The 15 Best Places To Promote Your Small Business Blog For Free
When it comes to promoting your small business blog, the odds are, you’ve already posted your content on social media, and for many with small budgets, this is where the story ends. But promoting your content effectively requires more than just posting it on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. It’s important to be creative with how you promote your small business blog and the places; even better, this doesn’t cost a single extra penny.
As with anything in small business marketing, there’s a tradeoff between time and cost. Promoting and publishing your content across these proven places will take up some extra time, but for those of you who are bootstrapping or still in that awkward growth stage that leaves your advertising budget still limited, this is for you.
(Tip, even if you’re not working with the smallest of budgets, it’s worthwhile promoting in these places to maximise your small business blogs reach.)
So without further ado; these are the best free places to promote your small business blog:
Email Signature
This one is a no-brainer, everyone you are in contact with is a potential lead. Promote to these potential leads at all times. Add your website link to your email signature to draw folks back to your site.
Are you already doing this?
Well, step it up a notch, highlight particularly useful or relevant content. It’s possible to have multiple email signatures, so why not switch out your generic site link for a mainly related blog post. E.g. when you reach out to those in the Agricultural industry, you could share a blog post that relates.
You can also do this with top-performing content. In business, never be afraid to promote and plug yourself shamelessly. If you’ve had a blog post that performed better than anything else you have or has garnered a lot of social or media attention, switch out your generic site link for the piece.
Apply for Inclusion in Google News
We often forget that blogs, including small business ones, are news outlets in their own right. Submit your website to Google News. Once you are approved you will start getting referral traffic, and regardless of the quantity this is natural traffic, that needs no added attention. If you need any other reason to consider this, people trust Google news more than traditional media.
Medium
Medium is excellent for republishing your blog posts and content. Add your existing content as a story on Medium to get some added attention from native users, and game the search engines with a higher ranking site than your small businesses website.
You can add up to 5 relevant tags as well as external links pointing to your website from the Medium story.
Worried about duplicate content?
No worries, we suggest you only post content that has already been on your website for over a month, this will ensure the post on your site is the first to be indexed. You should also attribute the story on Medium to your original post on your website by linking back. To further protect your site from duplicate content penalties, you could just post the first few paragraphs of your post, linking back to your original with a read more call-to-action.
Twitter
You’ve probably already posted your blog content on Twitter, but how many times and in how many ways?
Due to the user interface and the way Twitter operates, the average lifespan of a tweet is 17 minutes. That’s a short window for your followers and followers of the hashtags used, to see your content.
You’ve probably spent quite a while researching, creating and curating your content, that’s worth more than 17 minutes!
Increase the likelihood of people seeing your content, and maximise your resources by sharing the same content with different images and tweet text. No one is likely to notice any repetition as people remember visuals but not individual pieces that they’ve browsed past.
Doing this can take than 17 minutes to 170 minutes.
Instagram
Instagram gets a bad wrap when it comes to sharing content; after all, you can’t directly link to the content.
Or can you?
Consider using particularly catchy visuals from your blog content or topic as Instagram posts. If you don’t have one, create one. You can use up to thirty hashtags for each post, and as long as you leave a gap from the top, users won’t immediately see this.
You can then change your profile link to that blog post at the given time. This is a simple way to get some traffic from Instagram.
LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn groups can be a great place to share your business-related posts and content; you can tailor the content you share to the interest of each group you become a member of.
For this, you’ll need to find relevant groups on Linkedin, request to join them, and once you’re approved share your content there. There is a limit to how many groups you can request at a time, so conduct this process in increments, as you’re accepted into each group you can request membership into a new one. It’s also a good idea to keep the groups relevant to yourself and your small business as it’s very easy to become spammy otherwise, and many group admins will not accept those they don’t deem to be relevant to the group.
The key here is quality and quantity as your ability to qualify the interests of those you're promoting your content to. It’s probably best to only promote your very best content in Linkedin groups.
Remember this is a group and not a passive audience. Interact with the community by liking, sharing and engaging with others content. This will also make it more likely others will do the same for you.
Facebook Groups
These are similar to the LinkedIn groups discussed above.
Merely find groups that are relevant to your business and yourself, for example, those dedicated to small business or entrepreneurs. Also, think about your particular situation, e.g. if you’re a native Spanish speaker, there may be a group for Spanish Entrepreneurs. These niches may be small but added together you maximise your promotional reach.
