Blog Promotion: What Really Works?

Now that you have decided on your blog topic, sat up your account, tweaked the layout, added a few money making schemes onto your blog, and written your first post, what should you do next to promote your blog? Your blog is nothing unless you have readers reading your blog. After optimizing your keywords, readers are the key to any blog's success. If no one is reading your blog then what is the point of putting the time, and effort (and sometimes money) into it?

You may be wondering how you can promote your blog. Do you have to pay for advertising for your blog? Well, you can, but you really don't have to. There are plenty of ways that you can advertise and promote your blog without forking out big bucks to do it.

It wont be quick, and it wont be easy. You won't wake up one morning with 10,000 people reading your blog. It's a slow process. You have to take the time to promote the blog, and then it takes time for people to find your blog. 

The first thing you need to do when writing a blog is make sure that people will find it interesting! Is your blog about something that others may enjoy, or be interested in? Will your blog be helpful to others in some way? Find ways to make sure that your blog will remain new and intriguing so that people will keep coming back to your blog after the first time.

• Spread your blog link around to everyone you know. Send it to all of your friends and family, and tell them about your new blog. Word of mouth is one of the best ways to promote your blog. Add your link to your email signature. If you are a member of any forums, or message boards, add your link to your signature on those as well, so that every time you post something your link will be seen.
• Build your rss feed. Join a website like feedburner.com which allows people to "follow" your blog and send them a notification every time you post something new.
• Use your social networking websites. Places like facebook and myspace are great for promoting your blog. Send bulletins out to all of your friends telling them about your blog, and place a link to your blog on your page so that everyone that looks at your page will see it. You can also make pages specifically for your blog where you can send out updates and information about your blog to people who are truly interested.
• Traffic Exchanges. Traffic exchanges are when you exchange traffic! You earn points for looking at other websites and in turn, other people will look at your website. Everyone has their own personal opinion on traffic exchanges. Some think they work, others think they don't, however I have found quite a few new sites by using traffic exchanges, and it does help to generate traffic to your blog.
• Join Blog Communities. Blog communities are similar to myspace and facebook, however they are aimed purely at blogs and blog promotion. You can network with other blogs, make some new friends, and hopefully gain some new readers. A few that I recommened are blogcatalog and mybloglog.
• Submit your blog to search engines. You don't have to pay to submit your blog to search engines; it's very easy to do it yourself. Just go to any search engine that you can think of such as google and yahoo, type in, "submit website" and you should find a link to where you can go to submit your website. Put your url in the spot, hit submit and that's it. Just remember it typically takes a few weeks before search engines will recognize your website, but it will happen.
• Comment on other blogs. A lot of people believe that this is a great way to get readers to your blog. Basic blog etiquette is that if someone leaves you a comment, you go to their blog and leave them a comment. They may find your blog to be interesting and come back again, or someone from their blog may see your link and check it out.
• Twitter is a great tool for blog promotion. Send out tweets when you write a new post and everyone that is following you will see it. You can even make a twitter account just for your blog, and promote it on your blog so that others may see it and follow your twitter account.
• Entrecard is one that I really like. You paste the html on your page and other members of entrecard click on that "business card" to win credits. You can use those credit to advertise your blog on other similar blogs.
• Link exchanges. A link exchange is where you find other blogs of similar interest, or subject matter and ask them to exchange links with you. You place a link on your blog and they place your link on theirs.

These are only a few ways to promote your blog. There many other ways for you to promote your blog as long as you put the time, and effort into it. Get familiar with other blogs, make some friends and learn new ideas long the way.