Every business needs a website and nowadays it’s not just about it looking pretty but also driving traffic to it and figuring out how to promote your blog. Right from the start we decided that a blog was the way forward and should be the landing page for our site.
As we have grown in the first few months, we have realized that we require more than just a series of blog posts. We have introduced several new pages, ones that we considered important to us and helping us reach our mission goal.
There are so many sites out there telling you want you should be doing and unfortunately most of these are there to make money for themselves and promote their SEO businesses.
We are writing this for the simple reason in that we want to share want we have learnt so far so that others in a similar situation to us can develop and promote their sites.
So, in no particular order:
We took two approaches to Instagram, firstly we added a link in our Profile to drive traffic to our site. We use LinkTree for this, if you haven’t heard about it then we strongly recommend that you check it out. Secondly, we added our Instagram feed to pages on our site. We felt this gave our readers an instant insight to who we are and what we are about and hopefully encourage them to follow us. We also felt it added a nice element of color variety to the pages.
How often to post
This was a tricky one for us as we all have full time jobs, families and kid related activities after work.
There are hundreds of articles out there telling you to do this and do that but what it comes down to is what you can achieve. Unless this is your full-time job and you have a team of people to help write your blog posts then you are always going to be struggling to mass produce content.
We decided that our minimum number of posts should be 4 new ones a month while also updating and refreshing existing posts.
Images
Images are super important as they are the first thing that a blog visitor will see when they arrive on your site. After several different attempts at getting what we thought was the best look we settled on finding the most intriguing, yet relevant image related to the blog post.
The more colorful and more vibrant the image the more it stands out. Images in the blog itself can be what you need to make the blog post work.
Remember that you should Alt text (alternative text) every image you use. There are 2 ways we do this – either through the Media option in the WordPress menu when you click on any image or when you add an image to a page you can add text in the Alt text block.
Social media posts
Every time you post a new blog make sure that you share it with your Social Media platforms with a link either back to you landing page or directly to the blog. We use the standard 3, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and as are currently playing around with TikTok and YouTube.
To try and generate extra traffic from our site to our Social Media pages we used a social media WordPress plugin – as seen on the left-hand side of this page. This plugin also allowed us to include Share to Social Media buttons at the bottom of each and every blog post.
SEO
Coming soon
What about plugins?
We are currently working on a new blog post featuring what plugins we decided to use, what they do, how they benefit us and why we recommend them. Plugins are a great way to get the best look and feel for your site and help you promote your blog.
Finally…
Remember creating and running a blog involves a long-term commitment – you can’t simply write a blog, post it and think that is it! You have to put a little elbow grease and intentionally get it in front of as many eyeballs as possible to see a return on your time.
With this commitment and regular posts, you will see the benefits and some great results for your web presence.
Please note that this is a live document and will be updating the content and adding new sections as and when we come across new methods to promote our website / blogs.
If you have any suggestions that will help others, then please leave a comment in the section below.