I thought I might share some of the methods I’ve found for promoting my blog. This was prompted by reading this article by Jason Van Dyke. I’ve had experience in setting up other blogs, and through that I’ve found some useful tools and ways of doing things.One point to make is that promoting yourself and promoting you blog can be two very different things, depending on how you want to promote yourself.
I’ve tried to order these by priority – the number one suggestion below I’ve found to be better at driving traffic than later suggestions.
- What’s a blog without content? This is the number 1 way to get visitors to your site, and to keep people interested. Without regular, original, interesting/useful (for your audience) content, other suggestions here aren’t going to help much. It also helps to use words that represent what your site is about, and links to other quality websites. This tells search engines (and readers!) that you’re actively involved.
- Use your site’s URL when you comment, and comment often. I used to just surf around reading things, and never really had the inclination to comment. Now that I know a bit more about my particular areas of interest, I’m more willing to comment. This is also an opportunity to show search engines that your website is actually known/linked by other sites.
- Use the webmaster tools search engines make available. These tools offer ways to submit you sitemap, so search engines can more easily crawl the entire site. They also let oyu know about any errors encountered on your website. If you are using wordpress, there’s a plugin that can do the work for you.
- Link to your website or blog from your accounts on web apps. Many allow you to enter one or two urls as your home pages. Make use of them.
- When you have a new post, don’t be afraid of letting people know about it. Do this sparingly, as not everyone likes to have individual posts ‘spammed’ at them.
That’s the way I promote my blog. I hope that helps a bit.
Promoting myself is another matter. I prefer to simply put my name to things, and let people find them. I don’t want to force myself onto people – if they like the content, they’ll know who it’s by.
