How To Blog 105 - Blog Promotion by T. L. Pakii Pierce
Reference: http://blogforfunandprofit.blogware.com/blog/
HowToBlog101/_archives/2004/12/15/206584.html
Also Thanks Gracey for the answer to my question.
Here it goes....
Okay, no blog is a good blog if it doesn't have traffic right? Well not exactly you can have a great blog that doesn't get traffic. The point is that you need to have a strategy for getting traffic to that awesome blog of yours. So I'm going to talk about generating traffic to your blog. There are few things you need to consider when are thinking about generating traffic to your blog and these aren't any different than if you were planning for a regular web site.
The exception is that blogs will generate traffic much quicker. I didn't say A LOT of traffic much quicker. Just much quicker. You need to consider your target audience and from where you are generating your traffic.
Blogs can do can do anything a regular web site will do, they just do it faster and they do it better. Let's get right into it shall we?
Blogs Do It Better
It starts at home. When your house is in order everything happens in a matter time. By using the word home I am referring to your blog as the starting point from which all your other efforts should flow. Your blog is your starting point for generating traffic and the quality of your blog will determine how well you can sustain your traffic.
Blogs are natural SEO tools but you have to make it work for you. I'll tell you right now that if you don't like writing, checking e-mail, sitting at your computer for extended periods of time or doing Internet searches then you need to outsource your blog activity and there are some drawbacks to this that I will discuss in a moment.
Blogs are work. They are not cash registers and mass page generators or keyword spam tools. They are actually quite elegant in their natural habitat as a conversational media tool. They work hand in hand so well with organic search you won't believe until you see it.
Blogs get your message out better than any other publishing tool on the Internet at the moment. When you leverage a tightly focused and topical message with your blog, you will reap the rewards of your labor.
Let's start with getting the house in order.
Blog Promotion Traffic Strategy #1. Content is King. You have to "master your message". Feed the need of your audience and feed your audience frequently. You should publishing content frequently for three important reasons. You content should be relevant of high value for audience. Whether you want to humor them, get them to think, get them to cuss, show them how to do something or point them to useful resources...keep asking yourself this question about your audience as you prepare to write your content: "what do they want?". Think of the needs of your audience and target what you are writing to satisfy that need.
This is especially important if you are planning sales from your blog. You have to become a trusted credible source of information before people try our product. Blogs do this very well by allow you to "connect and converse through content". Without great content you blog cannot fully realize and leverage the power of your blog.
This isn't hard to do. Here are some do's and do nots:
Do Nots
1. Do Not publish infrequently.
2. Do Not criticize others without supporting facts and reference to those facts.
2. Do Not criticize in a mean spirit. Keep it objective and never personal. People love debate but mean people.
Do's
1. Do Publish often.
2. Do publish meaningful, high-value and focused content.
3. Do be yourself. You can personable without reveal private information.
Keep your posts topically focused and relevant to the theme of your blog, keep your posts interesting, authoritative, opinionated or humorous. Basically inject yourself into your writing and be authentic. Be prepared to create content and regular amounts of it.
Blog Promotion Traffic Strategy #2. Blog Often. Blogs are frequently updated and blog content is characteristically more relevant, topical, and fresh. For this reason blogs gets crawled more frequently, indexed much faster, and updated much more quickly.
But here's the thing. This won't happen for you if you don't keep the search engines happy with fresh, relevant or accurate, and topical content. The search engine spiders will literally adjust their frequency with which they check crawl your site based on how frequent you update. If they notice your content isn't as fresh as often, then they will slow down the frequency crawls a bit. If you publish more frequently, the search engine spiders will crawl your content more frequently.
Here are 3 big reasons to publish frequently:
1. Frequent updates means frequent crawling and faster indexing by Google.
2. Frequent updates means frequent return traffic.
3. Frequent updates encourages RSS subscribers.
Blog Promotion Traffic Strategy #3. Ping! Ping! Ping! I believe in pings and I go the extra mile to ping by not just relying solely on blog software pings. Blog software pings other update servers like weblogs.com to announce your content updates. Search engines like Google and RSS/Blog directories like Technorati, BlogDigger and PubSub check these update servers for the latest content updates.
