Promoting Your Blog

Part One

Once you have your blog up and running;  promoting your blog becomes your next priority.  We all want visitors to read our blogs and really; a fantastic blog deserves an audience.  There are many things you can do to promote your blog so let’s take a look at some, now.

Step One of Promoting Your Blog

The first thing you need to consider is backlinks.  Backlinks are simply links from other websites to yours and generally the more you have the better it is.  This is because backlinks are one of the factors that the search engines, like Google, consider when they are ranking your blog in the search engine results pages.  This is so important because the object of promoting your blog is to have it rank highly in the search results so that you get more traffic to your blog.

Google considers those sites with larger counts of backlinks as being more valuable than those with lesser counts.  However, it isn’t just the number of backlinks that’s important but also the quality of the backlinks.

The quality of the backlink is determined by it’s relevance to the content of your site.  For example, if your site is about how to play guitars and you have a backlink to your site from another site about guitars; then Google would consider that backlink to be of higher quality than a backlink from a site about cooking.

The backlink from the cooking site still counts as a backlink.  However, as the backlink from the guitar site would be more relevant to the content of your site; it is more likely to help boost your rankings in Google’s eyes.  Also, if the guitar site linked to your site with the same keyword that you were using and has a high pagerank; it’s better still.  In future posts, I will talk more about pagerank.

Step Two of Promoting Your Blog

The next thing you could do when promoting your blog is simply just submit it to some blog directories.

It can be difficult getting your blog found when you are just starting out but blog directories make promoting your blog a little easier.  This is because blog directories work in a similar fashion to search engines.

People simply type in their search term and the blog directory will return what it believes are the most relevant results.  Blog directories make it easier to connect with an audience that is interested in your subject matter.

Here are some blog directories that you can use to start promoting your blog.

• Bloglines
  
• Boingboing
  
• Technorati
• Bloggeries
• Blogcatalog
  

Step Three of Promoting Your Blog

Start building relationships with other bloggers; especially those who write blogs with a similar subject matter to you.  You can find blogs that you really like and leave comments for the bloggers.  Be genuine and friendly and only add comments that contribute something.

Essentially, you are promoting your blog by promoting yourself.  Your comments will get noticed by other bloggers  and eventually, they will come and look at your blog.  If they see a post they like; they may just write their own post, and in it, link to your blog.  So, you get a link and some visitors to you blog.

Just a word of caution.  Firstly, when promoting your blog, don’t leave comments that just say something like ; “Great blog”.  Make sure the comments you leave add some value.  Also, don’t overdo the amount of times you leave links to your own blog.  People are pretty savvy about sensing who is genuinely interested in them and what they do.  Promoting your blog is not about shameless self promotion.

Next Time On Promoting Your Blog

In Part Two of Promoting Your Blog, I will talk about a few more things you can do to get your blog the attention it deserves.  I hope you enjoyed reading Part One and find these steps helpful in promoting your blog.