At WordPress.com we’re always looking for ways to make building and running your web site simpler and more impactful (and more fun!).
One of the biggest challenges for any site owner is finding your readers, fans, customers, or subscribers. Until now, promoting your WordPress.com web site required multiple tools, online accounts, professional design and marketing skills, and – yes – lots of money.
That’s why we’re excited to announce Blaze, a new tool allowing anyone with a WordPress blog to advertise on WordPress.com and Tumblr in just a few clicks. How? By turning your site content into clean, compelling ads that run across our millions-strong network of blogs.
How Blaze works
If your website is hosted on WordPress.com, then head to wordpress.com/advertising and select your website — you’ll see a list of recent posts and pages you can promote. If your WordPress site isn’t hosted on WordPress.com, you can take advantage of Blaze through the Jetpack plugin.
Alternatively, when viewing the post or page list in your WordPress.com dashboard, click the ellipses (three dots) next to any individual post/page to bring up a new menu, then click “Promote with Blaze.”
Now you’ll be in the Blaze Campaign Wizard.
Step 1: Design your ad. The wizard automatically formats your content into a beautiful ad, but you can adjust the image and text however you like.
Step 2: Select your audience. Want to target the whole world? Only people in certain areas? Folks who are reading content about a specific category, like movies or sports? As you adjust these settings, you’ll see our estimate of how many people you’ll reach.
Step 3: Select your dates and set your budget. Run your ad for 6 months or for just a few days — it’s up to you.
Once your ad is running, you can check how it’s doing in the “Campaigns” tab of the advertising page.
Our campaigns are billed weekly based on how many times your ad is shown, so you’ll only ever pay for what you signed up for. As always, you can find even more details about this tool on our support page.
This feature is currently only available to users with “English” set as their primary language, but we’re working hard on bringing it to other languages as well.
Let us know what you think about Blaze!
We’re excited to launch this powerful new feature, and we’re eager to get feedback. If you have any questions about it, challenges while using it, or ideas to make it better, please share them with our team. We’ll make sure a real person reads through all of the feedback, and we’ll be working tirelessly to make sure that this tool is something valuable for you.
