Ways on Promoting a Blog
We have our blogs but no one is reading them. That is always the problem of new bloggers. Well, it is not just enough to start a blog, and write content for a blog. We also need to promote our blogs. But before we promote our blogs, let us make sure that we have enough blog entries. If people decide to visit our blogs, we have enough articles for them to read.
There are several ways to promote a blog or a Website.
1. Search Engines
Submit your blog to the search engines. Google, Yahoo and MSN Live are the most popular search engines. The truth is even if I have no content on my websites or blogs, I always submit them to Google Search, Yahoo Search and MSN Live Search. Take note, I just do that for the search engines only.
I will give you the links right away, where to submit the url of your blog.
To submit the url of your blog at Google, go to
http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl.
To submit the url of your blog at Yahoo, go to
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit.
To submit the url of your blog at MSN Live Search, go to
http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx.
With Yahoo though, you will be prompted to login first before they will process your submission. You can also submit your blog feed if you like.
What is the difference between a feed and url? In this case, the original RSS feed of this blog is https://www.problogit.com/feed because I am using WordPress as the publishing platform.
But I am using FeedBurner too, http://feeds2.feedburner.com/problogit for other purposes which I will be discussing later on. The url is the domain name itself, https://www.problogit.com only.
You can also further submit the url of your blog to other search engines like AOL, Alta Vista, Lycos, Ask.com, Cuil.com and a lot more.
Sometimes just like Yahoo, some of the search engines might ask you to open an account with the search engine first, so be prepared for that. Take note though, when you open an account with different search engines, please use different passwords. You can use the same username but make sure you have different password for each account.
2. Social Media
Join social networking services. There are different kinds of social media such as social networking sites, social bookmarking sites, microblogging sites, video sharing sites, and photo sharing sites among others.
Popular social networks are Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, LinkedIn, Bebo, Orkut and Hi5. There are more sites like Multiply, Tagged, Tubely, Skyrock, and WAYN among others, and there are still a lot out there.
When you join these social networking sites, be wary of others too. Just don’t bombard your friends and colleagues with all your blog entries. Do it in moderation. Give them some time to get used to your style of updating them on what is happening to you through your blog.
Popular social bookmarking sites and social news sites are StumbleUpon, Delicious, Bloglines, Technorati, Digg, and Reddit among others. Google Reader is now considered as social bookmarking site as well.
Popular microblogging sites are Twitter, Plurk, and Jaiku among others.
Popular video sharing sites are YouTube, Vimeo, Revver, and Metacafe among others.
Popular photo sharing sites are Flickr, Zooomr, Slide, RockYou, and Photobucket among others.
With all these sites, you need to open an account, so you know more or less that you will be memorizing a lot of passwords, which is again another topic to be discussed later on.
3. Internet Forum
Join Internet forum. It is another way of promoting your blog. You will learn a lot from the discussion inside the forum. If you have any questions, people are always willing to help.
4. Other Bloggers and Probloggers
Visit the blogs of other bloggers and probloggers. Study their blogs and eventually join the discussion by commenting on their blogs. Sooner or later if they think that you are good, there is a possibility of guest blogging. Meaning, you might be invited to write for their blogs. That is a great indication that you are indeed on the right track. It will definitely be very beneficial to you especially if the probloggers are very popular.
There are still a lot of ways on how to promote your blog such as having newsletters, paid advertising, attending social media events, and joining discussion groups, and so on, and so forth. But I know that you will soon discover them for yourself, so I just wrote about the popular ways on how to promote a blog.
Well then, if you are ready to promote your blog, hop on to those sites I mentioned and get yourself known in the world of problogging.
