Building a blog is one thing, promoting it to reach people is another, and its ease is often wildly overestimated. Perhaps, back in the days when Metas reach was more than sub 1% and Twitter wasn’t so rammed with fake accounts it was as simple as just posting a link to your latest article and watching the traffic (and ad money) roll in. Nowadays it’s far from easy, as previously mentioned, for every 1,000 likes you have on Meta a post only goes to 1% of them (or quite often less) If you try and  be smart and post it on your personal profile this little different and still only reaches a tiny percentage of your friends and followers and the only way around this is to pay Meta an exorbitant amount of money to reach these people and probably not get any clicks! So, what options do you have?

1. Display advertising. If you’re not aware of what this is, it’s the small ads you see on website pages all over the internet. It’s cheap and effective. This is something we use to great effect here on our free photo hosting site ClickAsnap. We use Google Adwords and pay a very small amount to bring in traffic from all over the world. In fact 1 click costs us 85% less than 1 ‘like’ does on our Meta page!!
2. Post your links into ClickASnaps feed. Our site is a free to use photo hosting site, it has quite a few major differences though, 1 is that we pay users when their content is viewed, the other is that it has a ‘feed’ a bit like Meta does. This is where you can see all of the content posted by the people you are following, and in turn, they can see the content you post. Now this feed is not just for photos, you can post statuses, and as a bonus post links to your website! The extra added bonus is that the feed is not restricted like Meta, if you have 400 followers, all 400 (assuming they are online) will see that link, that is the equivalent of having over 40,000 Meta likes! Plus all your followers are likely to be photograpahers or interested in photography so are much more likely to click through to look at your work! And as an added bonus it’s all free!
3. Spam post on Twitter. A tweet is forecast to have a life time of about 18 minutes. If no one has clicked on it in those 18 minutes, it’s unlikey anyone will. So, use a plugin like Tweetwheel or Hootsuite to post a tweet every single hour of every single day. Use Bit’ly to track link clicks and monitor how your traffic flow is moving

These 3 methods between them will garner far more traffic than any Meta page will for a fraction of the cost (if in fact, any cost at all) Why not try them out and let us know how you do in the comments below?