It’s easy to push “publish.” 
But almost a nightmare for so many content marketers to actually promote what they published. How sad?
In this post, I’ll show you 15 effective ways to promote your blog posts, and attract over 130,000 readers per month.
I know it’s doable because I’ll be using the exact strategies to promote this particular post.
You may think that 130,000 blog readers are huge, but it’s really not. Most bloggers generate 700,000 to 1,000,000 million blog readers every single month.
Every passing day witnesses the birth of thousands of new blogs and millions of new blog posts.
In fact there is a website that claims to keep a count of the daily blog posts published on the web.
Worldometer shows in real time the number of blog posts written every day and when this post was being written the meter showed the score at 2,470,000, adding more than 100 posts each second.
With so much content being added to the web each day, how do you possibly make sure that your content, your blog post stands out?
First thing first; building a blog’s authority is a painstakingly slow process.
If you are expecting to become an overnight blogging superstar, that’s 99.99 percent not going to happen.
If you think having impeccable English and an exquisite writing style will get you to a six figure page views, you are wrong. You've to use various strategies to promote your blog post, like a maniac. For example, in September 2014, see how many people read my content.
What will get your blog post the required eyeballs is a fresh organic writing style, patience and a mix of intelligent marketing techniques.
We've lots of strategies to discuss. The first thing you'll have to ensure is your content. If it's low-quality or generic, no amount of marketing will help.
1. Let Your Content Do the Promotion for you
If you want your people to come in droves and share your content, it has to be epic, as simple as that.
Mostly that means your content has to be bigger and better than the same content on the topic, contain actionable tips such as these, and some reliable stats and figures.
Longer posts also receive more social sharing. If a blog post is greater than 1,500 words, on average it receives 68.1% more tweets and 22.6% more Facebook likes than a blog post which is shorter. And mobile social sharing is another area you've to seriously consider.
Well, every content you write may not all be “in-depth” or have a long-format.
But if you want to increase the chances of going viral, the strategy that works for me is to find a hot/trending topic, and crank out a 2000+ words article – using screenshots, data and stats to back up claims.
2. An effective Linking strategy
Linking to influential blogs in your post will increase the chances of your blog being featured on their blog and get them sharing your content.
It is recommended to add a link whenever your content has a possibility of being more in-depth and exploratory.
Link to a source where people can find more information or something related to what you have written.
However, be sure to make it known in the community that you are linking out to them. Use social media for this purpose.
Twitter works best as bloggers can easily hit retweet and share button.
3. Quote influential players in your niche
A blog post which is backed by a quote or two from influential figures or key personalities is always viewed as more reliable than a post without one.
You can find experts through Google search. Just go to Google and type "Pat Flynn + interviews."
Next, scan through the interview, and extract a quote by the expert.
So you can quote what the expert (Pat Flynn) said and let him know that you quoted or linked to his interview. That's all.
Experts are always interviewed by other bloggers and at such interviews, they’ll pour their hearts and answer questions, provide insider tips and write quotes as well.
4. Make your blog post easy to share
To improve social sharing of your post, include the various widgets and buttons at various points in the post.
Many bloggers have their social sharing buttons either only at the top or the bottom, both of which have their own disadvantage. Blogs that generate hundreds of social shares made sure their social share buttons are visible. For example, QuickSprout.com
Once the readers get interested and start scrolling down the post, most of them will leave after reading it if you have social sharing buttons only at the top.
On the other hand, sometimes there is just not enough time and people might not make it to the bottom even if it is a great post.
The best strategy here would be to add a social share plugin like Digg Digg which adds a moving sidebar at the side of the posts.
5. Email Your Subscriber List
Email list offers the best converting channel for content marketing. If you want to attract instant traffic, the first thing on your list should be emailing your subscribers.
Having an email list of loyal subscribers is your ticket to succeeding in your online business. Most experts I know spend their seconds, minutes, hours, days and weeks strategizing and writing email copy.
Noah Kagan, founder of AppSumo grew his email list to 700,000 subscribers. Imagine how many people will visit his blog with just a single push of the button?
Write a short and unique email for your subscribers. The subject line should be intelligent enough to generate curiosity amongst the recipients and email body shouldn’t be too long or flowery.
You can make use of a variety of email marketing stats available to prune your e-mails and make them more purposeful.
For example, research has found that Click-through Rate is higher when recipient’s first name is used in the subject line, compared to when the first name is omitted
Another interesting fact is that saturday has the highest CTR at over 9%. You can accordingly adjust your publishing calendar.
If you want some advice for building effective email subscriber list, this post at entrepreneur will help you out.
6. Share on social media channels
It’s important to share your content on all the official social media channels for your content to get maximum visibility and traffic.
There are two ways of going about it. Either you can use a plugin like SNAP or Buffer, or do this manually.
Most will recommend the plugin method as its less time taking and considerably easier to manage. Your posts should be engaging and entertaining, such as a fun video or an infographic or a inspirational quote with a link back to your original article.
7. Publish to other social hubs
Social Hubs like Tumblr, Flipboard, Stumbleupon, Scoop.it and even LinkedIn have their own loyal audience and internal traffic.
Publish your content on these hubs and if you have written a really good piece, you'll get traffic.
