Having a large audience of readers and fans is every bloggers dream. For most bloggers, it’s just a dream, but for some it’s reality.

But there are often only a few small differences between a successful blog and an unsuccessful one. Today, I want to talk about how anybody can promote their blog in 4 simple steps.

Once you understand the concepts and start implementing the strategies I’m about to uncover, your blog will gradually shift to a whole new level and begin generating a perpetual stream of visitors, leads and customers for your business.

1. Email Marketing

Possibly the most important activity you can do to grow your blog is to build a list. Some bloggers monetize their blogs with advertisements, but the top marketers online understand that capturing your visitors email address and then marketing to them via email is wayyy more profitable in the long run.

Building a list of your blog visitors allows you to send broadcast messages to them whenever you want. You can build a relationship with them by providing them with valuable information in your niche, send them to affiliate offers and your own offers, do email swaps with JV partners to add more subscribers to your list… the benefits and opportunities of building an email list are endless.

But getting back to the point of this post, you can email your list every time you publish a new post on your blog. By doing this, you are getting your content in front of people who know you, who you are developing a relationship with, and are likely to start sharing your content, commenting on your posts and recommending you to others. Building a relationship with your blog readers is an extremely powerful way of growing your blog.

2. Grow Your Community

Growing your online community can transform your blog into a huge success very quickly. There are a couple of ways to grow your community around your blog.

Firstly, you need to attract the right readers. Random, cold traffic from Google search is harder to convert than other sources, such as your social media networks, forums and other blogs that you may participate on by guest blogging and commenting.

Once you’re attracting the right readers and building a list, you need to be connecting with your subscribers on all the social networks that you and they are on. Send emails out to your subscribers inviting them to connect with you on Facebook, Google+, Twitter and Linkedin.

This gives you even more channels to communicate, promote your blog and develop your relationship with them.

3. Guest Authors

This step is perhaps the most difficult to achieve and will only come in time, after you have been consistently blogging for a while, building your community and your list, and have a nice amount of traffic visiting your blog every day.

You can create a page on your blog inviting other bloggers to create content to add to your blog. Add a contact form to the page and put a link to the page in your sidebar. As your traffic and blog popularity increases, you will catch the attention of other bloggers in your niche, and will start getting requests from guest bloggers.

This will do a few things for you. It will increase the amount of great, fresh content on your blog, which will increase visitors as your search engine rankings increase and the guest blogger promotes their post to their audience and social networks. It will also help you to develop relationships with other bloggers in your niche, that you can in turn do guest posts for on their blog, list swaps with their lists and a whole load of other joint ventures with in the future.

4. SEO & Link Building

Building backlinks to your blog is the last major step to your blogging success. Without plenty of backlinks, your blog will never get the exposure you so desperately want.

When you write your blog posts, try to do some quick keyword research to find a relevant keyword to target that has at least 300 searches per month in Google. That will potentially give you 10 visitors per day to each post that you publish on your blog.

Once your post is published, syndicate it to your social networks to gain some quick backlinks which will attract the attention of the search engines, and possible other people in your networks will ‘like’, ‘retweat’, ‘g+’ and share your content, which is all taken into account by Google and their search engine ranking algorithm.

So by following these steps consistently, in the next few months you will start to see your blog traffic increase exponentially. It works a little like a snowball effect, so stay with it and I promise that you’ll reap the rewards from your effort.

To your success,
James Richardson

P.S. watch this video here to learn how to get your own authority blog, right off the bat, so you can achieve top search engine rankings and a ton of traffic without having to wait months to see any results. Get your authority blog now!