I’m surprised to see how many people really don’t know how to make the most out of blogging. Most will simply put up a blog, make a few entries and that’s it. They do no promotion and nothing else besides. Well, this article is going to give you just a few simple tips to turn your blog into a traffic generation machine. It won’t cost you any money to do any of these things and the time that you will spend will be minimal.
The first thing to do is get into the habit of updating your blog regularly. You don’t have to do this everyday, though it will certainly help if you do, but at least update your blog a couple of times a week. I personally have many blogs so it’s hard for me to do this, but I try to update each blog at least once a week. If all you have is one blog, this should be no trouble at all. The more you update, the more content you have, the higher up the search engine results you’ll go.
The second thing to do is to get into the habit of pinging your blog to the various directories each time you make an update. I use two services to do this. One is Pingomatic and the other is King Ping. The reason I use two is because every once in a while, one of them is down. There are many other services, but I find these two to be the most reliable and get the best results.
The next thing you need to do is actually go out and promote your blog. Don’t have any money? No problem. Just write some articles and submit them to article directories and put a link to your blog in the resource box. Make sure the article is related to the subject matter on your blog. Otherwise, readers are going to be a bit annoyed that they went to a blog that had nothing to do with the subject of the article.
Finally, go visit other blogs that are related to yours. Make posts to them in reply to some of the posts already made. Don’t forget to include in your signature a link to your own blog. You may not get many people to actually visit your blog from there, but the more of these backlinks you have at other blogs, the higher up the search rankings you’ll go.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey there,
I fully agree with some of your points, the one about posting regularly is especially relevant to me :p
I like to search on google for relevant blogs, the highest ranked ones are obviously the best according to google, I then also post comments on their latest articles, trying to get the first place in the comments. Kind of like what I did here
Nice blog by the way!
-F
You’ve made some excellent points about blogging and promoting your blog.
I also have good results by submitting my blog to sites like BlogCatalog.com and MyBloglog.com. Both help you promote your blog to a wider audience than you can all by yourself and make it easier to build a community around your blog(s).
I especially like how MyBlogLog helps syndicate my online activities from multiple blogs and services such as Twitter, FriendFeed, and others.
Have you tried any of those?
Act on your dream!
JD
I will have to try out those two web sites that you mention in your comment. Hopefully they can help out my new blog a little bit. I sometimes find it hard to find ways to promote a blog without having any money. Thanks for mentioning these blog web sites.
These a great tips. I’ve been using the latter one. However i can’t leave comments using my blog link. For some reason wordpress filters my post (it thinks it spam), so i end up leaving my blog URL is the comment post. I don’t how to get wordpress to recognize my comment as not spam when i leave my blog URL. It’s frustrating.
gagan
niche-affiliate-marketing.com
Francois – I really don’t care too much about page rank anymore. It’s usually only the blogs or web sites that have been around the longest.
John – I am on both BlogCatalog.com and MyBloglog.com. They are really good for bloggers who are trying to first get their name out there. Sometimes people promote too much on those web sites and not worry about other things like a content. I agree with you though.
Geeman – That is weird that peoples spam systems do this. I’ll look into this and try to help you out.
Great Tips! I think I finally get it…you really really want us to go and comment on other blogs! Do you find this approach one of the most valuable approaches to really getting your blog out there or what?
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No doubt about it, blogging is a great way to market. Even websites that are not primarily a blog can benefit from adding one. Not only does it keep the site fresh, but it allows greater interaction with the website’s main audience.
Pretty interesting article. I agree with most the people that are above me. I have learned that updating your blog regularly is a must. Why do people come back to blogs? Because they have updated content so that the reader has something new to read.
Article directories are great for driving traffic to your blog. I have about 3 blogs which are dying (and they are crappy) so I am putting the articles in an article directory and linking to my main blog. I have done this in the past and it drives a few hundred people a month to the blog. So I am hoping with the 50 articles or so that I have I can drive about 1,000 people per month. If I need to write more to get this number then I will
Wow, this is great simple how to tips. And trust me if your serious about starting a blog than start doing this basic fundamentals today and you will see your blog take off slow but surely. Lastly, the first point can not be send enough! Update your blog regularly!!
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