How to promote your blog

When you decided to have a blog and or you already started one, the time is now to promote it. Though I am very new to blogging, yet I got some handful of information to share with you and trying for myself. First of all, what you need to decide if you are at all interested in promoting it. If your blog only caters to a certain number or type of people then you shall not devour effort to promote it. Promoting not always means spreading your blog name and content wide across so that it reaches every nook and corner. Promoting can be specific target oriented or general. If your target audience is a group of people like if you have a blog on news for your local area, the way you will promote it should be altogether different.

A few ways to promote your blog.

• If your blog is audience oriented or meant for local news, events etc you can try these methods. I am not sure how effective these are but definitely the ideas are unique and make sense.
  • Aaron Brazell in one of his posts stated how effective is his Guerrilla Marketing Techniques. Guerrilla Marketing is promoting your blog in some unique, powerful and aggressive way. Like Darren Rowse in one of his articles gave an example of such marketing.
    

    I met a blogger recently who had a blog with a very local focus. His Guerrilla Marketing Tactic was to do a deal with three internet cafes in his area to make his blog the home page on all of the computers. In return for this he gave them some free advertising on his blog. The same blogger made a similar deal with the local library who also made his blog the home page of their public internet computers. This worked particularly well for him as his blog was on his local area

  • You can use local newspaper to promote your blog. I am doubtful if it will succeed, but there’s noting to lose in trying.
  • Distributing leaflet, wallpapers or encouraging local shop owners to display your blog poster can add traffic to your blog. Because some people just out of curiosity will definitely check your blog atleast for once. And if they like it, they will be committed readers.
• If your audience is global or general then your promotion should be online and offline promotion will not be a big success. Here are some golden rules.
  1. Content is king. So you must first concentrate on your blog content. If content is not good then you can draw visitors to your blog but cannot retain it. They will come and will leave and will think twice before re-visiting.
  2. Use a good blog software. There are certain features which a blog must have. Auto pinging, trackback URL, good WYSIWYG editor, should include in the blog features list. In my opinion wordpress, typepad are very good software which you can use.
  3. Search engine friendly url: Your URL at any point of time shall not look like domainname.com?blogtitle=xxxx, instead it should be like domainname.com/xxxx.html or domainname.com/year/month/date/xxxx.
  4. Submitting your website to various search engines will be your next step to index it properly. There are free tools in the market which you can use.
  5. Pinging various blog. If you are using any popular blog software, then these software automatically pings your RSS/Atom to various blog listing websites. If not then you can try Ping-o-Matic.
  6. Joining any blog community or creating one is very useful. Because in this community you will get readers who are really interested in reading blogs and all of them are regular bloggers. You can read this article for further insight.
  7. Promoting in myspace, xanga, orkut can add some traffic to your website but it cannot be very high, I bet.
  8. Putting your website address in your email signature is a good idea as this will keep promoting your website to the section of people with whom you communicate on regular basis.

Once you have completed promoting, the next thing you should think upon is how you should earn money(obviously if you are a professional blogger or looking forward to a blogging career). I will come up with another article on this topic.