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12 Ways to Grow Your Blog Without Any Social Media Promotion

Written by James Parsons • Updated October 16, 2024

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Growing and Promoting a Blog

Social media has been one of the best ways to promote something you’ve made for a long time, but these days, it feels less and less effective. Facebook is riddled with bots, AI spam, and people who like posts but never click through. Twitter has lost an increasingly large percentage of its user base due to ongoing bad decisions from leadership. LinkedIn has always been relatively narrow, and while Pinterest can still be effective, there’s only so much you can rely on one single social network.

TikTok can be great if you make videos, but not every niche is ideal for video, so it can be hard for many brands.

None of that changes the fact that you still want to grow your blog in any way you can. So, the question is, how can you do it without relying on increasingly fickle social media channels?

I’ve been at this game for a while, so here are the dozen top options I’ve used throughout the years, for myself and for my clients, to good effect.

1: Focus on Appropriate Keyword Usage

The two most important things to do to promote a blog without social media are the first and last items on this list. In fact, the two go together, hand in hand.

Every piece of content you create should, in my view, have very careful use of keywords throughout. I’ve found that taking even an old, mediocre, low-traffic piece of content, and simply updating it to optimize the keywords throughout, can drive it into the spotlight and get a lot more attention out of it.

Keywords are tricky, though. You need to be clever with how you use them, avoid stuffing in unnecessary keywords or exceeding the nebulous concept of keyword density that makes Google react poorly.

A Keyword Research Tool

How do you use keywords appropriately? You can do it manually, or you can use a tool. The manual method requires performing dedicated keyword research for each topic you want to cover, coming up with all of the most useful keywords related to that topic, and sprinkling them throughout your post – including image alt text, meta descriptions, and titles/subtitles – to ensure that your content is appropriately saturated without reading like it’s spammy.

Tools, meanwhile, include options like Clearscope and MarketMuse. These tools use ML/AI-powered analysis and natural language processing algorithms to determine what keywords are likely to be the most useful and where in your content they should be placed to help you buff up your usage without undue saturation.

They’re definitely worth the expense, and budget options that do the same thing but not quite as well also exist.

2: Participate in Online Communities

These days, one of the best ways to promote yourself is implicitly. To that end, I recommend looking for communities centered around your niche and topic on:

  • LinkedIn Groups
  • Facebook Groups
  • Reddit subreddits
  • Niche web forums

Then, just spend time there. Get to know people. Post your thoughts, views, and opinions on the topics being discussed.

Online Content Writing and Blogging Groups

You’re not on these sites to be promotional. You can put your link in your profile and in a signature on sites where signatures are allowed, but you shouldn’t be directly promotional unless it’s extremely relevant to a discussion. The goal is to build a personal brand and reputation and let people who start to trust you discover your site on their own.

3: Create an Exclusive Community

Another option you can try is to create a community of your own. This can be very hit-or-miss, though. Creating an exclusive community falls pretty flat if you only have two or three people in it because your site is small, and not many people are interested. On the other hand, a large community can become a nightmare to moderate, and more than a few creators have ducked out entirely when they’re confronted with the realities of what they’re required to do.

Building a Community

There’s a sweet spot in the middle. Building a community based on your niche, tightly moderating it to make sure it doesn’t get overrun with spam, finding a few trusted users to help moderate it and keep it under control, contributing to it regularly, and providing perks to the people who join, can all go a long way towards promoting your business. It might not necessarily grow your overall audience numbers, but it can make existing audiences more engaged and can turn into tighter sales numbers.

4: Try a Referral Program

Many businesses and blogs can benefit from a referral program. All you really need is:

  • A way to track user accounts.
  • An incentive for referring users.
  • A way to validate that no one is exploiting the program by creating accounts of their own.

Fortunately, pretty much all of this comes standard in a variety of different WordPress plugins meant specifically for managing referral programs. The only difficulty is in deciding what you’re going to use as an incentive.

Referral Program WordPress Plugins

Incentives can be anything from points that can be spent on coupons to your store, on exclusive merchandise, on unlocking exclusive content, on gift cards, or on specific rewards. The more valuable you make it, the more people will circulate it, but also the more likely it is to be exploited. It’s a fine line to walk, but it can be very useful if you get it rolling.

5: Guest Post on Related Blogs

Guest posting has seen a lot of ups and downs over the years. For a while, it was one of the most useful techniques available to bloggers, especially if you could use it to get followed, valuable, in-content links pointing back to your site. Later, due to scary blog posts from Matt Cutts (then-current head of Google webspam), people decided it was a dangerous technique and a lot of website owners grew too scared to accept and publish guest posts. Over time, these evened out, and we’re back to a point where a lot of people accept them, though you may still find it difficult to get a good link.

Guest Post Article Submission

Guest posting, even without a link, can be a good way to build a personal brand and, critically, some EEAT reputation in Google’s algorithm. Getting a good, contextual link is also very valuable.

The art of guest posting is worth a lot of content on its own, so I’m not going to dig deep into the strategies here, but you can read other resources I’ve put together to get started on the right foot.

