Paid and free, for beginners and for those who know how to manage an audience and know your unique selling proposition: working ways to promote from an experienced SMM-specialist.
Cardinally new ways of promotion have not yet been invented. The two most working ways that bring a quality loyal audience, which then does not hang dead weight, are targeted advertising (official advertising from Facebook) and advertising with bloggers. Of course, these are paid promotion methods. For those who have no budget or a very limited budget, there are free promotion methods: mutual PR, commenting, hashtags, mass liking/mass liking, and reposting – check the site.
And for those who know how to engage the audience, who have no problems with keeping stories and already have a large pool of loyal subscribers, you can consider giving away prizes and “catch-ups.
Paid promotion methods
Targeted advertising
You pay money to Facebook, and it brings you subscribers. Do not forget that in addition to the fact that you pay money to Facebook, you also pay 20% tax. And if you don’t know how to set up targeting yourself, you pay the salary of a targeting specialist. The cost of a targeting subscriber depends on the niche. So, targeting ads come in posts and/or stories.
Through targeting, you can promote your post, which is already on your blog (not all of it, of course), but you can’t promote the stories that you already have. That is, you develop your own creativity for the stories, which you then run on the ad. On separate ads in the post, everything is similar, only the format of the picture is different. And you also need to write the text. This text written by Gennady Yagupov
The cost per subscriber can only be guessed at, because it all depends on the niche. For example, freelancing niches are expensive and, therefore, a subscriber here is also expensive. So be prepared for this if you want to start a blog about remote work.
From targeting comes a slightly less loyal audience, because they themselves need to get to know your blog and find all its benefits themselves. But over time, this audience becomes loyal, too, if you make interesting content.
Buying advertising from bloggers
Advertising from bloggers is the most effective way to get the warmest possible audience. They can go straight to your blog and find what the ad is about.
Agree, about 40-45 seconds of screen time for a blogger ad is more than 10-15 seconds of targeting ads. Plus, the credibility is higher: the audience trusts the blogger’s ads more than the ads displayed by the soulless Facebook machine.
But the difficulties and risks here, unfortunately, are greater than in targeting:
- often caught scammed accounts;
- a lot of time is spent on finding bloggers, approvals, and other arrangements;
- advertising material does not work the first time, and you have to redo and test it many times.
The main difficulty is writing the advertising material. When you see an ad in Instagram, believe me, every word in it was written in advance by the client, and the blogger just memorized the text. With rare exceptions, you get bloggers who make ads by studying your blog and tweaking the material for themselves.
If you do not know how to write advertising material (pitch) or do not know how to promote through bloggers, it is better to hire a specialist or take special courses. Believe me, there are a lot of nuances in the advertising market.
Give away
Gives are when several bloggers (or one) get together and announce a contest for cash prizes, iPhones, or even cars/apartments. The idea is that these bloggers sell sponsorship spots, and the sponsors pay money to participate. To win, you have to sign up for all the sponsors. Then there may be some additional activity throughout the week. Eventually sponsors get a lot of subscribers from those bloggers who made announcements.
There are usually 60-150 sponsors. Can you imagine, at one point 100+ strangers show up and litter your feed and stories. You mentally hate them already, so after the contest there are very big unsubscribes, as the audience wants to get rid of you as soon as possible. Especially if you didn’t interest them in anything during the giv period and they don’t remember you. They came for the iPhone at all, they don’t care about you.
If you do not want to kill your account and then throw it away, then do not participate in give away. Gives are only useful for big bloggers who actively blog and know how to attract cold traffic.
Free ways to promote
Commenting
The idea is that a novice blogger writes a comment at a major Influencer. He wants to be noticed and appreciated so that people will go to his blog and subscribe.
Why don’t bloggers whose posts are commented on like this method?
Because these comments are nasty. They make you feel like you’re being taken advantage of.
Often these comments look like this: “Oh, great post, I agree with everything. And I just had a blog post about… (something similar to the topic of our post). Go read it.”
Or, “Oh, great post, I agree with everything. Just on the blog I have a free tutorial that you can download if you subscribe to me and direct message me.”
Learn to respond with wit, jokes, or stories that will grab the attention of other commenters. Create discussions, provoke an argument (not aggressive, but on the point), help answer audience questions – that’s proper commenting, not cheap manipulation of “go to my blog, I wrote a post there”.
Reposts
A great way to promote is through reposts. When your content resonates so much with people that they repost it, tag you, quote your posts. If you look at it from an ordinary Instagram user who is subscribed to a couple of bloggers, friends and acquaintances, when we see an unusual repost from a friend who normally doesn’t post storis, we get curious, “Wow, what is that you reposted? Who’s that? I’m going to go see.” The person reposts, and if he likes the blogger, he also subscribes and eventually becomes a loyal follower.
Hashtags
Hashtags are useful for those who have local services. People often search Instagram for services using keywords. Use them to attract clients and customers.
Hashtags are usually put in the comments so as not to clutter up the post.
Another interesting way is to use event hashtags. A successful example: A friend of mine put up soccer hashtags and geolocation when the World Cup was on. And in doing so, she gained some followers, because her post was shown to soccer fans. Most of them were annoyed, of course, but some of them found it useful.
Mutual PR
It’s the same as blogger advertising, but with one nuance: you’re both doing the advertising. You are about the blogger, and the blogger is about you. In this way you exchange subscribers. A great way for small blogs to gain a first audience. And for further development, this method is also well suited. Of course, you won’t make a million, but you can get up to 100 thousand.
The main thing is not to bore your audience with the eternal advertising of other bloggers. One nuance: bloggers for mutual PR should be approximately equal to you in the number of subscribers or coverage. Otherwise, the one who has many times less coverage will have to pay extra.
Mutual broadcasts
The principle is the same: do a mutual broadcast and you get a loyal target audience, because only loyal subscribers watch broadcasts, unless it’s a hot topic.
For effective promotion, we recommend using all methods (except givens, unless you’re a big blogger). This way, you will gain the highest quality audience, with which you will then monetize the blog. And remember, subscribers are an investment.
