To Promote, Or Not To Promote Your Blog: That Is The Question
Posted by
eli
on 3/19/10• Categorized as Consulting
There is only one difference between blogs that die and blogs that live, only one difference between blogs that have many readers and those which have only a few.
image source: onlinebusinessbuzz.com/tag/forums
The only difference? Blog promotion.
What is blog promotion? It is the process for the purpose of creating awareness in your target readers about your blog and gain maximum exposure for it.
Why blog promotion? The reason is to generate visitors or traffic to your blog. Another reason is to brand your blog, making it stands out from the countless other blogs in the blogosphere.
Having already understand the value of blog promotion, what are the venue by which promotion can be done? These are as follows:
1. Advertising
This includes joining in such popular ad networks and buying adverts therein, such as CMF Ads, Adgitize, Entrecard and Project Wonderful, to mention some of the well-known ad networks for bloggers.
Of course, putting adverts on these networks costs money. There is no such thing as something for nothing. You have to pay to make your blog known to the blogosphere.
2. Search engines
This concerns the submission of your blog to search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN Bing.
As I have already discussed in my previous posts, search engines especially the Big Three mentioned above, are the only constant and steady source of traffic to your blog and it is free.
The key to search engines promotion to generate traffic to your blog is to get high search engines ranking, specifically getting on page one on search engine results page (SERP).
3. Article Directories
This involves submitting your original and high quality content articles to articles directories such as Ezines Articles.com, Bukisa, and Associated Content.
Once your articles are published you will get free exposure. In addition, your content get indexed by search engines, resulting to your article and blog appearing in search engine results page every time people search on topics related to your article based on keywords.
4. Forums and Commenting on other Blogs
This involves joining the discussion forums related to blogging and/or your blog niche and posting comments therein, with your blog URL.
Commenting on other blogs’ posts also uses the same method, posting your responsive (not spam) comments that enhance the posts on some related blogs and leaving your signature and URL.
There are other forms of blog promotion, such as link exchange, viral marketing, e-mail marketing, joining social networking sites, etc.
However I have found out, based on personal experience, that the four methods I’ve outlined above are effective in promoting your blog and generating traffic as a result.
Eli, I believe to promote, promote. promote and when you think you’re done, promote some more. To me you can’t promote enough. I do however feel there are so many great and effective ways to promote that cost nothing but your time and effort.
I rarely spend any money on promotion and in the past several months proved that it doesn’t cost one red cent to get your blog/site noticed and draw good traffic. To me one of the strongest and most effective ways to promote is doing what I am doing right now, and that is commenting.
Not only is commenting a strong way to get your blog “out there”. but it also helps with meeting other owners and networking. You can join all the social network sites in the world, but if you don’t work them and use them consistently, then they won’t do a thing for you, unless you happen to get lucky and one of your posts go viral. But the chances of that are very slim.
Get to know you neighbors and make sure to be constant in posting on other peoples blogs.
Well, Eli, some good advice as usual. I have never tried the Article Directories route. I just don’t know how that would work with the (hopefully) humorous blog that I write. Advertising and search engines are absolutely crucial.
I don’t see any reason not to promote, especially the free options like search engines, article directories, and Forums and Commenting on other Blogs. Commenting on other blogs are nice because it gives me a chance to see what others have to say. Sometimes it is interesting, other times it not so interesting.
It’s never a question that I should ask myself. There’s no point in creating a blog without people reading my posts.
Of all the things you’ve listed here, it’s only article directories that I haven’t tried yet. You have discussed many times about this but I am so lazy to give my time. I am a bit familiar with Ezine Articles so I am going to check it out and sign myself up.
Thank you again for all your recommendations Atty. Eli! Keep it up!
This is a good list of promotion options and I agree with the previous comments that it doesn’t have to cost so much money to promote. We just need to focus on putting the word out.
I somehow done all of this methods but not often.
I still believe the best way to promote your blog is to go to other blogs and leave a decent comment. My traffic has really increased, the more blogs I am able to get to everyday. And in leaving comments, you make friends and so then their friends look at your blog. But you have to work hard to get this done. I tried the article thing and got nothing. But in my niche, there must be thousands of articles so that makes it hard to have some oringinal content. But that was good information.
Hmmm, that Glenn at MOB and Marg have a good point. I really need to get out to more blogs and comment. Mr. Glenn (and yourself) are great commentators.
Article submission is a great way to get more traffic and also get higher rankings. I use Article Submitter Buzz it’s a free software automatic submitter to the top 7 article submissions sites. It’s so easy and makes submitting to them very easy and once you get into the habit of doing it after you write a post then it is a no brainer. As far as Dave’s articles I would submit them, I think they would go over well in various funny fiction categories.
Article Submissions is quite tiring sometimes because of the effort that you have to put in it.-~`
i do a lot of article submissions in a week or two and i hire some writers from india and other countries to do my stuf ,’*