Surefire ways to promote your blog?

Image via WikipediaPromoting a blog is one of the most tedious tasks as a blogger.This becomes even more unmanageable when you are a part time blogger like me.Promoting a blog is an ongoing process and you have to promote your blog as long as you write on your blog.

If you are looking for some shortcuts then I fear I might disappoint you.I have no secrets to disclose on the topic .But if you are quite serious to promote your blog and ready to schedule the task on a daily basis then you will find this post useful.


Leverage your current visitors to promote your blog-

People are quite focussed on the things that they don't have.Same applies to blogging also.You might have been thinking of your low traffic or subscribership.But real key to blog promotion is to concentrate upon what you have.A bunch of visitors can bring in huge traffic to you if they spread just one of your post virally. This is the true value of the visitors you have.


How can I promote my blog through current visitors?
Now this is the question which needs to be answered.The ways to promote your blog this way are-

• Produce quality content-How can a visitor promote your blog if you don't have a content worth promoting.Content is the soul of your blog and a blog without quality content is a dead blog.
• Use "Tell a Friend" script in the post-footer -"Tell a friend" script is a piece of javascript or php code that enables your visitors to email your posts to their friends.So, only thing you have to do is to encourage your visitors to use this script to email your posts.This can be more effective if you give away free gifts to your visitors to tell their friend about your posts.Although right now I am not using this method to promote my blog but I am planning to use it pretty soon.
• Encourage your visitors to submit your site in social bookmarking sites-Social bookmarking sites like stumble upon(SU) are the best place to promote your blog.Just encourage your visitors to add your posts to social sites if they liked it.

Make many entry points to get into your blog-

Entry points for your blog are the highly optimized pages which rank high in search engines for their keywords.Thus, if you have many entry points you have more prospects of getting visitors to your blog through search engines.In my opinion 10-15% of your posts should be optimized for search engines.If you write 10 posts a week then 1-2 posts should be written with search engines in mind.

What should I do to make entry points to my blog-

• Give some time to research your keywords.
• Place your keywords tactfully.
• Maintain a keyword density of 3-6%
  
• Build links for your optimized pages.

Promote your feeds to promote your blog-

Your blog and feed are the two faces of the same coin.So, promoting your feeds can actually help your blog to grow.Infact, my feeds get more hits than my blog and many of the visitors who discover my feed actually come to see my blog.

What can I do to promote my feeds-

• Submit your feed to feed directories.You can find a list of feed directories here.
• Make sure autodiscovery feature is working.Most of the blogs have an innate autodiscovery feature but sometimes it may not be working.
• Leave your feed's link in your signature whenever you comment in forums and other blogs.

Distribute your articles in article directories and forums-

Submitting your articles in article directories has two benefits-

1. It build links for your blog.
2. It refers some of the visitors to your blog.

Forums, I think, are not being used properly by bloggers to promote their blog.Writing some very good comments on forums can bring in some traffic for your blog but it will be only a few even if you are commenting in high trafficked forum.To really get some purchase from forums write an article which is value packed,,addicting, attractive (you can add some more adjectives here !!!) I had once written an article on about 10 forums to promote my blog on "Tourist Places in India" and next day the traffic came rolling in.

Identify some forums having good traffic and post a new thread with a beautiful article in it and see the magic.Seriously,this has worked quite well for my blog and it can work well for you too.


Build a community to promote your blog-

The simplest way to build a community is to join communities at mybloglog and blogcatalog. Other ways of building community are-

• Email other bloggers when you have produced a quality post and let them know about your post.You can even email entire post to them.Don't email all your post but only those which you think are promising.
• Comment on other blogs.This is the simplest way of building relationship with fellow bloggers although it may take some time.
• Giveaway links to other blogs and don't expect anything in return.
• Write a guest post on an established blog of your niche.
• Be active in social media sites.
• Answer your emails and comments on your blog.

Although there are many more methods to promote your blog but those I have discussed are not frequently used by most of the bloggers.If you have some unique idea to promote blog you may discuss it here in comments.