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Blog Promotion

Blog Promotion - How to Promote your Blog for More Traffic - to drive traffic towards your blog, you must do some blog promotion. I am explaining here some of the prominent ways of blog promotion to drive visitor towards your blog / website.

You've got your blog set up and you've started posting useful information that your niche market would benefit from and enjoy. Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one comments or visits your blog. Now what ?

So, in order to drive traffic towards your blog, you must do some blog promotion. Firstly you should keep patience as blog promotion take some time to build a readership. I am explaining here some of the prominent ways of blog promotion to drive visitor towards your blog / website. These tips should give you a good start to building your blog traffic.

Keep posting good information consistently : Nothing creates long-term traffic more than value. Learn enough to become the expert in your field. Share your expertise generously so people recognize it and depend on you. Be timeless. Write posts that will be readable in a year. So keep your blog updated with new content at regular interval.

Read & Comment on Related Blogs : Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche. Write legitimate, intelligent & useful comments with a link to your blog. It is probably the most effective strategy early on in the process your blog promotion.

Optimize your blog for keywords : While some Bloggers don’t think much of search engine optimization, I think it is well worth knowing some basic SEO principles and keeping them in the back of your mind as you blog. In order to get a good search engine ranking, your blog must be focused on your target keywords. Use your primary keywords in the title of your post. Use your secondary keywords in the body of your post. Use your keywords in the anchor text of links in the body of your posts. SEO will help your blog to rise in SERP ranking, hence more visitors to your blog from various search engine. Don’t become obsessed by SEO, but don’t ignore it either.

Submit your blog to search engines : Like website submission, you must submit your blog to various search engines, like Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. This is a way to tell search engine about the existence of your blog and getting it indexed.

Submit your blog to blog directories : Submission of link to various online directories increases the number of inbound links to your blog, which is nowadays most important offsite factor of web/blog promotion. Placing your site link on the other website will increase traffic to you directly and indirectly The direct boost is given because surfers who see your links may click through and visit your site. The indirect traffic boost given by link popularity is that your site will get a higher search engine ranking in search engines which measure link popularity as an index of a website’s value.

Submit articles to e-zines : One of the best methods for promoting your blog is to write articles and submit them to article directories. Write articles to post around the web in article directories. Include a link to your blog in the author info box. This is very effective way of creating back links. Good articles are always in demand. People will download your articles with back link and put it on their website. This is win-win situation for both parties. Webmaster gets quality content for his website and increases your website's back link count.

Participate in forums : Forums with tons of pages, huge lists of members, and a responsive community are an easy way to not only connect with other individuals, but an opportunity to tastefully demonstrate your expertise and a link back to your blog. Participate in other web forums - Blogging is not the only vibrant online activity at the moment. I visit a number of other discussion forums and e-zines that explore similar ideas/hobbies/interests to me and my blogs. I’ve found an increasing amount of traffic to my blog is coming as a result of my contributions to these forums as many of them allow you to add your link as a signature to your posts. Don’t spam these forums - but be a genuine contributor that adds useful comments and you’ll find people are drawn to your other projects.

Put a link to your blog on every page of your website : If you have a website then you must put a link of your blog at prominent place. This will expose your blog to your website visitors.

Back link your Newsletter to your blog : If you publish a newsletter, make sure you have a link to your 

blog in every issue.

Promote your RSS Feed : Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to. Most blog platforms come with a RSS feeds built in but there are ways of increasing your subscriber list. The most obvious of these is to put it in the sight of your readers by putting your RSS button in a more prominent position. There are a variety of different buttons available that you can make available to readers to help them to subscribe to your blog via their news aggregators with one click that might also be worth investigating. Also, if your topic is not one which many readers seem to use RSS in, you might need to do some education on the topic of RSS feeds. Write a post on how to follow your blog via RSS and you might find more do.

