creators and bloggers. And the more you interact with other people in your niche, the more you can…

…Collaborate with Other Bloggers

The internet was built as a communication tool. In order to be successful in the digital world, you must tap into this interconnected network the internet was founded upon and communicate with other people in your industry.

Collaborating with other bloggers comes with a wide range of benefits. It helps you:

  • Reach and connect with new audiences
  • Build your authority
  • Create content that’s more in-depth, compelling, creative, and entertaining
  • Learn new things from people in the industry
  • Get more social proof and engagement on your blog posts

Collaboration isn’t all about guest post exchanges.

Focus on building genuine relationships and joint ventures. Run interviews with other bloggers, co-create products or services, show up at online events together, create social media engagement for each other—this is your chance to get creative.

When you collaborate with other bloggers in your niche, both sides increase their reputation and reach. This is a win-win.

Don’t Forget about Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Finally, blogging SEO remains one of the single most efficient ways of promoting your blog.

Here’s why it’s so valuable:

Let’s say you run a gluten-free recipe blog. One of the primary elements of SEO is keyword research. You want to target keywords that people are searching for and that you might actually rank for.

So you choose “best gluten-free brioche recipe” as your targeted keyword. People are searching for it, and it’s not super competitive. Perfect.

Now, you can optimize your blog post around this keyword. (Though don’t go overboard.) Use the keyword in your title, headers, and meta description. Use relevant alt text for images. Make sure the keyword is in your slug.

And then make sure your content is really, really good.

These are just a few important aspects of SEO, and if you focus on them, you might actually start to see your content rank on the first page of Google.

This is important because most people aren’t looking past the first page when they’re searching for a topic or resource.

SEO is a long game strategy, but it’s worth investing in. It’s also about a lot more than just keyword research.

Some other factors to consider are:

  • Your main keyword’s volume and difficulty
  • Additional, secondary keywords
  • NLP (Natural Language Processing) keywords
  • Content quality
  • Content length
  • Internal backlinks
  • External backlinks
  • Social signals
  • How your content is structured
  • How you use headings to make content readable
  • Your overall site structure and pillar pages

Promoting Your Blog for Free Is 100% Possible…

…but you have to put in the work.

If you want your blog to succeed, you need to be consistent and patient while you experiment with different promotion methods.

Nobody gets it completely right on the first go—so allow yourself to make mistakes and learn from them as you focus on continuing to create great content for your blog.