5 ways to promote your blog further

“How do you really promote your blog?” This question was asked by a blogger with her own distinctive style who felt that feeding her posts into Twitter and such like wasn’t enough.

I commended her in both having a distinctive writing style and automatically publishing her posts in social networking sites. That’s half the battle won, but now she wanted to go forward to the next stage.

So a quick bit of brainstorming came up with these five tactics:

1. Social bookmarking sites

Submitting your blog posts to ordinary social networking sites may not be enough. The trouble is, this isn’t necessarily a place where you’ll find the most bloggers who would be interested in your posts. Sure, you’ll capture a few interested parties, and maybe gain some new blogging followers, but Twitter is too fast moving and Facebook doesn’t contain many blogging types to enable you to promote your blog satisfactorily.

Whereas social bookmarking sites are geared up for blog posts and articles. These are the blogging centres on the net. Here you’ll be able to find bloggers within the same subject area, who you can make friends with, read their blogs and share, recommend and review each others content. The idea is to gain popularity for your blog, which can be accomplished through writing excellent stuff and participating altruistically, and the more interest and reciprocation for your blog you gain, the higher it will rise in the ranks and receive more traffic.

2. Adequate SEO

Keywords are the mainstay of blogging search engine optimisation. It is vital to research into what is fashionable, in trend and who’s looking for what. But don’t go overboard and saturate your posts with keywords, or you will be penalised by both the search engines and your readers. Focus on finding ‘long tail’ keywords for your blog which will match up with the search requirements of your visitors (or customers), so you don’t have to compete so heavily for keyword attraction.

3. Guest blogging

Another way of gaining attention to your blog is by spreading your posts around the net. Guest blogging gets your posts in front of a different audience, which will in turn (provided they like what you write and you add a suitable call to action) bring traffic back to your blog. You could adapt your posts into articles and submit them to article websites like ArticleEzine for further exposure, in fact, look for any opportunity to place your posts outside your blog (but remember, it’s wise to create brand new material for each new venue, to avoid duplication penalisation and loss of credibility).

4. Leaving lots of comments

Altruism goes a long way in the blogging world. Responding to other blogger’s posts shows that you really care about what they say, and you’re not just in it for yourself. Leaving feedback is helpful and friendly, as long as its constructive and not purely an acknowledgement (which could be construed as spam), and of course it provides more links back to your blog. It will encourage reciprocal visits and hopefully comments for you, and lots of extra content activity will soon draw attention from the search engine spiders.

5. Writing lots of drafts

I know a prolific blogger who says she has a multitude of drafts sitting in her blog. This is certainly necessary if you want to keep up the flow of content for your readers (and search engines). There are many ideas flying around about how often you should post, but if you want to avoid dry spells have some brewing in your draft section. This isn’t difficult to do, just get into the mode of dropping down some ideas into draft, let them ruminate for a while while your brain subconsciously works on them, and then go back to finish them off. This process may even spark some more drafts along the way, stimulated by exposure to different environments you come across during your journeys around the net.

So which ones of these are you doing to promote your blog, and can you think of any I’ve missed?

Bio
Latest Posts

Alice Elliott

Alice Elliott writes the award winning Fairy Blog Mother blog for beginner and post-beginner bloggers to “explain things really simply” about blogging and WordPress. She provides simple, easy to understand, highly visual courses and tutorials using ordinary, everyday words. Visit her new Beginner Bloggers blog to find her latest learning resources.