Promoting your blogs killer articles

A killer article is not just a well written article on some topic, its something that shouts out ground breaking news and makes the reader say OMG. As the name itself suggests it, a very well written article on a topic which has never been written before, it should contain your research or experience and you must be the first one to spread it to the world.

It all just starts with an OMG, but its followed by a tweet, digg, thumbs-up and a few links from their blogs. Most of the articles which end up on the popular page of Delicious or on the front page of Digg are such sort of articles. Most of the successful killer articles get promoted by ‘the word of mouth’ leading to thousands of visitors, but when your blog is just born, you won’t have many people to read or promote your content.

Killer articles require a unique and special type of promotion other than your own blog promotion, this requires great hard work, patience and networking skills, but how much ever long it takes every well written killer has potential for success.

Email to bloggers and webmasters

As I said above networking skills play very important role in this, you’ll need to build up a good network and relations with other bloggers even before you create your post. After that help promote their content by Digging, tweeting and linking to their posts. Once they are confident about you start asking for return favors.

When ever I write a killer post, I usually send a mail to 50 bloggers (usually of my niche) and almost all of them respond to my mail by giving a feedback, or by retweeting, digging or stumbling. Many bloggers link to my post in some of their future posts, this gives me more exposure and traffic.

Social media websites

As soon as I write a post I start to share it networking sites such as Facebook, Myspace and Orkut, this does not send a lot of traffic, but this helps me in notifying friends and family about my new blog post. I usually make sure all my friends and family are updated because they usually help promote my site no matter how my post is, so a nice friend circle always has its benefits.

Then I go to the main field in sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit, Digg and reddit send very less amount of traffic to my site, but StumbleUpon makes up more than 15% of my sites traffic. I still use Digg and Reddit because even if the chances are rare I may end up with huge amounts of traffic.

Discussion forums and Blog commenting

Currently I don’t find much success with social media, as I’m still a newbie, so most my traffic and exposure comes from discussion forums and bulletin boards. I’m usually active on Digital Point and Webmaster-Talk as that is my target niche, other than replying to posts and sending traffic through my signature links, I also post my entire in a thread giving links within and after my thread.

You’ll need to make sure that the forum your using allows you to use such promotional methods or else you’ll have chances of getting banned, these days most of the forums allow signature links, so you’ll be allowed to use it.

If you’d read my previous posts, you’ll know that I’m a big fan of blog commenting and I get most of my traffic from it, and this can be a great technique to promote your article, just find a discussion on a related topic using services such as Backtype and get active in that discussion and at the end post a link to your post. (Learn more at : Attracting traffic through comments)

Pay per click advertising

Getting search engine traffic to your article will take a lot of time, so until then you can use pay per click advertising methods which is almost as targeted as organic search engine traffic. Pay Per click advertising is actually pretty cheap, but most people do not have that start up money to afford pay per click advertising, but I usually believe in investing a bit of money on blog promotion always has benefits.

I you’d read my post ‘Using Adwords to promote your blog‘ I had recommended that you send pay per click traffic to a post, welcome page or a list of posts instead of sending it to your homepage. This method works fine with any type of site and is one of the best ways to promote your killer article.

Blog advertising

Something which has gained fame in the past few years is blog advertising, many people say that it isn’t good for promoting your blog and only works for promoting products or services. Its true that you can’t promote your blog using blog advertising, but you can promote your posts, but they’ll have to be unique.

Blog advertising costs more than PPC, but its worth it and helps you promote your brand while your promoting your post.

Content distribution

I never use this method, but the people who have told me about its efficiency, although article submission died out, many things like podcasts, videos and tutorials are the latest trends. Making videos to promote a particular post isn’t very effective, so its easier and effective to distribute podcasts, press releases, pdf files, PPT presentations and exe files.

Its not mandatory to do all of them, so choose what ever your comfortable with, although the more you do the more return you get.Also do not give away all of your content, just distribute partially to make people know that you have this article on your blog.

On to our readers

In the past few months I’ve written many unique articles on Dumb Little Blogger and almost all of them have achieved their goals, so I’m very sure that the above points will have success and will prove to be very effective. In case you know any more techniques or have any opinion or feedback on this post your free to comment below. Also please do follow me on Twitter.