Marketing Ideas&Management Stuffs

http://ibrahim.cn/2010/08/20/promoting-your-blog/Promoting Your BlogMarketing Ideas&Management Stuffs

Your blog has been out there for a bit now, so it’s time to tell people about it.   You can do the whole job of networking and participating on blogs, which is ideal, but there are a number of other participatory strategies that can be employed to get your blog’s name out there.

Blog & Feed Directories

You can submit your blog to a number of directories.  There are hundreds and most are free, but we’ll review a handful and point you to additional resources should you aim to get complete directory coverage.

1. Best of the Web Blog Search (http://blogs.botw.org): This paid option ($39.95) is well worth the investment, as Best of the Web is one of the most well-respected paid directories on the Internet and employs human quality reviewers.
2. DMOZ (http://www.dmoz.org): The Open Directory Project is a free directory submission and is heavily valued by Google and other high-profile partner sites.  Editors review blog content based on quality.
3. Blogged (http://www.blogged.com): Blogged contains over 200,000 blogs and advertises tools that enable content discovery.  An online community is also maintained where bloggers can interact with one another.
4. Zimbio: (http://www.zimbio.com) Zimbio is a resource for “online web magazines.”
5. MyBlogLog (http://www.mybloglog.com): This analytics package has more than just statistics: it also has a built-in user community.  If you’ve spotted a widget that identifies recent visitors by their avatar, chances are that it’s a MyBlogLog widget.

1. BlogCatalog (http://www.blogcatalog.com): BlogCatalog is similar to MyBlogLog in the sense that it also integrates community features with a very similar-looking widget.  It also boasts a powerful API.
2. Bloggapedia (http://www.bloggapedia.com/): This is a blog submission directory that features paid featured links ($29.99) and regular links that are free to submit.
3. Technorati (http://technorati.com/): As the premier search engine for blogs, Technorati is a directory that you must submit your blog to.  While Google Blog Search is incredibly effective, Technorati is often considered the “Google of the Blogosphere” with the familiar brand that all active and engaged bloggers know.  Consequently, this is not a directory to overlook.
4. BlogPulse (http://blogpulse.com/): BlogPulse is a Nielsen BuzzMetrics service that highlights trends within the blogosphere, similar to Technorati.
5. EatonWeb: The Blog Directory (http://portal.eatonweb.com/) is one of the oldest blog directories on the web, with blogs ranked by strength, momentum, and an overall score.

Additional blog directories are listed at TopRank Online Marketing Blog, Search Engine Journal, and MasterNewMedia.

Blogrolls

Another way to get noticed is to provide blogrolls for your readers and to be included on blogrolls of relevant sites.  A blogroll is simply a collection of links that typically appear on the sidebar of a blog.  If your blog is included on a blogroll, this is a good sign, as the link itself is usually an endorsement by the blogger.  It’s one of the highest forms of praise since it’s a perpetual link that shows up on the front page.

If you are active on other blogs and have established a relationship with the author of the site, it should not hurt to ask for blogroll inclusion.  If you’re an active participant, you can ask if you’ve earned the privilege to be included on a blogroll.

In some instances, networking alone may not be sufficient for blogroll inclusion.  If your blog is stale and not constantly updated, your chances may be slimmer.  If, on the other hand, your blog is updated frequently and provides valuable information on a regular basis, other people will take notice and those people may be the ones who eventually add you to their blogroll.  They may not even know who you are (networking isn’t necessarily a requirement), but they love your content that much to endorse it.  If your content stands by itself and can hold its own, it may be the perfect bait for a blogroll.

Blogroll relationships don’t just happen like link exchanges.  They’re a high form of trust, and as such, you usually need to be a proven blogger to get included on such a high-esteemed list.  It all depends on the bloggers, however.  Some have different criteria for how they update their blogrolls.  If in doubt, ask.

Memes, Contests, & Community Projects

Several other ways to promote your content begin with blog memes, running contests, and holding community projects where your readership participates by writing posts on their own blogs.

