10 Great Tips to Market Your Blog
There are so many blogs these days and so many kinds of them too that to stand out in an overcrowded market is indeed a difficult task. But this is still possible, say experts, and therefore given below are the 10 top methods of marketing your blog successfully. Check them out:
• Choose a distinctive and stand alone domain name and steer clear of hosting services that don’t allow this facility.
• Use custom-designed blog software such as WordPress.
• Optimize your blog with researched keywords with help from WordTracker or Keyword Discovery; optimize your templates with RSS subscription options, have social bookmark links, HTML code, unique title tags and URLs and a sitemap.
• If you have set up a blog to get you known as an industry expert or authority, interview prominent bloggers and improve your own credibility. Get on to Facebook, Twitter or MyBlogLog and build your online network and post useful content periodically.
• Set up a ping list on your blog so that each time you write a post, it pings the main RSS aggregators.
• Create posts at least three to five times a week and ensure that each is of high quality and unique. Check out your inbound links, incoming traffic, and readers’ comments and look out for your blog being mentioned on Technorati, Google Alerts or Yahoo News.
• Check that each of your blog posts is optimized for search engines.
• Always reply to readers’ comments on your blog. If you find your blog mentioned on another blog, thank the blogger for this. Get in touch with related bloggers, both online and offline, where possible. A comment need not be a critical view of the article but could be expert advice that would be of immense value to readers who would then go over to your blog and read more. If you do this consistently, you can attract several new readers to your blog and so increase the popularity of your blog.
• Create your profile on social networking sites such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, which attract many visitors each day. As you build your profile, bring in the fact that you have a blog and insert a link to it which can direct the traffic there. Ensure that your readers bookmark your posts—do this by adding a plugin.
• Use blog communities to promote your own blog. Once you register your blog with either www.blogcatalog.com or www.mybloglog.com, start posting comments and inviting the traffic to your blog.
Quick tips:
a) Register with Feedburner.
b) Use widgets to increase your blog’s popularity. Here, you start a blog on MyBlogLog and new readers will read your posts and make friends with you. In turn, you too make friends with them and direct them to your blog.
c) Have your blog reviewed professionally by sites such as Blogsvertise.com or Reviewback.com
d) Syndicate your blog by resources and directories who syndicate the url of posts or just snippets. Check out Bloglines or Technorati for this.
e) Subscribe to big blog directories or just use the RSS feeds directory for this.
f) When announcing a blog, send out a press release to your target audience. You could use Prweb.com for this.
Tags: Blog Marketing, blog writing, SEO writing