For your blog to be successful, you need to get the word out and there are various methods of promotion that work very well for blogs. 

Promote Your Blog - Step 1

Promote your blog on social.Social media is one of the first places that you'll want to promote your blog. Why? Because social media is perfectfor short snippets of content. Your blog should be shareable, personable and include fun content so think about social media as really the first place of promotion. You should share your blog on all of the key social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and so on. 

Here is an example of two blog posts being shared on Facebook and Twitter:

It's great because both platforms actually offer the opportunity to show photos, so remember that imagery is key. 

You also get the opportunity on social networks to put paid promotion behind your blogs. This helps you amplify your blogs as well as helps you gain additional followers. This is a great way to get the word out there, and your name out there as a brand.  Ifound that once we put somepaid promotion behind our blog post, it really gets the word out there and increases the amount of shares. 

Promote Your Blog - Step 2

Optimize for search.You want to make sure that your blogs are optimized for search. To do this, you need to create internal linking structures for various key words that you want to rank for. The more you do this over time, the more Google will know that you are trying to rank for those terms and your blogs will be much more searchable.

In the following example, the term, "top-of-funnel solution" , is being highlighted in length:

The company Captora wants to make sure they are ranking for that term. So consider actually creating a keyword document that lists all of the key terms that you want to rank for and the correct page that you want to drive the linked traffic to. This is a great resource to provide to all of your bloggers in addition to the people that are actually the administrators of the blog. They should make sure that you are linking these terms throughout the blogs. You should only link about two to three terms per post. You want to make sure that you are notkeyword stuffing or over-linking. 

Promote Your Blog - Step 3

Send out an email.An email is actually a great way to get your blog out there. By sending out an email to your database, you can show them some of your most recent thought leadership. You cansend out an email that promotes your most recent blog post.Consider including a great image where your overlays quote from within the blog itself. Periodically make sure that you're sending out blog digest emails to your entire database. This increases engagement and gets them to click on your emails and visit your blog.

Promote Your Blog - Step 4

Syndicate your RSS feed.You can actually set up RSS feeds to syndicate your blogs to various websites. This means that the site automatically can pickup your content and post on their own site. In the followingexample, the website "Business 2 Community"is a great example of a syndicator. 

They pick up the RSS feeds of many blogs and post them directly to their own site. So you can see here on their homepage that there is actually a wide variety of syndicated blog posts for readers to choose from. 

Promote Your Blog - Step 5

Leverage forums and groups.Forums and groups on sites like LinkedIn and Quora are another great way to get your blog content out there to the right audience. Become a member of various groups that have members who are into the same topics as you are and post one of your blogs. However, be aware of the group rules. Many groups won't actually allow you to post your own content.  But if your group does,post away. 

Take a look at an example from Doug Kessler. He's the founder of the creative firm Velocity Partners. 

He posts a new blog that sparks a ton of interaction in the community in the particular group that he's a member of. By promoting your blog through various channels, you can amplify your reach and get the word out. 

There are many ways to creatively promote your blog, so let's get to promoting.