Why Promoting Your Blog Is The Absolute Worst Way To Drive More Traffic

The problem? You probably don’t have a following yet.

Want to know how to promote your blog and drive hundreds of thousands of readers to it on a daily basis?

If you do, here’s a secret:

Don’t.

As in, don’t promote your blog. Actually, don’t even have a blog. Not until you build a following first, that is.

The biggest mistake people make when trying to market a product, service, company, personal brand — you name it — is trying to drive traffic to a blog site. Even if your blog is well put together and offers visitors loads of value, promoting it is a waste of your time, and can get pretty costly if you fall into the trap of putting money behind Facebook and Twitter ads.

Reason being: it’s an unnecessary extra-step in trying to market whatever it is you’re selling (even if you’re just selling a good read).

Let me explain what I mean.

For this sake of this article, let’s say you’re an entrepreneur in the fitness space.

You’ve got all the accolades: you’re former semi-professional athlete, licensed personal trainer, have MBA in biology, and on top of all that, you’re a registered dietician. You have a solid core group of clients but really want to start working with professional athletes — both training them for competition and coordinating customized diet plans.

You’re looking for a way to build a personal brand and market beyond what you’re already doing on Instagram. A friend of yours is a writer, and said you should really position yourself as an expert by writing articles sharing what you know. You agree it’s a smart move, and she decides to help you put together an article a week for a couple of months.

Not knowing where else to place them, you create a blog page on your personal brand site.

Every time you finish an article, you publish it to your blog, copy and paste the URL to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and write a little something about the piece before sharing to let readers know what advice you have for the week — something like:“The key to reaching your peak athletic potential is finding balance. Hit the link below to learn more.”

You think your messaging is enticing enough to get readers to click, but when you check your page views for each post, you barely average 50.

The problem is, you don’t have a following.

And you’re not going to build one using a blog.

The truth is, people just don’t want to visit your site.

Even if it’s professionally done and offers them tons of insight, they can probably get the same information somewhere else — likely a source that is perceived to be more credible.

And even if it’s clear by your profiles you are credible, you don’t have any sort of audience — no one is seeing it when you post it to your blog.

Instead, go where the people are.

What I mean by that is, instead of posting to your blog and trying to drive people there, publish your pieces where people are already reading.

There are a number of social platforms people go to with the intention of reading — and that’s where you should be publishing. For one, people don’t have to leave those sites to read your content. But on top of that, they can connect and follow you on those platforms — something that can’t happen with a blog.

My two favorite are Quora and Medium. LinkedIn is another good one, too (it has it’s own publishing platform — that’s why for a lot of what you read on LinkedIn you don’t actually have to leave the site). Both Medium and LinkedIn have over 200M unique monthly visitors, while Quora has over 300M unique monthly visitors. And all of those platforms are incredibly conducive to long-from content — you’re able to post, share, like, and comment on content and actively follow other users.

Needless to say, it’s much more likely to gain viewership on any of these platforms — where there are hundreds of millions of viewers already — than it is trying to drive more people to your lowly blog.

If you’re copy and pasting links to social platforms, you’re giving people an option to click or not. Odds are, they’re not gonna click. With so much content out there, they just don’t need to. Plus, they probably didn’t log onto Twitter or Facebook or Instagram to read — let alone, leave those platforms. They logged on to be passively entertained… to scroll.

Promoting your blog should come secondary to posting on social platforms like Quora, Medium, and LinkedIn.

This isn’t to say don’t have your own blog at all.

Republishing everything you post on Quora, Medium, and LinkedIn to your personal site to populate your blog is never a bad thing. In fact, I encourage it. Over time, people will come organically.

But until you build a large enough following where people are willingly typing in your URL or that when people search “fitness” in Google your blog is the first thing that comes up, trying to drive people to your site is a huge waste of time and energy.

Build a following on social first and put your blog on the back-burner for now.

Thanks for reading :)