How to Promote a Blog Post

Here's some tips to promote your blog posts

• Pitching to Other Bloggers, ask another blogger to consider linking to your post. There’s a real art to this; read more on how to do it at 11 Ways to Increase Your Chances of Being Linked to By a Blogger.
• Social Messaging, what social networks like Twitter and Facebook are you registered with? Attempt to leverage these to promote your post. The key is not to incessantly spam your followers and friends with your link, but use your network to seed the link and let your followers spread word of it for you. This won’t happen every time but as your network grows, it can become more and more powerful.
  
• Social Bookmarking, promoting selective links on sites like Digg or StumbleUpon can lead to amazing results. Further reading is available on this topic at How to Get to the Front Page of Digg and Using Social Media Sites to Grow Your Blog’s Traffic.
• Internal Links, rather than just promote your post on other people’s sites, think about where you can link to it from within your own site. Perhaps you’ve written on the topic before and can add a link for further reading, or maybe adding a section in your sidebar for “Latest posts” could work. Internal linking won’t drive heaps of new traffic but it can help with SEO and increase page views.
• Newsletters, if you have an email newsletter list, shoot out an email about your latest post
• Other Blogs’ Comments Sections and Forums, leaving helpful and insightful comments on forums or other blogs can be great at driving traffic if your comment is genuine, relevant and sensitive to the discussion. Leaving a link is sometimes appropriate provided it is highly relevant.
• Email Signatures, adding links to your blog on your outgoing emails is fairly commonplace, but include links to recent posts instead of just your blog’s front page URL.
• Follow-up Posts, write a new post on your blog that picks up where your last one left off. This builds momentum and if you inter-link the posts, drives more page views.
• Advertise Your Post, for posts that you’re particularly proud of and are well-received by readers, you might even consider a mini ad campaign with a small budget using a service like AdWords or StumbleUpon advertising. There’s further reading on this at Run a StumbleUpon advertising campaign on your blog.
• Pitch Mainstream Media, occasionally posts will be relevant to the mainstream media. You’d want to pick a really interesting post for this; it’s not advisable for every day.
• Article Marketing, I wouldn’t recommend submitting exactly the same article you’ve posted on your blog to article marketing sites (this can get you into trouble with Google where you could face penalties for duplicate content) but I know of a few bloggers who rewrite their key articles for article marketing.
  

Note: Please be careful in using these techniques. Don’t use them all with every post you write. Choose your best posts and promote them selectively, in ways that are helpful to other people. I tend to pick 1–2 posts a week to push and let others grow organically.