How to Promote Your Blog Posts and Get Traffic
- Filed under: Getting Traffic, Networking
- Date: Jan 28,2009
After you have exhausted your creative energy giving birth to the perfect blog post you hit ‘publish’. Relax not young blogger, for you must get your words out there. There is no quick fix for this and unfortunately it takes time and persistence to build your online reputation. The following is a plethora of promoting activities you can get stuck into for building your readership, your traffic and inevitably your monies!
Articles
Write interesting articles about your post topic and link back to it. There are 100’s of free articles directories you can submit to but choosing a few popular ones will do the job.
Guest Post
Write a guest post on another bloggers site. Contact them first and pitch your blog post idea to them, give them a link to your previous works and hopefully they’ll accept to post your content and link back to you! (Speaking of which, I am interested in promoting your site through my sites so please contact me to be a guest blogger!)
SEO
Help the search engines find you! To help your post get picked up by search engines try the free automated service at ping-o-matic. They let 21 specialised search engines (at the time of writing) look at your site. Your latest addition to your site will be indexed. Use the SEO plugin for Wordpress. Darren serves up some more plugins. Get ‘em.
Forums
Make frequent contributions to popular forums. Be sure not to spam your site or your comments will simply be deleted. Provide genuine value to the conversations and people will click your signature link to find out more about you and what you’ve done. The BIG forums can be found at The Biggest Boards.
Press Release
Use press releases to announce to all the major search engines that your site has a worthy update. PRweb.com signup is free however they like your ‘news’ or ‘announcement’ to be in press format. Headline, summary para, body which expands the summary, final para, and a footer about your blog/company and contact details.
Be a Link Whore
Use backlinks - they can be free or paid. Get some free ones. You basically reciprocally link with another site in the same niche to share your readers. You can also comment on other blogs. It helps if they use the commentLuv plugin (here’s 100 blogs using it) or dofollow link backs. If a link tag has rel=”dofollow” in it Google will boost your page rank. (Dofollow high PR list, another, and 1 more 
)
Email List
If you have built a opt-in email list on your website announce your new post via email. Start a regular informative newsletter to all your interested readers and make an announcement. Tell them your thoughts on the post, why you’re excited by it and how it could be of value to their endeavours. The link back to your site. Make sure your email recipients are relevant to that niche otherwise it could be noted down as spamming.
Vlog Your Blog
Promote your post via YouTube - just hit upload if you already have the file or if you want to record yourself by webcam hit quick capture. If it is a technical post on web designing use a video capture program like CamStudio or check out these downloads. Other video sites are Monies TV, 12seconds, Dailymotion, Joost, Seesmic, Smotri.com, Vimeo and Vodpod. If making a video is too hard just comment on videos listed, join the online community and discuss! Leave a web signature or casually drop in your site but do not spam. Bad spammers grrr.
SN
Submit your post to Social Networking sites. You can automate it using the Wordpress ShareThis plugin however you still have to write a comment for each time you share. It also makes it easy for readers to share to bookmarking sites like Digg, Del.icio.us and Furl.
There is a huge variety of SN sites - some people classify some as news, blogging directory updates, bookmarking, status forwarders but that is semantics. They are all doing the same thing - making it easier for a reader to find information. I think of it as an ever growing collaboration of ideas exchange.
Make your own page on MySpace and Squidoo. These are very interactive ’stick to your own’ groups who do not like to venture off their servers. If you miss them you could potential block yourself to thousands of readers. Mr. Squidoo talks about SN’s future.
More SN
More bookmarking sites - Diigo, Google Shared Stuff, Ma.gnolia, Mister Wong, StumbleUpon and Twine. More news sites - Google Reader, Mixx and Reddit. More status sites -brightkite, Facebook, Google Talk, MSN, identi.ca, Jaiku, Plurk, IntenseDebate and of course Twitter. (I will write a Twitter post soon as this is important - search Obama if you don’t believe me! Basically it You follow people status messages of what they’re doing and vice versa) And another one Backtype where you follow peoples web comments and Disqus where you track your comments and replies and can answer via mobile thru one system.
Carnival
Try submitted the post to Blog Carnival - which is basically a collection of posts about a certain topic which is edited and there release as an edition like a magazine. It is hard to find an updated carnival so look for the latest edition date to make sure it’s active. Is it just me or is this a dying cause?
Pretty Pictures
Here’s one for ya. Google Images - in the filename of your post header image put in keywords relevant to your site. For instance make-money-blogging-header-image.jpg You can also have a flickr stream or share a picasa album relevant to your niche.
GEO… G G O
If you have geo relevant information promote it on Craigslist. Personally I do not have much success with this - if you do please comment in the forum - thanx. Basically, if your site is about New York, let the search engines know and they’ll connect you to locals. More on GEOtagging.
Walk Hard
Go offline… I hate to pull your plug but social networking existed before computers!!!!!!!!!!!!! Walk around the block a drop letters with ’sign up now and get a free ebook how-to guide’ in it and it’ll work wonders. Go to the bus station, uni notice board, clothing store gig guide and so on. Make T-Shirts, handout business cards, make bumper stickers but whatever you do - do not graffiti your blog name to public walls. Not cool.
Thanks for reading! Be sure to read my feed and ShareThis to everyone! I had fun writing it - cheers
