How to promote your blog?
You should dedicate 1/3 of the time to reading other people’s blogs and researching topics for your own, 1/3 to writing content and 1/3 to promoting your content. How do you go about this last third? Let me tell you a story.
Dolly is this beautiful cat on the picture. It belongs to the pub next door to our house.
Dolly, the pub's cat
She is really funny because she spends lots of time visiting her neighbours’ houses, including ours. Whether she is welcome everywhere I don’t know but looking at how she is really good at getting our door open, and at getting free food served, I bet she now knows all the good neighbours (those she can drop into for food, a snooze or a cuddle) by name.
Over time, she has built up her fan club, inside and outside the pub.
If you want to blog and make this a long lasting and fruitful activity, I am not saying that you should invade (willing) people’s space like sweet Dolly does, but like her, you will benefit enormously from knowing and building a network of followers who will like your content, look out for your updates and share these with their peers. (Note that’s the bit a cat would not do as they aren’t very good at sharing stuff as you may know..). Here are 8 tips to help you do so.
1. Facilitate subscription
Create an RSS feed, and make the RSS feed icon big on your website to invite people to subscribe. You can also invite people to receive updates in their mailbox, via email.
2. Syndicate your content
Syndicating means to share your content on other sites, such as Twitter and Facebook. There are different tools to do this. For syndicating this blog on twitter we are using Feedburner. You have access to Feedburner if you have created a Google account. Going in your Google account settings, add “Feedburner” to your account, then “burn” your RSS feed. Finally, in the “publicise” area, choosing the “socialise” tab, you can add the Twitter profile you’d like your posts to be published to. Feedburner will also provide analytics for your blog which is good. Alternatively you can also have a look at Twitterfeed.
Again, there are different tools to syndicate your blog content on Facebook – at White Hat Media we use Social RSS to do this. Finally, Linkedin is also a place where you may want to publish your content. Add your blog url to your profile and post relevant blog posts in the “news” section of the groups you’re a member of.
3. Make your articles SEO friendly
Using appropriate HTML tags to structure your content will help search engines index it. If you are not familiarised with HTML, switch your blog editor to wysiwig and make use of title tags and sub-headers and write meaningful titles and sub-titles to make these SEO friendly.
4. Bookmark your own posts!
Bookmarking sites are there to help! So don’t use your Delicious account just for saving all these interesting articles you learn from, also be the first to bookmark your own stuff and start sharing. Some bookmarking sites: Digg, Reddit, Sphinn, and of course Google and Yahoo. Also, don’t forget Technorati. It’s a directory of blogs to which you should add yours. This is done by including a code provided by Technorati in a blog post.
5. Facilitate sharing
Add share and retweet buttons to your blog.
6. Comment on other people’s blogs
In part one of this article, I mentioned it’s important you know influential bloggers in your industry, they are opinion makers and thought leaders. Through reading their content you will learn and get inspiration. So check their blogs often and comment on their content. This will give you exposure and is a good way to start building your own profile, providing you add value to the conversation. When relevant, refer and link to an article you wrote about the topic that is being discussed. In the same manner, quote your sources in your own articles!
7. Integrate some of your blog content to your newsletter
Not all your blog content may be relevant, but surely the best articles should go on your newsletter.
8. Take into account your readers’ feedback to write new articles.
Taking this further, you can also run polls to find out which other topics they would like to learn about and develop content accordingly.
Can you recommend more ways of promoting your blog?
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May 11th, 2010 at 2:26 pm
I do like the analogy of a cat when it comes to marketing your blog it really is a good one, ‘pearls of wisdom’ indeed. You appear to have covered every aspect of marketing a blog in this post but can i just add to what you have already said? Encourage readers to respond (comment) to your posts. You can do this in a number of ways one of which you have employed yourself Anne. Leave the post with a question to your readers ask what experience they have had both good and bad.
Blogs were intended to be forums to debate and discuss ideas and creativity, long live the blog!