Drive traffic from Social Networks : Social networks get a lot of traffic due to their nature. Most social networks are free and take seconds to register and submit your first entry. You will be surprised when you see the amount of other websites that use feeds from various social networks. Make profile with a link of your blog and invite other members of the social networks. Some of them will find their way to your blog through the link. Submit your story to Digg and reddit and, regardless of whether it makes the front page or not, you get 50-100 free hits. The easiest way to generate quick exposure.

Put out Press Releases : Write a press release about something newsworthy and tie it in with your blog topic.

Join a blog carnival: Where every blogger joins one blogs about a topic, then each blog gets promoted.

Use Trackback : Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts. Now, what is TrackBack? Essentially what this does is send a message from one server to another server letting it know you have posted a reference to their post. The beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on their site.

Technorati - Your Best Friend : Technorati is one of the best traffic providers for Bloggers. It makes your blog much easier to find when people search by Technorati tags. Technorati is also a large blog ranking engine. Based on the number of links to your blog from various websites, your blog is given a rank. The higher your rank the easier your blog is to find when people search for things. A higher rank gives your blog greater credibility in Technorati. If you don’t already have a Technorati account, get one.

Ping The Blog Services : There are a number of services designed specifically for tracking and connecting blogs. By sending a small ping to each service you let them know you've updated your blog so they can come check you out. Use Ping-o-maticto ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish.

Submit to Google sitemaps : Really part of “get your house in order”, but when you do, Google will be able to find you so much easier; translation — more Google juice, more traffic, higher rankings faster.

Join virtual groups : Through Yahoo Groups, Usenet, and more; then bring the conversation off the group with emails and instant messages. Be friendly, be helpful, and it will pay dividends.

Leverage the power of your email Signature : One of the quickest and effective ways to start driving traffic to your website at no extra cost is to add your ad or blog address to your email signature. This way, every time you send an email, you'll be advertising your website.

Answer your emails : If some visitor contact you through your blog, be sure to answer him. This will earn good points for your blog and some of them may become regular visitor of your blog. These are the small but important tips to follow.

Capture Subscribers By Email : It may seem strange for a blogger to send out updates by email, but email is still the #1 choice of most people who want to receive news and information. Using a free service like Bloglet to manage your subscriptions is easy and it allows your subscribers to manage all their

subscriptions from one interface.

Participate in Yahoo Answers : Yahoo answers is free service to all. This is quiet effective and sure way to drive some quality traffic to your blog. Participate in Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn Answers where you can demonstrate your expertise, get associated with relevant keywords and put your blog link out there.

Create a Squidoo Page Lens : Squidoo Lenses are a good way to generate traffic. By using a lense, you can generate your own custom “community” of WebPages. On a given related topic to your blog; participate in the Squidoo community; Squidoo has a ton of traffic, and you could funnel traffic and tastefully include links to other relevant sites and perhaps your own blog.

Don’t forget Offline Advertising : Most people still spend most of their time offline. Put your url in your print advertising, TV advertising, on your stationary and in your brochures, on your vehicles, in your shop window, on T-shirts and other apparel and any other place where it will be seen.

Try Pay Per Click Advertising : Search engine optimization, reciprocal linking, content creation, and publishing all take time to deliver traffic to your site. If the main sections of your site are ready for public viewing and you want to see how well you can do, then buy some traffic. The most popular and probably most effective pay per click advertising program is Google’s Adwords. It only takes a few minutes to set up an Adwords account and you will get traffic immediately. But remember, your site has to be good enough to convert this traffic into orders if you want to recover the cost of the advertising.

Include a link to your blog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence such as autoresponder sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers, etc.

Blog promotion takes time to build readership and sometimes even it is frustrating for beginners, keep hang on to it coz if you quit promotion even for some time, all your previous hard work will go waste. So, roll up your sleeves and start working.

Congratulate yourself for being persistent, bright and hardworking. Most get frustrated and quit before this point, which is why most websites/blog never become anything. After all, the secret to having a successful site is working hard in both promoting and creating it. You just might have what it takes.