Are you thinking about starting a blog? Some of the top bloggers in the world make millions of dollars in revenue from their website – and you could be the next success story.

However, there's more to your blog than publishing high-quality content. Blogging involves as much marketing as an e-commerce store if you want to attract an audience and eyeballs to your writing.

Great content isn't enough to make your new blog a success in the digital era. It would help if you had actionable promotion strategies to drive traffic to your posts. In this article, we'll unpack blog promotion strategies that shoot your website to superstardom.

Follow this guide to promoting your blog, and watch traffic start flooding to your posts.

Install Google Analytics

You spend your days drafting high-quality blog posts, but do you know who's reading them? Many new bloggers make the mistake of focusing on publishing content. However, there's much more to your blog than writing.

When traffic arrives at your posts, you need to know the traffic source. The traffic source lets you determine the markets where your content is popular.

Google Analytics is a free web tool you can install on your blog to track your traffic sources. However, Google Analytics offers you many more functions that are useful to your blog marketing strategy.

With Google Analytics, you can see which posts create the most engagement and page views, allowing you to focus on replicating those posts. Google Analytics gives you a screenshot of your business, letting you know where you need to improve.

This handy web tool also lets you know if your keyword research is working and which terms your target market are searching for when they land on your new content.

With the data from Google Analytics, you can boost your content promotion strategy using actionable data and reports.

Build your email list

Bloggers use email marketing as one of the most popular forms of finding new prospects. Your email list is the heart of your blog, and you need to do everything you can to build that list.

Eventually, you can start monetizing your audience when you have enough subscribers, pulling in cash with your blog. As a result, you get to earn an income and quit your day job – That's the ultimate goal for any blogger.

To grow your email list, you'll need to create an opt-in strategy. One of the best ways to do this is to use lead magnets.

A lead magnet is a pop-up window appearing when your prospect takes action on your CTAs (calls-to-action). For instance, your CTA could be something like, "click here to register for premium content."

The CTA and lead magnet present your readers with a value offer in exchange for their email address. To get the prospect to do this, you'll need to have a compelling value offer.

Your value offer differs from niche-to-niche. However, your value offer could be free access to premium content or a weekly newsletter. Whatever strategy you use, it must produce enough value in the prospect's mind to give you the information you need.

You can use web tools and plugins to expand your blog and add extra list-building functionality with lead magnets.

The more email subscribers you add to your list, the more marketing opportunity you have in a few months when you decide to monetize your blog.

Engage with up-vote communities and aggregate sites

Aggregate sites are another excellent option for driving traffic to your blog. Aggregate sites collect information from several sources through their user base.

These sites allow you to share your blog content without breaking the site's publishing and posting rules. If you spend some time researching aggregate sites, you'll find they cover thousands of topics in every niche.

Some of the best aggregate sites to promote your blog content include the following.

• Reddit – The front page of the internet can bring plenty of traffic to your business.
• Product Hunt – A great aggregate site for posting your product-related content.
• BizSugar – Advice for startups on finance, marketing, and management.
• DataTau – An excellent choice for scientific research and data.
• Triberr – An excellent resource for blogging.
• Inbound.org – Information and news on inbound digital marketing strategies.

Participate in forums and answer questions

Forums are another excellent resource for marketers and bloggers to promote their content and drive blog traffic. Forums are all about sharing information.

There are forums for any niche, and you'll find one for yours. Search the forum looking for questions relating to your blogging niche.

When you find a candidate thread, post a short answer to the person's problem, and drop a link to a blog post talking about that issues in detail.

Use a post line like, "I wrote a blog talking about that a few days ago, check it out here (insert your blog link)."

Register on Quora, and do the same thing. Look for questions relating to your blog content, and drop answers with a link to your post.

If you're having trouble finding forums for your niche, visit the Google search page and type this into the search bar. "intitle:forum" + [your keyword or niche]. You'll get pages of options, but make sure you choose active forums where users post frequently.

Share your blog on social media platforms

Bloggers can capitalize on social media platforms to grow their audience and find blog topic ideas. If you're struggling to find new ideas to write about, use a web tool like BuzzSumo to identify social media trending topics.

Search hashtags and find out what your audience is discussing. With this information, you can create compelling content catering to the data you collect.

When it comes to promoting your blog, you can use social shares to boost your reach and capture eyeballs. Make sure all your blogs feature social share buttons, allowing your readers to share and retweet it easily to their Facebook page and favorite social platforms.

When it comes to sharing, it might surprise you to learn that LinkedIn offers your blog's best sharing platform. If you're writing on professional topics, post a link to your blog on your LinkedIn page and share it with your groups.

