Blog promotion is a great way to attract customers, improve your online reputation, and make money online. The interactive nature of blogs makes promoting them quite easy.
If you’re not spending time promoting your blog on a regular basis, you might as well be leaving money on the table. It’s not that hard, either. Here are some helpful blog promotion tips:
Blog Promotion With Microblogging
Twitter, Plurk, Friendfeed, and other microblogging sites give you a great opportunity to attract traffic. You’ll bring followers that are already following you into see what’s new and you’ll attract new followers that follow public timelines (and that often share interesting links with their own followers!).
You’ll also be telling search engines that you’ve updated your blog and that will get your pages indexed, leading to search engine results pages listing your site as the go-to spot for information.
Linking
If you are a prolific blogger, a bit of promotion can kill two birds with one stone. Whether it’s to the same blog, or another relevant blog you own, you can link to multiple blog entries you’ve written in the past. Make it a habit to link to a previous post in every post you write and you’ll drive traffic and search engines to your pages. This will give your readers more reasons to click deeper (increasing the chance of their subscribing and / or buying).
Keep search engine optimisation in mind and use anchor text links for strategically used phrases to do the linking. And if you develop a following on these sites, people will re-tweet or promote your links for you as well – broadening your promotional reach.
Social Bookmarking
Beyond microblogging, you can submit blog links to other sites as well. There are plenty of lists of top bookmarking sites that can help you to increase blog traffic and results.
Promote Often
If you’re posting often, you should also be promoting often. And even if you’re not posting as often as you should, you should make time for blog promotion. Even older posts can get new sets of eyes on them.
About Sean Rasmussen
I really have to remember to link to one of my previous blogs when I post a new blog. I usually link to other sites but always forget to link to my own. Thanks for reminding me of this.
Thank god I am not alone
I am ok with putting links to authority sites in my posts, but I have a hard time to remember my own (older) posts or sister blogs where I could link to in order to promote my latest post. I will need to do that more often.
A good way to remember and locate your old posts, is to simply go to your sitemap to look for relevant older posts
That’s a good idea, why didn’t I think of that?
I was even thinking of making a separate list with all the permalinks so I have them handy, but I guess it’s much easier to just to onto the sitemap and copy it from there. This way I won’t get any typos in it as well
Hi Sean,
That really is a good question… “Are you promoting your blog enough?”
Blog promotion is uber easy with all social media sites available, I have recently learned how to use ping.fm that you can use to post out to multiple microblogging platforms as well as other social media sites like Facebook & Myspace.
I’m not sure how mass posting the same message effects your SEO but the strategy seems to be quite a good way to pump out a lot of messages to various places fast.
Ping.fm is a great timesaver and something I use fairly regularly Jeremy
Hi Sean,
Blog promoting – Am I doing enough? …….. no but then I am just learning.
I have been linking my site to other sites like facebook, but not back to my own sites I have.
I keep meaning to do so… But …..I know No excuses.
When I start blogging more regularly I will definately link back to one of my previous blogs.
With the weekend upon me I am going to make a start on promoting my blog, with the help of your blog promotion tips.
This is where a checklist comes in very handy.
Create a checklist with all items that you need to perform. This can include items per blog post or for your entire blog. The checklist should include SEO tasks, social bookmarking tasks, social media, etc.
It really does make it easier to ensure that you complete all the required items and give yourself the best chance at ranking well.
That is an absolute requisite for me Cemil – thanks for the reminder. I have been drawing up a list of daily chores (e.g. tweet time, write a blog etc), but those other chores like internal linking to previous blog articles, pinging and so on I always forget.
Very good tip Cemil. Otherwise it is very easy to miss out on opportunities to promote yourself and your blog, just because there is so much happening.
I will have to sit down and write up (another) checklist
I don’t really think I’m doing enough blog promotion. But then I haven’t been trying to sell anything on the blogs I normally keep updated. However, one thing I plan to do on a regular basis, is link to previous articles on the same blog whenever possible. That is one thing that I haven’t done very often.
I was always told that part of good promotion is “doing good things and talking about it”.
So after writing and publishing good content we definitely need to talk about it – and do some active blog promotion. There are some great tips in this post, but I guess the test comes with time – if we can create the habit of really doing all the bits necessary.
Automation wherever possible is of key importance for me there!
Hi Renee,
I always do some blog promotion straight after I write a post but then I tend to forget about it until I write the next post. I’m thinking I need to be a little more consistent with it.
It really helps to have these processes automated as it just saves you so much time.
Hi Sean,
Well, no I’m not and thanks for pointing it out. I’m another one who neglects to link to older blogs for maximum SEO benefits. I don’t like the idea of leaving money on the table if it’s not necessary to do so.
There’s a ton of good advice here. If I familiarize myself with it for long enough some good habits are bound to rub off
Hi Sean,
This is another area I need to work on but I think I am starting to get around the net a little more. I get a few visitors to my blog from the comments I leave on other people’s blogs.
I just need to work a little harder on my social media sites.
I hate it when you ask Am I Doing Enough? as the answer is alway is no, and I hang my head! – but……..I am getting better which I take pride in. A lot of what I was doing wrong was that I didnt know what to be doing so i am really grateful that you have given us ideas and tips.
I love to revisit this blog….I always pick up something new from Seans blogs that I can use to better my approach to blogging……