Similarly to LinkedIn, engage with the community members. Understand how they interact with each other and the rules of the groups to avoid getting kicked out for sharing your content in the wrong way. Some groups have limits on how much you share, so consider sticking to 1 post a day unless they specify any less.
Google Plus Communities
These are essentially the same thing as groups. Find ‘communities’ that are relevant to your small business content. You will have to figure out which ones have an active community as many Google Plus groups have large numbers but not much activity.
The more activity they have, the more likely it is you’ll receive shares and other interactions.
Pinterest
Pinterest is a great place to share your blog content especially when you have compelling visuals or infographics. Infographics, in particular, do well on the platform so consider creating some retrospectively for each of your blog posts.
Pin your visuals and content to multiple related boards based on the topics covered within the posts themselves.
Also develop your boards to curate your content in your way, based on topic areas and target audience. The same content can be pinned on multiple boards which increases the likelihood of it being found.
Similarly to Medium, this is a great way to rank your content on a high ranking website.
Quora
Quora is a great way to promote your blog posts by answering questions that relate to the topics you cover in each piece of content. Find appropriate questions you can answer and link back to the content of your website for further detail and context.
This is an excellent way of positioning you or any other member of your small business as experts in your field and a reliable source of information. It’s a great way of promoting both your business and individuals within it.
The key here is to add real value. Quality answers get upvoted and therefore get better promotion and traffic.
Subreddits on Reddit
Subreddits are similar to Facebook Groups. Though before you start promoting your content, you’ll try to find subreddits that are related to your blog topic and subscribe to them.
Ensure you read the community rules from the outset, Interact with the members of each subreddit first, by voting for their existing posts and commenting. It’s only then you should share your content as it’s likely to be more organic and be viewed in a better light. Reddit is an active community of savvy members, so merely dropping in links to promote your content won’t be enough, more effort and tact is required for using Reddit than with Facebook and LinkedIn.
If members of subreddits find your content valuable and relevant, they will upvote it, getting you more traffic.
Remember, the content you post on Reddit will be there for a long time, mainly if it does well on Reddit.
With Reddit, it’s a case of less is more!
StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is very simple. StumbleUpon is a free web content curation platform. Only submit the URLs of your blog post and valuable content on your StumbleUpon profile using the Add Page button. Make sure to check the “safe for work” box then specify what post is about by adding interest as well as relevant tags.
Once this is done, no more effort is required, so it’s worth including this in your content posting process so that all your content is linked to and available on StumbleUpon.
Triberr
This is a two-step process. Join the tribes and share your content. If your content is of good quality, it will be shared. Link your RSS feed to Triberr so your content is automatically posted to the tribes you’re a member of. Where there are no relevant or active tribes related, you can create one, and it will quickly grow. The user base on Triberr are highly active, so you’ll be surprised how active and responsive they are.
Also if your small business blog content is marketing related it’s likely to do particularly well on Triberr.
BizSugar
It doesn’t look like much, but you’d be surprised by some of the established business that is active on Bizz Sugar; a prime example of this being Upwork.
Bizz Sugar is an online directory that allows you to submit a link every 24 hours. All you need to do is find a category that is relevant to your website content, business or yourself and share it in a post on BizSugar.
Tip: Content that is business related does particularly well on BizSugar.
Growth Hackers
This one is for anyone sharing marketing-related content, or marketing related content from a small businesses perspective, which many if not all small businesses can and will already do. If your content is or can be linkable to marketing, blogging, social media, design, SEO, and similar topics, then Growth Hackers is a great place to promote your content to a targeted audience.
The process consists of submitting a link, adding a short description and up to three tags to show it’s topical relevance.
Your post will need approval unlike the majority of other methods, however, once your post is approved anyone will be able to read and share it.
Final Thoughts
Many of these sites offer you a profile in which you can further promote your small business website using the URL, a tagline, your social media profiles and even at times, a short business profile or description.
Make good use of this, as it’s added promotion and requires minimum effort. And of course, incomplete profiles can appear unprofessional and potentially lose you some of your recently hard-earned traffic.
We’re sure with this combination of promotional opportunities; you’ll start to see exponential growth in your sites traffic as well as other key metrics.
As always, Happy Small Business Marketing!
For more on four content marketing strategies for small businesses in 2018 and marketing strategies for small businesses.