Ever since I started hiring bloggers to blog for Blogtown Press I’ve been focusing my efforts on promoting and marketing the blogs within the network. I thought blogging was time consuming!
Marketing and promoting blogs consists, in my mind, of two groups. You want to gain readers, and if you’re in it for a monetary payoff, you want to gain advertisers as well. Gaining ground in both of these areas is a very time consuming job and you’ll need a lot of patience to see it through.
When I first started out blogging I had one blog, this one. I exchanged links by asking doing the usual: contacting like-minded bloggers with similar content and asking, no, begging, for link exchanges to promote my blog and boost Google Page Rank (PR). I did good for about two months and then it got really old. Once it got really old, my traffic got really stagnant. And it kept that way until about 2 months ago when I hired on some other bloggers and have been able to focus the bulk of my efforts on building traffic and gaining advertisers.
Although my efforts in both these categories aren’t nearly as “expert” as others claim to be I’m working towards learning all the ins and outs of SEO and the enticement of visitors. Blogging is fun, but watching traffic grow as you work behind the scenes can be just as rewarding.
If you are new to blogging, or old to blogging, chances are you’ve seen a few blog posts about SEO and you’ve probably tried to build your Google search results ranking before. But as I mentioned it can get old really quick. Stick with it! It becomes more and more rewarding the further along you go. Sure you’ll hit some lulls and you’ll probably loose ranking and then gain ranking. Don’t complain about Google screwing you, do something about it and try and figure out why, then fix it.
To help you out I found this great article over at Problogger.net posted by Darren’s guest poster Tony Hung all about how to market your blog. In it he lists and describes 41 ways you can use to market your blog, or website for that matter. Below is a list of my 3 favorites, but there’s plenty more.
1. Spend time to create links and trackbacks – This works, no matter how much you don’t think so, over time, it works
2. Get Your MyBlogLog widget – I just started this one after reading this article, seems simple and automagically gets the word out about your blog.
3. Get Dugg / Netscaped / Reddited / Stumbled upon – Gotta do this one, if you don’t you’ll be left behind.
There are a ton of ways you can market your blog. You just have to trust what you read about SEO and follow through. Doing one or two exchanges is great, but have you stumbled something, join a network, written about someone else’s post, tried to make a friend, participated in forums, commented? You have to do it all if you want to get your blog to the top of the blogosphere.
It takes time, I work on it for literally hours every night. And I’m only now seeing the payoff after 2 months straight. I plan on keeping it up and so should you.