This one big reason why your content gets into Google so quickly using a blog. What? You didn't know that? Oh yes and this is awesome. Blogs are indeed SEO power tools. I've seen it take as little as a day to get content in Google using a blog. But on average, your content will take mere hours to just a few days to get into Google. The RSS and blog search engines like BlogDigger will index your blog content in mere minutes!.
Here is a fantastic list of ping services to use as documented over at ProBlogger. As noted at ProBlogger "...you might not want to ping them all every time as it can take a long time to post anything. The Pingomatic one at the top of the list automates the process and pings many services for you all at once".
Your blog software will normally and automatically ping http://www.weblogs.com and http://www.blo.gs by default. You may need to turn this on so check with your blog software for instructions. When you turn ping on it works in the background. Every time you publish content it will automatically send ping updates. A companion tool that is a must use is Ping-O-Matic. Ping-O-Matic allows you to enter the title and RSS feed URL of your blog and it will ping a larger group of major ping update servers...all at once. Very nice tool. Sure, it's a manual process but well worth it.
Reference: ProBlogger Ping List
Syndicate and Replicate. I consider blogs accelerated content publish tools. Blogs allow you to perform most content publish and management functions at a supercharged pace. Not only can you publish content in mere moments but you can replicate your content exponentially using your RSS feed. Content flow is in real-time now because of blogs. RSS allows you to broadcast your content to a wider audience than those that reach your home page.
When you update your blog, your blog software updates a simple text file formatted in XML. This is your RSS file. Your blog produces a link to this RSS file and together the make your RSS feed. The RSS file contains your blog content updates. As you update your blog content, your RSS file is updated to reflect those changes. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. To keep things you should realize that RSS is a standard for content subscription and distribution.
Your RSS file contains the titles and content of your blog articles. I'm going to get technical now for just moment so that you understand just one portion of the power of RSS. XML is document type markup language. HTML is used to describe the display or format of web pages in your web browser using HTML tags that have properties associated with them.
The XML tags in your RSS file formats and describes the data in your RSS feed. Search engine bots crawl your feed and uses your titles and descriptions to locate your content. Heres the one aspect of the power of RSS. In your RSS file, your "titles" are linked back to your blog. RSS allows you broadcast your links and content to a broader market far beyond your homepage.
You need to submit your blog and RSS URL to blog and search engine directories and update your content frequently. Spider bots crawl your RSS feed quickly and often to find your content. When your content is keyword rich for your topic or niche than you RSS feed is keyword making it attractive to the search engines. RSS allows your content to found in many more places now the what I call supplemental search and RSS readers are becoming part of Internet culture. People are now search Google+.
That means Google + Technorati or Google + BlogDigger. Blogs are information on demand and information now. Blog directories are growing their presence both on the line and in the surfing habits on Internet users. People are search more places for content, the are subscribing to search and RSS content and with meta search engines like Mama.com you are growing your chances of being found in organic search results like never before. It all translates in to traffic back your site.
Promote your feed, make sure your content is relevant and rich and grow your traffic.
Blog Promotion Traffic Strategy #5. Blog AdNetworks. Ad network exchanges are another option. BlogSnob and a free blog ad exchange network. When you sign up Your create and ad for your blog and then you cut and paste a snippet of code into your blog. Your ad will show up on other members blogs and your blog will display adds from other members in the blog ad network.
Another blog ad network is BlogAds. Blogads is bit more serious blog advertising. BlogAds is a network of influential blogs that accept paid advertising. BlogAds also maintains some compelling statistics about the nature of blogs, readership and e-commerce.
Blog Promotion Traffic Strategy #6. Blog Traffic Exchanges. Blog traffic exchanges are bit different than blog ad networks. Blog traffic exchanges allow you to earn credits towards impressions for your blog. Here's how it works. You join a blog traffic exchange like BlogExplosion. Signing up is free. You are then part of a private network of blogs. Private in the sense the network includes the blogs of those who sign up and not every blog on the Internet. You then visit the blogs in the network to earn credits for your blog.
