Duncan Riley> was checking out a Bloggers forum which someone is currently bank rolling through Google Adsense at the moment and got sucked into joining and posting the odd thought. One thing that struck me was the lack of knowledge about promoting blogs, so this is what I posted (with a few edits). Let me know what you think.
Blog Promotion for Newbies
1: Don’t use blogrolling: it may be easier to use but the javascript stuffs up search engines when they are looking for links and makes the links useless, use WordPress’s managed links feature or similar product, or even hard code it, I did for the 18 months I used MT before changing to WordPress
2. Pinging to weblogs et al is good but trackbacking to sites is better, when of course your post is in relation to that sites topic. Also legitimate commenting directly on other sites helps expose your site to others. But remember, it must be legitimate comment and not spam! You can even send people to your blog from your email signature by adding a CTA button with a link to your latest post. WiseStamp’s email signature editor offers this option for free, so give it a try.
3. Offer to exchange links on your site under your links section, it lets people know that your interested in linking and will build up your site quickly in Technorati and Google.
4. Link to other small sites without exchange, either through side bar or post: linking to big sites is great in showing what your reading but does nothing to build up your readership because they nearly always never return the favour, indeed a number of them will steal your stories or ideas without any attribution at all. Smaller sites on the other hand are often stoked that you’ve linked to them and will return the favour without asking, even if they don’t, you’ve still done a good deed.
5 submit your blog to ALL the search engines, it might take some time but the spiders will start coming if….
6. The most important feature of all: post regularly and post often. It not only brings readers back regularly but it means the spiders from the search engines will return more frequently indexing your entire site, and you’ll start getting hits from the search engines. Some may argue that these aren’t that valuable but I would argue that’s rubbish. It exposes your site to a new audience for free, and even if only a few return you’ve still built up your readership for free. Take the Blog Herald for example, we get 5,000 views per month just from clickthrus in from Google and another 2,500 from other search engines (Google is the only real game in town though). Even if only 1% return to the site later, that’s 75 new regular readers per month or nearly 1000 per year, and what I also find is that this traffic also responds well to advertising on the site if they’ve stumbled in for the wrong reason.
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