In addition to your own content, also share other great content in your niche to build a credible authority. You can also set up your own newspaper-like page on Paper.li. Thousands of people will read your blog content as though they're reading a newspaper.
These sites offer widgets and buttons that you can add to the browser and with one click add the content you are enjoying to your page.
8. Syndicate to other blogs
There must be some top blogs in your niche that accept syndicated content.
The reason syndication is listed here is because it gets you exposure to “Other People’s Audiences” , as Eric Enge of Search Engine Land calls it.
It will definitely take some efforts and time to find sites that host syndicated content and also will like to do it for you. I found growthhackers.com extremely useful. Just click the "submit" tab, share your blog posts URL there and drive blog readers to your new post.
However, if you do find such sites, it will allow you to tap into your competitor’s audience.
The real benefit of syndication is only when you syndicate to sites that are of higher authority than your site.
Also, do not syndicate every blog post of yours as this will hardly leave anything unique to be discovered when they visit your site.
Since it is essentially an opportunity to build your reputation on a high authority site, syndicate what you consider your best stuff.
9. Post to Facebook Pages, LinkedIn Groups and other communities
There are countless Facebook Pages and groups dedicated to a particular niche out there.
Some of them have a thriving community following and witness active member participation. Posting in these pages and groups will also get you some exposure and traffic as well.
To find such communities on Facebook, all you have to do is search in the search box at the top with some relevant keywords.
Choose groups amongst the options and find those with the maximum engagement and fan numbers. Hashtags can create engagements too, if you know how to use it.
Share your content within these groups through interesting and entertaining posts.
10. Add the blog content to aggregation sites
There are sites like Digg.com, Reddit.com are content aggregators that use crowdsourcing to produce interesting content that keeps the readers hooked. The top aggregators will send you huge spikes of traffic, once you're consistent.
Huffington Post, Daily Beast and even Google News use automatic content aggregation.
You can also add your posts to them for effortless traffic. All you have to do is create an account and “submit your link” before you witness traffic flowing down to your site.
Technorati.com, the blog search engine that recently shut down its blog directory was once a content aggregation site specifically built for blogs.
It was an inimitable influence in the blogosphere and had it been still active, it would have been the number one destination for content aggregation.
11. Repurpose your distribution strategy
If it’s a long post like this one, with multiple stats and figures there is no reason why you cannot package it into PDF files and share on document sites like Slideshare or Scribd.
These sites are the top destination for audience seeking new, informative, technical content. You will be able to tap into previously unexplored market by turning your posts into PDF and adding to these sites.
Similarly, you can turn your posts into simple slides and post it on Slideshare to bring in some extra traffic. You can also create infographics from your most popular blog post, which is related to your post and sharing them on sites like Visual.ly and DailyInfographic.com can bring in new visitors.
12. Tweet Experts and Get Retweet in return
There are good reasons why you should tweet experts. If you are confident enough about your content and think an influential blogger or personality of your niche would like it, then let them know.
If they find your content high quality and as per their liking, who knows, they might hit the retweet button, or add a couple of lines or two appreciating your post.
Their followers will become the newly found source of traffic to your site.
13. Blog Commenting on relevant blogs
For you to drive traffic from blog commenting, you've to be fast and give value. Try and subscribe to at least 5 authority blogs in your niche that receives lots of comments. Then subscribe to them.
After hitting the “Publish” button on your site, it’s time to check some blogs that you follow in your niche and wherever it is relevant, leave a link to your post in the comments section.
However, spamming the comment section is viewed in negative light and you might lose some credibility, plus the right to add comments. If done right, it puts you on the radar of the blogger, plus their audience.
14. Use forums to their full advantage
If you are an active member of a niche forum, now is the time to reap its benefits. To find a relevant forum, go to Google and type in your keyword + forums. For example: writing + forums:
Once you click the search results above, you'll be taking to the forums. Look at the number of threads (contributions from forum members) to determine how active the board is.
Whenever you add a new blog post, you can change your forum signature to point to the new post, with a call to action such as “To find more information click here”.
There are forums that allow you to share your content in short or a summary of the content when they recognize you as a valued member.
15. Engage in Video Marketing
Video is powerful traffic driver. According to Digital Sherpa, "11.26% Of Internet Users Look For More Information After Viewing A Video Ad"
If you want to be really innovative and budget is not a constraint, you can create a small video, a teaser related to the post followed by a message that asks readers to jump over to your site and see the complete post.
Have your own channel on YouTube, which by the way is now the world's second largest search engine.
Conclusion
Blogging is one of the most powerful digital marketing tools that businesses have ever known.
If you consistently post unique and data-driven content, you should increase your blog visitors by 30%, says Anna Hoffman.
It drives more traffic to your site; helps convert leads into sales and build brand authority. Thus, knowing how to promote your blog posts is necessary if you want to build a strong audience and brand authority.
Writing good content is only half the part, promoting your content and making it more visible on the web is the real deal. If you think this is too much task for one man, you can hire specialist internet marketers for the same.
It would be needless to add here that all the above tactics would work well only if you have a well designed website with proper SEO implementation.
What other strategy have you used to promote your blog posts?