How to "sell" your blog

[busygoat]

Hi,

I am a recent blogger and at this point i don't have a whole lot of traffic on my blog. I figured this means I have 2 problems:

1. I don't know how to promote my blog
2. I don't know how to sell my content

I am only going to talk about the second one here, for not to fall off-topic.

I don't think I have a lot of returning visitors, except for some friends, which probably isn't very relevant.

People read a post, MAYBE comment and then they're gone forever.

I was wondering how do all of you create solid readership? How do you sell your blog to your readers?

[Melody]

Your questions are the age-old mysterious questions that everyone wants to know about: How do I get visitors to my blog?

Everyone has different strategies. I can only tell you want has worked for me. So caveat: These are my strategies. My blog is a PR 4, and gets about 18,000 unique visitors a month.

1. Your content has to be incredibly unique, well written, and just very very very good. It does NOT have to be controversial. I actually try to avoid anything controversial on my blog. I'm not saying that I've got unique, well written content, but this is what I strive for.

2. Update a minimum of 2 times per week, to a maximum of 4 times per week. Do NOT update your blog daily. You'll wear out your RSS subscribers with too many posts, and your quality will drop, despite what you think.

3. Use twitter. Connect with others who love the same things you do. Do NOT use twitter as a feed, to just push out links. That's a spammer, not social.

4. Create a facebook page for your blog, and have a link so that other can "like" your blog. It will make it easier for people to follow your updates if they've liked your blog on facebook.

5. Find other bloggers in your same niche and love them. Getting visitors means being giver. And I have to admit, there are a few others in my exact same niche as mine, and they have great blogs.

6. Do all of these things over and over again. How you use twitter is critical. If you're not being social, following people, and connecting, you may likely be perceived as spam. Remember, you do not have to read everything in your tweet stream. You can use lists feature to keep yourself organized.

7. Avoid ads. You'll never get rich blogging, and most readers do not want to be distracted with advertisements. Or keep ads to a bare minimum. I have only one ad on my blog - an amazon.com widget in my right side column.

Like I said, those strategies have worked for me. I guarantee you that everyone has different ideas about will work. Many people will say you should submit to ezine (I strongly disagree) or try to submit to directories (also a waste of time in my opinion- Google knows what a link farm is, and people will use search engines to find your content.) I have NOT done these other strategies like ezine submission, or directory submission, because with google algorithms as sophisticated as they are now, I no longer think it is good advice. Remember, google is amazingly smart, you can't outwit it into a higher PR.

Those are my thoughts. Just my opinions only. I want to make that super clear: The above steps are what have worked for me.

[busygoat]

Originally Posted by Melody

Your questions are the age-old mysterious questions that everyone wants to know about: How do I get visitors to my blog?

Everyone has different strategies. I can only tell you want has worked for me. So caveat: These are my strategies. My blog is a PR 4, and gets about 18,000 unique visitors a month.

1. Your content has to be incredibly unique, well written, and just very very very good. It does NOT have to be controversial. I actually try to avoid anything controversial on my blog. I'm not saying that I've got unique, well written content, but this is what I strive for.

2. Update a minimum of 2 times per week, to a maximum of 4 times per week. Do NOT update your blog daily. You'll wear out your RSS subscribers with too many posts, and your quality will drop, despite what you think.

3. Use twitter. Connect with others who love the same things you do. Do NOT use twitter as a feed, to just push out links. That's a spammer, not social.

4. Create a facebook page for your blog, and have a link so that other can "like" your blog. It will make it easier for people to follow your updates if they've liked your blog on facebook.

5. Find other bloggers in your same niche and love them. Getting visitors means being giver. And I have to admit, there are a few others in my exact same niche as mine, and they have great blogs.

6. Do all of these things over and over again. How you use twitter is critical. If you're not being social, following people, and connecting, you may likely be perceived as spam. Remember, you do not have to read everything in your tweet stream. You can use lists feature to keep yourself organized.

7. Avoid ads. You'll never get rich blogging, and most readers do not want to be distracted with advertisements. Or keep ads to a bare minimum. I have only one ad on my blog - an amazon.com widget in my right side column.

Like I said, those strategies have worked for me. I guarantee you that everyone has different ideas about will work. Many people will say you should submit to ezine (I strongly disagree) or try to submit to directories (also a waste of time in my opinion- Google knows what a link farm is, and people will use search engines to find your content.) I have NOT done these other strategies like ezine submission, or directory submission, because with google algorithms as sophisticated as they are now, I no longer think it is good advice. Remember, google is amazingly smart, you can't outwit it into a higher PR.

Those are my thoughts. Just my opinions only. I want to make that super clear: The above steps are what have worked for me.

Thank you, Melody, I will try to follow your advice!

[cp9195]

It doesn't happen overnight. Most blogs take years to build solid traffic.

You have to have a lot of patience and a long term mindset. Many people have seen the blog traffic suddenly surge.

It doesn't hurt to try out a few different blogs on different topics. You never know what is going to hit.