These credits are used to determine how many times your blog will show up in the network for others when they blog. When you run out of credits you blog is no longer in rotation. You earn additional credits by surfing more blogs in the network or buy purchasing credits. I personally use BlogExplosion for my blog about daily success motivation and positive thinking for powerful life change. I have had good success with BlogExplosion. I've not tried BlogExchange yet.
The caution here is that you need to search the categories of each network and see the type and quality of the blogs there. Then test and see if your blog does well in it's category. BlogExplosion has a rating system. The audience of a blog traffic exchange may or may be suited for your blog if you are selling products or services to a specialty niche not well represented by that traffic exchange. However, if you something to offer that would appeal to a category within the network than signing will do you well. I've made sales directly from my blog by first building content and getting people involved in with my content.
I have a review of BlogExplosion here: BlogExplosion Review.
Here is another blog traffic exchange network called Blog Exchange.
Blog Promotion Traffic Strategy #7. Trackback and Pingback. Blog are link magnets. Bloggers refer to bloggers all the time because blogs contain the best content available to today on the web. I explained trackback in How To Blog 103 Part One and How To Blog 104.
Use it! It is natural way to create links exchanges that readers can follow between your blog and the blog you are linking to. It is also a great way for the traffic from the other blog to find it's way to you. Of equal or greater importance is the fact that the blog publisher is notified that you have referenced them. If they like what they see, you can build traffic to each other. This is a common and natural occurrence when blogging.
Blog Promotion Traffic Strategy #8. Get Reviewed. The quality of the results with this one depends on the quality of the reviewing site. If the reviewing site has substantial traffic coming through then and review about you on one of their heavily trafficked pages is a boon for you. But even from a smaller site you could still benefit. Use our judgment. All qualified traffic is good traffic no matter how little. Get review by a site who you think can you send you targeted traffic. Ask for reviews. Find Blog reviewers and see if you get your site reviewed. Reviews will normally cost you a bit of wait time, perhaps a link to the reviewers web site or a small donation.
Blog Promotion Traffic Strategy #9. Participate in your niche. Blogs are conversational and relationship publishing tools. You get more traffic by becoming and trusted source of information and authority. Find newsgroups, discussion forums, blogging networks or web rings and participate. To date when it comes to my niches I spend most of my time reading and responding to blogs within my niche. That takes most of time away from newsgroups and other networks. You don't have to do them all and you my do a mix of some. See what you like and what gives you the results you like most.
But DO participate. You have to participate and connect your content with your audience. When you participate, always, always use a signature with a link back to your site. Never post spammy comments or irrelevant chatter. Don't post comments like "that's interesting" and such short statements. People will know you are only trying to use them for link exposure and traffic. Be genuine and contribute with integrity. You will win friends and traffic.
Blog Promotion Traffic Strategy #10. THINK TRAFFIC MAGNET. You must never lose sight of your blog being a traffic magnet. Blogs are so efficient at what they do you will be amazed from just a small amount of time examining search results for your blog and watching the search terms you will come up for the search engines. Your blog will bring you traffic from keyword searches you hadn't even considered.
This means you must be committed to generating content. You will be creating your own article archive that will continue to reward with traffic. The is hard to appreciate if you aren't blogging yet. But when you start blogging you will not want to go back to a regular web site as far as search engine results are concerned.
A natural writing style and keyword relevancy is all it takes. You don't need polished content structures or journalistic perfections. If you can tell a story then you can create content for your blog. Just write in a converational tone as you would naturally speak. Keep your articles around 800 words give or take 200. I violate this one often. :-)
Blogs and organic search are SEO gold. your keywords will rank so fast and you will be found so efficiently you will be amazed. I may be repeating myself but this is really powerful stuff. It is amazing to start blogging about a topic and then just hours later seeing the traffic coming through from Google searches on your content.
These are just one of many ways to go about your blog promotion and blog marketing activities. There is no quick cash technique for profitable blogging. Blogs need a commitment of your time, a clear content strategy and the patience to let it work for you.
Blogs are awesome, they work well and you shouldn't delay in getting started.
