Help Me! Which Of The 101 Ways Do I Use To Promote My Blog?

June 4, 2008 by Trish Jones
Filed under Website Promotion Strategies

blogs that sell Oh boy … this is the new dilemma of too many bloggers today. They want to make money with their blog but, there are 101 ways of doing so and everyone has the best suggestion that will get them a flood of traffic to their blog.

There is one problem though …

You can’t utilize all 101 ways and if you try to, you’re going to crash and burn and your blog won’t make you a dime.

Bear with me, I’m going to rant, but I’m also going to give you some sweet tips to get more traffic to your blog! Fair? Okay, read on with your eyes WIDE open!

If you’ve been on the Internet for any length of time, you’ll remember the “blogging and pinging,” the “tagging and pinging,” “trackbacks,” “pingpacks,” etc. Whilst these strategies are not obselete, you could literally add 101 new ways to market and promote your blog nowadays and by marketing and promoting, I mean getting noticed so you get lots of traffic to your blog.

But, here’s problem number 2 …

The Foundation of Blogging Seems To Have Been Lost In All The Noise Of Social Media, Video Blogging, Podcasting, More Sophisticated Blog Designs Etc, and New Bloggers In Particular Fail To Give Their Blog A Solid Foundation

Now, I am not saying that these methods should be ignored but if as a bloggers you are going to build authority with your site, if you want to be known as the expert in your field and if you want to attract new business and sell more products and services, you are going to have to get one thing right …

… You are going to have to learn “how” to blog!

I get people telling me that they want to know more about designing and building blogs and, whilst I appreciate that us mentors have been promoting the “sack your designer” thing, there is a fine line between knowing all that there is to know about blog building and making your blog sell for you!

It’s about going back to the principles outlined in Timothy Ferriss’ Four Hour Work Week’ … You have to strengthen your strengths and where at all possible, outsource the rest.

I make money building blogs and consulting with entrepreneurs, independent professionals and small business owners and for the most part, there are tell-tale signs in who is going to create a successful business with their blog and who will struggle to get any recognition.

The success stories come from those like Gavin Ingham who is willing to focus on marketing and those who struggle tend to focus too much on blog design … and not just any old blog design, the worst one …

DIY blog design!

In other words, they want to be able to do it all themselves no matter how in depth the coding and whether they even know anything about HTML or PHP.

Yes, blog design is important, but if you don’t blog, no matter how pretty your blog is, no matter how much time you spend sprucing it up, no one will even know your blog exists.

Basically, you gotta walk before you can run and many of the things that bloggers think they “need” right now, will do nothing to help them attract traffic even if they spent thousands per month on pay-per-click advertising.

Let’s face it, what are people going to see when they visit your blog …

“Welcome to my new blog?”

I personally didn’t even try to monetize my blog until I was blogging for months but that was out of personal choice but you can’t have five blog posts and expect to make a shed load of money with AdSense or from affiliate marketing and, you do need to give people good solid content to encourage them to keep coming back or to make a purchase from your site.

Anyway, less of my rant, here are my Top Ten Tips for getting more traffic to your blog “quick time.” And, I’m not even going to mention that you should not be spending hours designing when you should be promoting …

In terms of ease, here they are:

Tip #1: Ensure your ping services are set up correctly and up to date BEFORE you even write your first blog post and, ensure your very first blog post says more than “welcome.” Give the spiders enough “flies” to get their attention and your human visitors a reason to want to return even if your blog only has one post on it.

You will find the list of ping services in WordPress 2.5.1 by going to “settings” and then “writing,” otherwise, it will be “options,” writing if you are using an older version of WordPress. If pinging is a new term to you but you want to understand more about how it works, see this great article about pinging to get top search engine rankings.

Tip #2: Set up your permalinks so the search engine spiders recognise you. The default permalink set by WordPress (http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=123) will do very little for your search engine ranking if anything at all. The search engines don’t understand what “?p=123″ means and is useless for enabling anyone to find your keyword loaded blog posts.

I personally use the permalink structure http://www.mydomain.com/%postname%/ although I have seen very successful bloggers such as Pro Blogger using the date and name based structure. You can go check out my previous post on permalink structures for more details.

Tip #3: Write keyword specific blog posts. I know this might sound obvious but it’s amazing how many times I harp on about this and then I visit people’s sites and it has no structure, no keywords and then they ask why their blog isn’t being indexed by the search engines.

