5 Pitfalls To Avoid When Promoting Your Blog Posts

How do you promote your blog posts in a way that gives you a good audience and month-over-month growth?

This is a frequent question that most new bloggers ask themselves when starting out, myself included.

When I started writing and earning money from what I wrote, the idea of gaining followers and having a lot of people read my blog posts was all I cared about. In the thrill of the hunt, I began to try different forms of promoting my writing. Ways that didn’t compromise on the value I was providing.

Over the years, I’ve learned what works and what doesn’t. For that reason, I’m going to cover 5 options not to waste your time, energy, and money on.

There are a lot of writers groups on Facebook that you can share your blog posts in. These groups basically do a daily post, and then everyone in the group follows up by posting their articles for others to read and share.

The problem with this strategy is that you are posting your article in a group where people only want to post their articles. Nobody really wants to read articles posted by others. It’s all about exposure.

After three days of posting in the comments, you will get tired of entering comment by comment to give views to articles that you do not really care about. Meanwhile, you’ll see that your article does not receive as many views or likes as you give. The return on investment is so low that it’s just not worth the time and effort. I prefer to post my content in Facebook groups that are within the niche that I’m covering, not necessarily a “writer’s group”.

Instead, I recommend creating your own social media profiles to share your blog posts on. Chances are if you have a website, you’ve got social channels created already. Put your time and effort into posting on those and growing an organic audience that is genuinely interested in your niche.

Another fairly common practice when we make a post is to include links to other related articles in case readers want to read related content. Take a look at the following screenshot. Just in that screenshot, there are 3 internal links to other posts on that site. The article goes on to include half a dozen more internal links.

The problem with this is that it can turn into spam. Believing that an excellent post should include at least three to four references to your other articles is a poor practice that does not work. Yes, internal linking is a necessary SEO strategy for search engine ranking, but too many can negatively impact your blog post or even your entire blog domain. I add no more than 2 internal links within each of my blog posts and I space them out with at least 100 words between each.

You can ask anyone who likes to read informative articles how many times they have clicked those links while they are reading. They will probably tell you they don’t remember.

When someone cannot easily read the content of a blog post without receiving spam or ads promoting other posts, it makes it difficult to want to continue following the storyline and more than likely result in them leaving the page.

Instead, write blog posts that leave readers wanting to read more of your content. If readers of your content are truly interested, they will find your other articles by navigating your site or visiting your social media pages.

Your website probably gives you the option of showing related articles at the bottom of the current article or in the side margins. Because of this, there is no need to riddle your content with internal links.

While an ad can help you attract outside traffic, a “too good to be true” ad will turn people away.

I have seen thousands of articles from different blogs that appear on Facebook with titles like “celebrities who destroyed their career with just one comment” or “these people did not know they were being recorded, look at what they did.”

These titles made me want to read the post out of curiosity, only to discover that the post was simply stupid, poorly written, and riddled with pop-up ads. I will never go back to any of those blogs ever again.

Those clickbait ads attract an audience on one single post. The engagement may not continue as expected though, since the initial post was bad. Think of it as more of a one-and-done strategy. There are better ways at promoting through paid ads.

Instead, focus on writing blog posts that genuinely benefit people. People will see your authenticity and want to come back to read more.

Writing about things you don’t know just because it can generate views is one of the worst things you can do to promote your content and generate an audience.

If you are going to write about something that you have no idea about, you better dedicate the time to research, train and learn as much as you can about it. Without investing the time and effort into the research, your information is not going to be credible and readers will be able to see right through that.

Adding value to your readers is of the utmost importance.

Instead, find your niche, and write content that you’re passionate about and have knowledge of.

I have realized that when I like something, I find many different ways to write about it. But if I write about something that doesn’t really interest me, I find it difficult and mind-numbing, similar to the history class assignments from 25 years ago.

Every topic has an audience.

A blog is a platform to attract readers who want to learn more about a specific topic. Platforms like YouTube are where people go to watch videos and be entertained.

A blog and Youtube are two completely different platforms. Therefore you have a totally different audience.

So unless your channel is about writing, blogging, or content creation, it will be very difficult to make viewers interested in reading articles on your blog. I’ve seen it successfully done, but you have to be strategic about it.

Instead, find other blogs or social media channels that talk about the topics your blog covers. From there, you can connect with people that are really interested in your niche and topics.

Promoting your blog posts well enough to attract an audience can be a difficult task at first. But once you gain an understanding of what outlets work and which ones don’t, the tasks become much easier.

The quality of the content will always outperform clickbait for a single article. Check what works best for you according to the topics you cover and then create a strategy that is effective for that.