This article is for those few brave souls, who have just initiated their journey into blogging, and need that amazing high one gets when your blog is finally getting read by a substantial number of readers.
Please track your blog readers using services like Google Analytics, it just takes 10 minutes, and it will provide you with a vault of valuable information on your reader’s preferences, where your readers come from, and how they interact with your blog.
For those of you thinking about right now “Hey, I like writing for the love of it, and I don’t need any readers for approval”, I would like to say kudos to you, and do continue the good work.
But if you are serious about sharing your hard work (its blood sweat and tears when you have to do it 5 times a week) with the millions of users searching blogs daily, then let’s continue our journey down the rabbit hole.
A quick look at the statistics on Blogging – comScore MediaMetrix (August 2008)
” Total internet audience 188.9 million
” Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in the US alone
” Facebook: 41.0 million
” MySpace 75.1 million
Well that the good news!
But the bad news is that with the thousands of new blogs churning out each day, what hope is there for a reader interested in your topic to reach you. You many have written brilliant masterpieces, but how do you let others know that (remember most poets and artists die poor and unrecognized because they don’t reach out to share themselves with others).
In this article, we will not get into details about the quality of your content, and its assumed you have written good clean copy. Good copy being informative, entertaining and engaging (Don’t forget to get your keywords in the body content as well the labels/tags).
There are various ways to promote your blog and reach out to the millions out there. The strategies below will not only assist you in getting more traffic to your blog, but also get you higher rankings for your blog, as well as corporate site (if you have one).
Deep-Linking
Start a corporate blog for your employees, customer, vendors, associates and investors. The benefits of doing so are many, as seen in the trend where many corporate blogs are doing very well in building brand loyalty, customer loyalty and driving business through existing customers.
Also start a topic specific blog of your expertise. To give you an example of this, a SEO Expert Services Company, can start a blog on SEO tips, advise and attract marketing professionals, seo students, Internet marketing professionals, readers and businessman.
Now comes the easy part; Create relevant deep links between your corporate website pages, corporate blog posts and topic blog posts. Your website, corporate blog and topic blog are treated as separate sites as far as search engines go, so don’t hesitate to use you’re your content for link building purposes.
Each blog post is a potential to build another link to your corporate website. But don’t overdo it. Search engines dont penalize a site for too many links (unless the site is just a whole bunch of links for the pure purposes of link farming, and trying to trick the search engines to give irrelevant results), but it could a big turn off for your readers who just want to enjoy the story and don’t care much about your hair brained strategies to dominate the internet.
Cross-Linking
It’s easy to create links when you are the master of your website and blogs, but how do we get other websites/ blogs to give the same quality links back to your blog.
As in the real world if you have to build a new contact, you would approach that person, introduce yourself, inform that person of the value you offer, and maintain a good relation with that person.
In the blog world building links is no different.
1. Approach websites that has content/target audience similar to your blogs and offer some additional value to their readers, or even better write a good intelligent review about some service/products that website is offering. Send a nice email highlighting the same with a link back to your blog post. Online marketers like collecting testimonials so there is great probability that they will link back to your blog.
2. Approach other bloggers who command high loyalty. Most of the time if you have a professional approach, a good pitch and a value proposition, most bloggers will not mind writing a small review and linking to your blog.
After all these bloggers need to create content daily, so offer them a helping hand. Many bloggers advocate semi-advertising in their posts, and bloggers define their tastes, preferences, likes and dislikes about brands all the time. So why not get onto the bandwagon.
Another way is to leave intelligent comment on the bloggers post with something nice to say about the blogger, and then give a small link to your blog to explain in detail. Most times the blogger will leave a good comment and not delete it. I don’t personally use this method, but as they say, in this matter, flattery may get you what you want.
3. Some SEO experts and bloggers have good relations with other fellow bloggers. A good seo expert should be able to get some of these bloggers to write a good review and link to your blog/ website. It will drive traffic to your website and add to your link building campaign.
Create a RSS Feed
Most blog software’s like Blogger allow users to create an automatic RSS feed. If you notice a RSS feed is a very simple page, no major formatting, no pictures and videos.
RSS also knows as “Real Simple Syndication” is a mechanism used to distribute content without depending on the browser or email client. Users subscribe to RSS feeds to get latest updates (headlines with a small brief) about their favorite websites/ blogs across the internet in one place.
In your case, your blog posts form part of content that can be syndicated across news/content feeds. Once your RSS feed is published, you can submit the feed to many of the feed aggregators and have your content/ blog post distributed across their network of users. You can start by using this link http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm to submit your blog to many feeds.
Submit to Article Sites
Article sites are a great way for distributing your content to many sites without the fear of landing into soup for duplicate content. In addition you are building credibility as an expert in your domain, quality links, and driving traffic to your blog.
By submitting your blog posts to article submission sites having high page rank, you are basically syndicating the same content across various channels, getting links, and traffic. Now that’s a good deal!
A note of warning, don’t just submit your article to 1000 sites, rather be wise and work with a few key article sites. In this way it’s easy to build a good relationship with those sites and their audiences, as they feel that you have not plastered your article across every living website in the world.
Also its easy to keep the momentum up, otherwise submitting each blog post to 1000 sites would be rather time consuming.
Go Social with your Blog
Social bookmarking is the next wave to hit the new media landscape. Millions of users surfing the internet now have a voice and can rate/bookmark and suggest websites, blogs and share their likes and dislikes with the billions of surfers.
Wikipedia describes social bookmarking as a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata.
In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.
Register your blog with services like digg, reddit, del.icio.us and stumbleupon. Give your readers an opportunity to suggest/ bookmark/tag your blog post across the social media landscape and watch the traffic come in.
Make a Noise
Hey you have worked hard to get your blog started. Now is the time to announce it to the world, atleast the online world. Submit your blog to blogger search engines like Technorati, and other blogging directories on the net. As you submit your blog to the various directories out there, your blog is reaching out to newer audiences.
You can also submit your blog to PR sites which allow companies to submit press releases and announcements. It may not do much for your rankings, but many journalists are known to scan press release sites for a good story. Could it be you?
You can also announce your blog by putting it on your visiting card, in your email footer, on your corporate website, Facebook (profile, posts on wall, comments etc), Youtube profile, Linkedin profile, and finally the good ol’ word of mouth.
These should keep you busy for the next few months, and by then you will be raring to get into more advanced techniques of marketing and promoting your Blog. But that my friend’s is another time, another story!
Zen of SEO Blog: http://www.seo-optimization-experts.com/seoblog.html
