Whether you’re an entrepreneur with a growing business or a speaker or blogger with your own personal brand, driving traffic to your blog is an important goal.

But what would happen if you were to suddenly and terribly lose all your current blog posts? What if your blog suddenly didn’t work anymore?

Are you feeling the onset of a panic attack just from thinking about that possibility? If all your traffic, all your leads, and all your content is wrapped up in the blog posts on your website, it’s time to make a change.

Prepare for a light bulb moment.

Your Brand > Your Blog

If you’re just focused on promoting your blog posts, your vision is too small. Your blog is only a tool to promote your brand, even if you’re a blogger by occupation. You, the business, the blogger, the person, are the main attraction. When you realize that, your blog posts stop being the end all, be all. Once you start focusing more on your brand than your blog, you could actually go a whole month without posting one single new blog post and still get traffic to your site.

A steady flow of traffic should not solely depend on you promoting your blog posts on your social media pages. Yes, social is a huge part of content promotion and a huge part of your brand too. But think about it. On your social media pages, the majority of the time, you’re only reaching the people in your own network. People who already know you and have already followed you.

So how do you reach new people?

You need to go outside of simply posting on your own page. You needed to join new communities.

If you can grab hold of the idea that what you’re ultimately promoting is your brand and that you don’t have to depend on your blog alone to do that, you’ll start seeing all kinds of new ways to do it.

The Nitty-Gritty of Getting More Traffic

Earlier I said, “Once you start focusing more on your brand than your blog, you could actually go a whole month without posting one single new blog post and still get traffic to your site.”

But how?

By promoting your brand, even if it’s not with blog posts. There are many ways to get exposure, earn new followers, and send more traffic to your blog that don’t involve your blog at all!

Say what? Yes, you can get more blog traffic without promoting your blog posts.

Now I’m not saying to stop promoting your blog all together. Please don’t cancel every blog-related update in your Buffer queue. I’m saying to expand beyond that.

10 ways (besides your blog!) to promote your brand :

1. Guest write for an online magazine
2. Answer lots of Quora questions (include your URL in your bio – like I did )
3. Do Facebook/Instagram Lives
4. Guest speak in podcasts (you can pitch yourself to be a podcast guest!)
5. Micro-blogging on Instagram (here’s a micro-blogging example)
6. Sharing lessons you’ve learned and personal challenges you’ve overcome on LinkedIn (a LinkedIn example)
7. Share exclusive or repurposed content in emails to subscribers
8. Get interviewed/profiled by a publication (you can pitch yourself for this too!)
9. Create Pinterest pins specifically for your lead magnet ( a Pinterest example)
10. Connect with influencers and run mutually beneficial cross-promotions

If you did all this, combined with your regular blogging and social media blog promotion (at a slower pace), can you imagine how much traffic you would get? A lot.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Trying to do all ten of these things this month will drive you crazy. . . or kill you. The good news is that you don’t need to all ten of these things to start seeing results. You just need to do a few.

Kicking Out Your Brand’s Crutches

As you do these few things consistently, you’ll develop a pattern and a system that works with your schedule and needs.

The more consistently you do those few things, the more your brand will pick up steam and the more regular your web traffic will become. Your traffic won’t depend entirely on the number of your social media blog promotions anymore.

Know what else you won’t depend on as much? Your blog itself. These 10 ideas build up your brand without using your blog at all. They allow you to get new social followers, email subscribers, and maybe even customers all on their own. And that’s why you could go without blogging for a bit and still see steady web traffic.

If you were to suddenly and terribly lose all your current blog posts, your brand wouldn’t suffer. Because you have other ways to connect with your audience and other places you can send them to see your content.

These promotion techniques allow you to position yourself in a whole new way. You’ll have new ways to establish your credibility, share your knowledge, and give the answers your audience is looking for.

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Thanks for reading! By the way – if you enjoyed this post, you may also like Pinterest for Personal Branding.