6: Collaborate with Influencers and Business Partners

Similar to guest posting, if you can build relationships with other influencers, other bloggers, other businesses, and generally noteworthy people in your niche and industry, those relationships can help promote you.

How to Collaborate With Influencers

Start by identifying brands and influencers you’d like to work with. This can be anything from a blog takeover to collaborating on a product made from the synthesis of your offerings to simply offering discounts to customers already purchasing from the partner.

Then, reach out and offer a partnership. You can discuss what your ideas might be, or you can leave it open for a later meeting, but either way, it’s all about the approach. Know who you’re reaching out to, what they’re into, and what you might be able to offer them.

7: Sponsor Events

If you’re in a position where you can use tangible amounts of money to promote yourself, one option is to sponsor events related to your brand in some way. You might help sponsor a marketing seminar, a local cooking event, or an art show, whatever best fits your brand. You want events where you can get some exposure, whether it’s as a logo on banners, an entry in a brochure, or a listing on a website.

Steps to Sponsor an Industry Event

The downside here is that events are short-lived, a lot of people don’t pay much attention to the sponsors, and it can usually be pretty expensive. That’s why you want to focus as exclusively as you can on events that are very closely related, so you aren’t sponsoring something no one will care about or associate you with down the road.

8: Repurpose and Reformat Top Content

When you aren’t using social media, your biggest resource is the content you’ve already created.

Reformatting Blog Content

Go through your top posts, focusing on the posts with the most generalized value and the most ongoing traffic. Then, think about ways you can take that post and use the content in different ways.

  • Take points or side comments you made and write additional content to expand it, which you can link internally.
  • Take the overall post, rewrite it to something more focused on the spoken word, and record it as a podcast.
  • Take that podcast audio and set it to video, with explainer graphics along the way.
  • Take the video and cut it into clips to post as lead generators in other channels or on TikTok (yes, social media, but that’s just part of the strategy.)
  • Take key points and make an infographic out of it that you can share.

One piece of content can easily become ten pieces of content if you put a little effort into it, and many of those kinds of content can be posted and shared in different channels and venues for greater exposure.

9: Establish a Mailing List

Mailing lists also don’t necessarily directly promote you, but they can help make your existing audience more engaged, so you experience less drop-off of your users over time. With certain incentives, like coupons, exclusive content and tips, or other freebies, you can draw more people into the mailing list and keep them around over time.

A Mailing List E-Mail Signup

Mailing lists are one of the best tools you can establish for long-term utility because they’re one of the only channels available to promote yourself where you don’t have to be on your toes about being too self-promotional, and you can’t have it taken away from you by a fickle platform. At least, as long as you aren’t using it for spam purposes.

10: Use PPC Advertising

The quintessential “promote your blog” option is simply to exchange money for traffic. PPC advertising through any of the many platforms available (ranging from Google Ads to BuySellAds to native advertising platforms like Outbrain and more) is a good way to get exposure and can potentially translate into a decent amount of ongoing traffic.

A Website Analytics Chart

The downside is that PPC often doesn’t have a lingering impact, and the number of people who stick around for the long term after seeing your ads can be small. Even so, it can be a good strategy if you have the budget to do it.

11: Make Business-Related Lead-Generation Hooks

If you have the ability to do so, creating simple tools you can use to attract people in your niche and provide value can be a great option.

Topicfinder Competitor Analysis

For example:

  • A food blog could make a resource where you could put in an ingredient and get substitutions.
  • A marketing blog can make code snippets usable on various sites to speed them up.
  • Here at Topicfinder, I could make a utility to analyze a title for keyword and length properties.

The key is that these provide some small amount of value and are completely free to use. That way, they draw in people, who then trust you when they see your site elsewhere and are more likely to click and read your posts, visit your store, or hire your services.

12: Create More Useful Content

Up above, I said the two most important strategies were the first and last; well, here we are.

Just make better content!

We currently live in a world where the internet is saturated with AI-generated spun content that has no unique and useful value to it. Standing out is a matter of providing that useful, unique value to your readers. This is something I’ve been harping on about for years, and it’s only gotten more and more important as time goes on.

The Topicfinder Blog

Learn who your audience is. Learn what they’re searching for, and what their intent is when they search for those keywords. Provide content that gives them what they actually want, rather than just something vapid with a few keywords strewn about.

Once you get this process down, it gets easier. A huge amount of work is up-front with audience and topic research, but that doesn’t rapidly decay once you’ve done it. You can also use tools like Topicfinder to help you perform topic ideation, keyword research, competitive analysis, and more, all to speed up the process. Give it a try! Pretty soon, you’ll wonder why you even bothered with social media in the first place.

Written by James Parsons

James is the founder and CEO of Topicfinder, a purpose-built topic research tool for bloggers and content marketers. He also runs a content marketing agency, Content Powered, and writes for Forbes, Inc, Entrepreneur, Business Insider, and other large publications. He's been a content marketer for over 15 years and helps companies from startups to Fortune 500's get more organic traffic and create valuable people-first content.

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