Facebook groups also offer you another channel for promoting your blog and capturing shares. Build relationships on social media, and respond to all mentions and comments on your posts. Leveraging your social networks is a great way to get more eyeballs on your content.

Boost engagement using the "Power of 100 rule"

If you want to supercharge your social media marketing, we recommend following the "Power of 100 rule."

With this rule, you reach out to 100 new people on your social media channels each day. You can reach out to influencers to grow your brand and blog fast.

Influencers have followings of more than 10,000 people, and they're looking for advertising opportunities to make money.

You can pay an influencer a small fee, and they'll promote your blog in their content. Find influencers in your niche that have excellent engagement in their comments.

However, avoid influencers where the comments seem too similar. Some groups create accounts and grow them to influencer status using bunk followers.

Make sure you're dealing with genuine influencers who have an authentic audience before blowing your marketing budget.

Leverage guest posting and podcasts

Use guest blogging for marketing your new blog post. Choose ten authorities in your niche, and reach out to the marketing department.

Ask them for a rate card for guest posting on their blog. Design a guest post talking about a related issue to your latest blog post on your site.

In the guest post, you insert a hyperlinked keyword from your keyword research and link it to your blog post.

When the prospects read your guest post and click the hyperlink, it pulls them through to your blog post, attracting qualified traffic to your article.

Guest posting is a vital component of your link building strategy. Your outreach goal is to get as many backlinks to your blog posts as you can on authority sites.

By linking your site with hundreds of links to domain authorities, you increase your search ranking. Google likes recommending websites and pages that have plenty of recommendations.

The search bots see your links as recommendations from the domain authority, flagging your content as useful. As a result, the search bots start boosting your posts up in SERP results.

Reshare your prime blog content

Your best blog content deserves more views. It's common for new bloggers to overdo their publishing schedule at the beginning of their blogging career.

The excitement of the experience leaves your mind bubbling with content ideas. Some bloggers find themselves posting fresh content every day.

There are plenty of content ideas out there, from infographics to post roundups, but eventually, they run out for every blogger.

Eventually, every blogger hits a wall, and they start publishing less often. This mistake can cost you your readership. It's a better idea to stick to a two-day a week posting schedule until your blog starts attracting traffic.

During the first 6-months of your blog, you're not going to have much organic traffic show up to read your posts. Therefore, blowing your best content in the first few weeks of launching your site is a bad idea for your content strategy.

However, if you have older posts with great content, you can always repost them. Every piece of content you create needs to get in front of as many eyeballs and referrals as possible.

If you have old, awesome content with low page views, consider re-promoting it to gain more shares and views. Sharing your old content can dramatically increase page views on your old post; give it a try.

Here's a republishing strategy that works.

On the publishing day

Schedule your post to publish across all social media platforms. Share the post twice during the day, at different times per the best publishing times for that specific platform.

The social media site won't punish you for publishing twice, and your audience won't mind. This strategy lets you A/B test different CTAs and content formats to help you find out what works best with your target audience.

The following day

Share your blog post again twice at peak times of the day.

A week after publishing

Add more social messages and images to your posts, and promote them again.

Two weeks after publishing

Send out a reminder message again, and keep the traffic flowing to your blog post.

B12 gives you top-quality content tailored to your blog

If you're thinking about building your own blog, you have a couple of options for a blogging platform. A free web-builder sounds enticing, but you're not a design professional, so how can you hope to compete with other websites in your niche sporting professional development and design?

You could always start a WordPress blog for free. However, if you don't have coding know-how, you're going to have to hire a developer to make template customizations. A fully-functional WordPress blog could go from free to costing you thousands of dollars in development fees.

Why not publish content using B12, which offers you an all-in-one platform to manage every part of your business online, including a blog. Publish posts on your own or have an experienced B12 copywriter create SEO-rich content for you.

You pay a small monthly fee for the design and development of your entire online presence, including the homepage, service pages, and every page you need to sell more with less effort. It's the best option for small and growing companies, giving you easy templates and starting points with plenty of customization options, plus all of the optimization tools your site needs to rank in search.

With B12, it's a win-win situation. You get to focus on your business strategy and serving clients without losing hours of your time each week updating your site. You avoid the technical aspects of managing a website because B12 takes care of the back end. You're left feeling confident that your business looks professional online and will continue to evolve and improve.

As a bonus, B12 can help you with your SEO writing. Sign up for the SEO Pro subscription, and you get a free blog, optimized for the search engines delivered to you to publish on your site each month. B12 has everything you need, from development to management, and high-quality blogs for your content marketing strategy.