So you’ve created a masterpiece, optimized every last word and now your ready to publish that top quality piece of web content. You upload it to your website or blog and wait for the traffic to come pouring in, but it doesn’t. This is the mistake that many webmasters and bloggers make when publishing their content to the web. You could have the best content on earth, but it would be useless unless people are reading it. This is where promoting your content is essential for your work to be successful and not wasted.

Here are 8 ways in which you can promote your web content online: -

1. Writing a Tweet – Twitter is immensely powerful when used to promote content online. It has grown exponentially over the last year or so and now your hard pushed to find an established business not on it. A short sentence describing your content with a shortened link (Bit.ly or similar) is all you need to do, possibly repeating this several times over a few days
2. Posting on Facebook – Facebook is the most popular social networking platform on the web, creating and posting a link on your page will help let people know about your content.
3. Ping Your Blog – Pinging your blog using free services lets RSS readers and search engines know that you have updated your blog and invites the search engine crawlers to return to index your new content.
4. Digg it! – Digg.com is a social bookmarking system where you share links with the Digg community. If people like the link you shared they can Dig it and show you that they like it. Getting enough Digs sometimes gets you onto Digg’s homepage, which gives a PR8 back-link, tasty eh.
5. Commenting on Similar Blog Posts – Adding a follow on comment on a similar or related blog post giving your take or making a valuable addition to their post is generally welcomed. People often skim though the comments and if they come across a genuine, useful comment, they often follow the link
6. Send out an email to your subscribers – Often the CTR of email shots are small, but if you have a large enough email list, it can provide some good traffic and can often spread a link to your content on other blogs
7. Forum & Email signatures – If you find yourself emailing all day every day, adding a simple email signature will quickly spread your link to your recipients. The same works with forum posts. If you post regularly on forums, having a link to your content is another way of spreading the word.
8. Submit a link to StumbleUpon – StumbleUpon has over 5 Million registered users and can provide some good traffic over a reasonable period of time. If your content is favourited by users, it can give a real traffic boost.

There are hundreds of other ways you can promote your content online, gaining valuable backlinks and brand recognition. I recommend you make yourself a checklist of places to go to promote each and every blog post you make in order for them to have maximum effect.

If you found this blog post interesting or useful, please follow me on twitter: @webdevluke

Feel free to add any additional methods to promote your content in the comments.