Blog Promotion For Beginners Done Easy

Blog Promotion Secret Weapon

Getting traffic to a blog doesn't just happen. It takes commitment and a drive to succeed, something most bloggers actually don't demonstrate, which is one of my secret weapons, I'm not competing against 50,000,000 bloggers, I'm actually only competing against a few percent of them, much better odds as my bookie would say. This is the first thing that you need to understand about promoting your blog.

The majority of blogs in your main keyword (with the obvious exception of SEO and making money at home keywords) will likely be owned by people who don't maintain them or promote them. This is exciting, it means you can easily leap frog them in the search engines. And here is another little known secret about bloggers, the majority of high profile bloggers are easy to emulate, primarily because they don't know SEO and traffic building.

What happens with most bloggers is that they produce content, this gets traffic because their community likes them, links to them, and helps feed more traffic and search engine ranking to their blog. You can do this too, and with the advantage of sound SEO knowledge and traffic building skills, you can surpass them and become the dominant blog in your category. I've seen this happen, it happened to me, I was the expert, and I had to learn SEO to retain my ranking and stand a chance of fighting back.

Promoting a Blog, First Steps

Let's forget about your immediate community for now, I'd like to come back to that in another post. Instead, let's talk about some of the steps you need to take to promote your blog. When I create a new entry in Serendipity I immediately ping Google and Ask.com with my updated sitemap which Serendipity creates on the fly for me. Then I ping the biggest blog search engines, but I don't use the default ping function within my admin panel, I actually go to one of the webping sites so I can select the blog search engines that I want to ping.

My next step is to quickly check out Technorati for other blogs with the same main keyword as my entry that have also been recently updated. If I like what they have to say I make a comment on their blog, and often use the URL of my latest entry as my website address rather than just use my default homepage address. Most of these bloggers don't mind because the more relevant comments they get the better for them.

If your new entry has a good title, and makes effective use of keywords you should notice traffic starting to trickle in. But this isn't the end of the story. Just submitting your sitemap and pinging services isn't going to bring in massive amounts of traffic although it will invite the search engine spiders into your site. The most critical step now is to go back to the community where you made your name and tell these people about your new entry. You don't need to spam anyone, simply go to the largest forum for your keyword and start posting replies in discussions about the subject you're just written about. If you aren't able to post links to articles on your blog, then change your forum signature.