If you are a blogger who is trying to sell something with your blog – you have to be proactive about marketing your blog. Here are a few tips on how to get the word out about your blog.
1. If you have website separate from the blog, place an obvious call to action on your site promoting your blog and vise versa.
2. Get yourself signed up for Facebook’s Networked Blogs applications – this is a great way to promote your blog to your social connections. Once someone on Facebook follows your blog it’s posted on their profile and can cause a viral effect in getting you more followers.
3. Use a blogging application like WordPress that allows you to use plugins that will “ping” your content. In other words, when you post a new article your blog gets “pinged” and sent out across cyberspace to blog ping servers that amass this information for blog search engines like Technorati and Google Blog Search.
4. Be sure to incorporate your blog feed into your LinkedIn profile and also feel free to post links to your latest posts in relevant groups that you belong to within LinkedIn’s virtual community.
5. Get yourself on Twitter and start tweeting when you have a new post. Some of your followers who read your content will “re-tweet” the link to your blog if they like what they’ve read, and then their followers hear about it and so-on. Again a very viral effect to grow a following to your blog.
6. And the most important thing you can be doing is participating in other high traffic blogs – set yourself up with an RSS feed to blogs that you want to follow. They may relate to your business whether it be to the products or servicees you offer, or the industries that you serve. Be proactive about leaving well thought out comments on other blogs that you follow. Every comment you leave will include a link back to your blog. Be sure to reference specific points in the post so the author knows you really took the time to read it – rather than just saying “great post!”
Your blog is meant to set you apart as a subject matter expert in your industry – try to post at least once a week – and get yourself involved in other blogs. You can start out slow, try commenting on one blog per day and work your way up to 5 comments per day. Once you get used it – it will be time well spent and you will reap the rewards by the visits and comments that will be left on your blog, and ultimately growing your customer base.
Happy blogging!
