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8 Tips For Promoting Your WordPress Site

This is the seventh part of An Essential Guide To WordPress SEO – as we have seen, SEO is a great way to drive more traffic to your site – however, there are lots of other approaches that you can also use to attract visitors.

Therefore, this post isn’t specifically about SEO – instead it’s a range of related tips and techniques you can use to promote your site and spread the word about how wonderful it is

A nice side effect of implementing many of these tips is that you will also enhance your SEO efforts by getting lots of high-quality backlinks from authority sites which can help push your site up the rankings!

Use Social Media

This is essential if you’re looking to get more traffic to your site. Social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Propeller, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Delicious and Technorati (and hundreds of others) allow you to bookmark and share your favorite sites. If one of your blog posts becomes popular at any of these sites it can generate a large amount of new traffic to your blog. It’s therefore important that you make it as easy as possible for people to bookmark your site – one way to do this is to have some buttons at the bottom of your posts that make it very simple for people to share your content (like at the bottom of this post).

Other social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook aren’t so much about bookmarking, but more about obtaining followers and interacting with them. Twitter can be a great way to drive more traffic to your site – you can build authority by creating interesting and useful tweets related to your site’s topic, and you can also promote new content on your site with a link to the appropriate page. If someone else picks this up and retweets it to their followers your content will start to spread and there is the increased possibility that you’ll receive more visitors to your site.

Creating a Facebook page for your site is another useful way to promote your site – I recently read that if Facebook was a country, it would be the fifth biggest in the World – that’s a lot of people and it’s important that you have a presence there!

Create Videos

Creating helpful and interesting videos are a great way to promote your site – and once you’ve created them, you can distribute them to a wide number of different sites. This obviously includes YouTube, but there are lots of other video sharing sites that you can upload your videos to as well (TubeMogul is something you’ll want to check out for distributing your videos).

So try and create some videos if you can – these might be short tutorials on something related to what you’re doing, or an opinion piece on something that is going on in your industry. Make sure that you “brand” all of your videos – this doesn’t have to be overly elaborate, but just ensure you’ve got the name of your site and its URL somewhere in the video.

Also try optimizing the titles and tags for your videos by incorporating some of the keyword phrases you’re targeting – this will help increase the chances of your video being ranked well in the search engines. Having a video that ranks well can help generate a lot of traffic – largely because they normally have an image next to them (i.e. a thumbnail image of the video) – this makes them stand out from the standard “textual” search results, and as such means they can attract more clicks from users.

Commenting On Other Blogs

Another great way to promote your site is to start commenting on other related sites and blogs. If you can leave thoughtful and interesting comments on some of the main sites in your niche it will help build your profile and increase the likelihood that people will want to learn more about you and visit your site.

Make sure that you include the URL to your site when leaving a comment so that people can visit your site if they want to – however, I’d recommend not doing this in the comment itself unless it really adds value. Also ensure that you don’t spam these sites just so you can leave your link – it’s simply not worth it – most people will ignore your comment anyway and probably wont click on your link.

A much better approach is to take your time and create comments that add some value to the discussion – this is good in that you’re adding value to the website and it also increases the chances that someone will want to learn more about you. Win-Win! If you have time, it might be worth getting into the habit of making a couple of good quality comments at other sites on a daily basis – this will soon add up over the course of a year and will result in a lot of extra links pointing back to your site.

Write Articles

Another good way to promote your WordPress site is to write articles and submit them to article directory sites. There are literally hundreds of different article submission sites, but two of the big ones that you’ll want to target include EzineArticles and GoArticles – both allow you to leave your details in an “About The Author” type box – an ideal place to leave a link back to your site!

You want to make sure that what you include in this box is engaging and includes a call to action (e.g. “Visit www.vooshthemes.com to learn more about X”). The nice thing with these articles is that other people can freely use them on their own sites – this may sound like stealing, but it’s actually very advantageous for you as a website owner. Anyone who uses your article also has to include your author box and the link back to your site.

Therefore, this is potentially a great way of getting your name and site out there – so start writing some articles and submit them Again, always make sure that you optimize the articles you write by including some of the keyword phrases that you’re targeting in the title and actual content.

Some of these article directories are seen as authority-type sites by Google, so you may find that some of your articles rank very well in the search engines if you optimize them for a good keyphrase.

Write Guest Posts

In addition to writing articles that you can submit to article directories, it’s also worth writing for other sites in your niche. In some cases websites will pay you for writing an article – this can be a nice bonus, but it’s certainly not the primary goal.

What you want to do is write a great article for a site that receives a lot of traffic – this will enable you to get your content in front of a whole new audience and if you’ve written an interesting, engaging and helpful article, they may want to learn more about you and visit your site.

This approach is also great for building relationships with other site owners in your area which could result in future partnerships in promoting each other’s products and content.

Forums

A further way that you can promote your WordPress site is to get involved at a number of different forums – try and locate the best forums in your area as you don’t want to be participating in the ones where there is very little activity – you want the forums where there’s lots of opportunities to help people and post your opinions.

Ensure that you create a forum signature that has a link back to your site – not all forums allow this, so you might want to target only the ones that will allow you to include a link back to your site. As always, make sure that the comments you’re making are adding value – don’t just spam the forum with quick responses so you can get another backlink to your site!

Another advantage of using forums is that it can help you learn a lot more about your area – this, in turn, can often spark new and interesting ideas for content you can add to your own site.

Give Something Away For Free

Using “freebies” can be a great way to promote your site and get some more traffic – and it doesn’t always have to involve lots of hard work! If you already have a large amount of content on your blog, think about how you can potentially re-purpose this into a useful ebook. It doesn’t have to be long – it just has to be something that will appeal to your readers and get them interested in your site.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be an ebook either – it could be anything that your readers will see some value in. It’s also worth making sure that whatever you give away for free is of high quality – you want people to get lots of value from it to increase the likelihood that they will start following your site on a regular basis.

Conclusion

Making use of the tips outlined in this post will help to spread the word about your site and generate more traffic. It does require some time and effort, but this is not necessarily a bad thing – it will help you stand out from the crowd and you’ll attract more visitors who will actually want to interact with you. The next part of An Essential Guide To WordPress SEO will be the final one – but it’s still very important! You’ll learn how to monitor the effectiveness of your SEO efforts and how to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your SEO campaign.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction and Guide Overview
2. Researching Great Keywords To Help Drive Traffic
3. 10 Ways You Can Generate Quality Backlinks To Boost Your WordPress SEO
4. Ten Quick Power Tips To Drive More Visitors To Your WordPress Site
5. WordPress SEO Issues – Managing Duplicate Content Effectively
6. Top 8 Free WordPress SEO Plugins
7. 8 Tips For Promoting Your WordPress Site
8. Great Tools For Analyzing The Impact Of Your WordPress SEO