We create blogs to inform, educate, humor, promote, share thoughts as well as other articles with the hopes that they will be shared and conversations started with comments. In determining your target, how often you will blog and the blog topics it is also important to think about how you will promote the blog. Writing great and relevant content is only half the battle. Getting people to find the blog and share it is the other half. The search engines do search and index blogs which helps with organic search engine optimization however promoting the blog to gain awareness and readership helps to further your efforts.
How do you promote your blog? Promoting your blog is essentially advertising reach your target. The free advertising on the web to reach your target where they hang out. Let them find you so that you do not have to find them.
9 Ways to Promote Your Blog
1. Email Marketing. Introduce your blog to friends, family, clients, customers, acquaintanceswith an email that gives insight into what the blog is about.
2. Blog Communities. MyBlogLog, Blog Catalog, Networked Blogs to name a few. Create your profile and start building your community while promoting your blog.
3. Commenting on Blogs. Commenting to provide value and build relationships. Please no spamming by attempting to direct readers to your site.
4. Guest Blogging. This can be a bit of a challenge when you are just starting out however the better the content, the more readers, the more readers, the more attention and the more attention will bring in more opportunities to guest blog.
5. Networking Sites. Facebook, LinkedIn. Fan other pages, join groups on LinkedIn and post. Be sure to comment on the comments as well as other blog posts. Provide value by also building relationships. Reach out to people who comment by sending a private email thanking them for their support.
6. Microblogging Sites. Twitter, FriendFeed. Posting your new blog post for followers to read and share. Also find articles to share with your followers to maintain a balance to avoid it being all about you.
7. Sharing Sites. Digg, Reddit, Delicious, StumbleUpon. Create accounts and start building relationships within these communities. Find articles that you like and give the author a digg, a stumble. From time to time it is not deadly to promote an article or two that you have written. Just don’t overdo it.
8. Additional Sites. Technorati, Squidoo. Submit and ping your most recent posts and create your lens. Technorati ranks your blog as well as gives it authority. Authority takes a while but with great content and your blog just might get picked up but other bloggers.
9. Article Submission. Ezine, GoArticles, ArticleDashboard. Submitting to these sites can help bring traffic to your blog by creating a great signature/author bio and also help with links.
Blog promotion is a part of the overall advertising strategy that needs to be well researched and planned out. You are reaching out to your target and not the masses to entice them to come over and read the blog to solve a problem they may have, to be their source of information so they will share the information. Blogs are one of the best ways of improving search engine rank by creating new content, receiving links and ultimately writing great content that people want to read and share.
Any additional techniques worked for you? What has worked best for you? Share your blog promotion techniques and get the conversation started.
photo credit: Mike Licht