This is where I could go off on the deep end again about ignoring basic search engine optimization techniques in favor of social marketing, podcasting, video marketing etc. Whichever method you use, you’re going to have to learn some basic SEO and apply it to your blog posts … period! :-)

In particular, you want the keyword in the title of your post, preferably in the first sentence of your blog post and, throughout the blog post without making it look like spam - i.e. you don’t want to write your keyword every other sentence. You want the keywords to appear as natural as possible and, if you can anchor text a couple of your keywords, all the better.

If it would appear unnatural to your readers if you had the keywords in the title and first line of your blog post, use the All In One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress. Just type that into Google and you’ll find it.

Tip #4: Give People the option to be updated via RSS. RSS is growing in popularity and is a great way to spread the word about a new blog. If you’re using WordPress to promote your blog, your RSS feed is created automatically which will allow publishers to syndicate or distribute your content.

RSS makes your content easy to find by the search engines which means that it will be easier for them to index therefore easier for your blog pages to get ranked.

However, because RSS feeds are automatically created on most blog platforms, it can be ignored as a powerful means to get your message out there. So, ensure you have a link for people to sign up to your RSS feed on every page of your blog, pereferably with an icon to draw people’s eyes to it so they can sign up to receive automatic updates via RSS.

The best places to put your RSS link is in the header, sidebar or under the header … basically where it will be automatically displayed on every post and page.

Tip #5: Submit your blog to blog directories. Blog directories are orgainzed in categories and are much like web directories or ezine directories where you can go to find sites that relate to your particular interest. Signing up to them is usually quick (less than 5 minutes) and more importantly it’s free to list with most directories.

Listing your blog in blog directories will also help your blog get higher rankings with the search engines, because your blog link will be added to more websites which will get you more sites linking back to your blog.

For the top 55 RSS and feed directories, check out Robin Good’s site at http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

Tip #6: Comment on other people’s blogs. If you use something like Comment Kahuna, this makes it easier for you to find blogs that you can comment on as well as find blogs that don’t utilize the “no follow” tag which, will enable you to build some quality backlinks to your blog.

If you leave a comment, make it worthwhile. Always ask yourself “how” you want people to react when they read your comment.

This should be a lesson to those who rant on other people’s blogs without providing any substance to their rant and certainly without offering an alternative. Other readers will just think you’re full of sour grapes and won’t want to come near your blog even if you have the best product or service on the market.

Tip #7: Provide good quality product testimonials. If you’ve recently purchased a product and you have a genuine testimonial to give, send it to the product owner because you never know where your testimonial might end up.

I admit, this wasn’t a deliberate strategy to get incoming links to my site, but I know that some of my comments have ended up on good authority sites and, one occasion one of my readers told me that he had found the link to my site from a testimonail that I had written about a new membership site software that was being promoted. I didn’t even know the testimonial was on the site.

If you do give testimonials, ensure they say more than “great product.” Tell the owner of the product how it has saved you time, money, effort or how and why this is the solution you’d been waiting for.

It does go without saying that your testimonials should be genuine and not fabricated. You could get people emailing you for an update on how you’re getting on with the product and your integrity is in knowing that you can provide honest feedback.

Tip #8: Add an opt-in box to your blog. This is very similar to tip number 4 but you want to be able to capture names and addresses of your visitors so that you can keep them updated with great information, new products etc.

My personal recommendation is Aweber although I know some Internet Marketers are combining thier RSS subscriptions with their database subscriptions via Feedblitz which is Feedburner’s email newsletter management system.

Tip #9: Subscribe to Social Bookmarking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Furl etc.

Joining and participating in (the operative word being participate) in social networking is certainly a way of networking as well as getting some free traffic and backlinks to your blog. One word of caution with social networking sites is that it can become a full time job making them work for you if you don’t focus.

My suggestion is that you sign up to one or two, get some results and then sign up to another two until you’re familiar with them. You have to decide whether you will go wide or deep and it’s my view that spreading yourself too thinly across all the social networking platforms won’t get you nearly as much benefit as really working a few.

Tip #10: Add podcasts and videos. Like social networking, podcasts and video blogging will get you free traffic and some bonus backlinks. If you want a few tips on video blogging see my video blogging quick tips post.

If you feel this is a techie’s strategy for promoting your blog, let me clear that myth up …

“It has never been easier to add audio and video to your blogs.”

The quickest and easiest way to get started is to open an account with Audio Acrobat. You can record both video and audio there and then add the recordings along with the players to your blog. They also provide free training on a regular basis so you don’t have to feel as though you’re tackling this method of blog promotion in isolation.

In conclusion … I hope you’ve gained some insight from this post about how to promote your blog and just by being diligent in implementing the first five strategies will keep traffic coming to your blog on a consistent basis.

To Your Business Blogging Success!