Run a blog meme. A great way to promote your blog and bring awareness to a specific cause is to run a blog meme (a “meme” being a unit of cultural transmission).  The idea behind a blog meme is to start off sharing information about you and then tagging a number of people and asking them how they’d answer the same question.  In hundreds of posts, people start spreading ideas and the original links get spread as well.  Often, a blogger should contact the person he or she tagged to let them know they’re “it,” and they’ll pay it forward by tagging their friends (and linking back to you).

Popular past blog memes include “5 Things You May Not Know About Me,” “My Favorite Charity,” and “What Magazines Do You Read?”  SoloSEO has tracked popular memes in the past and illustrates how virally they can spread.

A note about blog memes: try to tag people who occasionally blog about themselves.  Some bloggers won’t create personal posts on principle, but others are very liberal with what kind of posts they choose to make.  Many bigger bloggers have to satisfy a tremendous audience and may not necessarily respond to the blog meme for editorial concerns and fear that they’re ostracizing users since they would rather share the “news,” not “personal tidbits.”  As a common courtesy, if you get tagged in a blog meme and cannot participate, let the tagger know so that they can tag someone else who can.

Have a contest. If you are a big blogger (or even if you’re not), contests are easy to set up and require no major overhead.  Giveaways can be relatively cheap and include iTunes music certificates or Amazon gift cards.  In the case of larger blogs, numerous sponsors often chip in to provide books, cash, computers, cameras, and more, which is all the more compelling reason for your readers to participate in these contests.  Some popular contests include photo caption contests (where you provide a targeted photo to your audience and let them write the most creative caption), asking a question about a particular technology and choosing the best answer (e.g., what is your favorite social network application and why?), and possibly using third party software such as SurveyMonkey to get detailed responses to questions in return for a nice prize (as long as you record the participants’ email addresses).   One popular contest is Andy Beal’s SEM Scholarship contest, where readers write guest posts for his blog on any topic related to SEM and are eligible for over $10,000 in prizes.

Hold a community project. If you have a large readership, a great way to build solid links is to hold a community project.  Ask your readers to offer a bit of advice on their blog about some specific topic and then provide you with the links.  After the project period expires, link back to all the post submissions.  An example is the Daily Blog Tips Blog Writing Project, where editor Daniel Scocco solicited blog entries related to blog tips and received 122 posts for his blog in a short period of eight days.  He then listed all participants’ blog posts in a final list and categorized them into sections for easy readability.  The result of the community blogging project brings targeted traffic back to your blog, awareness of the project on the participant’s blog, and ultimately, a link back the participant’s blog as a gesture of “thanks” for participating.  The relationship is, therefore, beneficial to both the community project hosts and to those who participate in the project.

Comments, Trackbacks, Guest Posts, and Other Participatory Strategies

There’s more you can do besides hosting the content on your blog for promotional purposes.  The key to this strategy is all in networking.  The more you network with like-minded bloggers, the more likely you are to have them discover your content and establish a relationship with you.  After all, blogging is not just about sharing ideas but about being inherently social.

Read other blogs and comment. One way to network is by reading other blogs and writing insightful comments on the blog entry.  In this case, you can link back to your blog (the smart idea is to use your name, not some “Free SEO  Newsletter” identifier for link value – it looks silly and there is no link juice as blog comment links are generally nofollowed).  Engage in a real dialog with the blogger and they’ll recognize you, too.  For promotional strategy, relate to the blog post and provide valuable commentary rather than “Great post!” Some spam filters actually disallow generic comments as a precaution.  If you have a related blog post you’d like to point out, it may also suffice, but most bloggers don’t like too much self-promotion from guests/commenters, so use this tactic sparingly.  If you’re a big fan and want to be made known, comment often.  Eventually, even the biggest bloggers will know who you are.

Link out – and generously. Link out to relevant sites on related topics.  While you may not necessarily feel that this is a benefit to you, as you may lose the reader to the other story, that’s usually not the case. (If readers navigate to the other story, it’s typically after they finish reading yours.)  When you link to other blogs, upon publishing your blog post, a trackback will be generated that will alert other bloggers that your content has linked to them.  Often, that is a way of letting the blogger know that you endorse his/her content.  If the trackback is approved by the blogger you linked to (and the blogger displays trackbacks in their comments), your link will appear on the bottom of the comments.  While trackback links are nofollowed, readers who seek out related material may click on that link.  If they find it valuable, they may link to you, and so on.

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