How is Your Blog Promotion Going? Are you Passing or Failing?

[Bloggeries]

How's your Blog Promotion going? Are you doing anything to get yourself "out there" in the blogosphere? If not you don't need to keep checking your AW-Stats because besides Technorati and some of you lucky enough to get Search Engine traffic there won't be much.

I can't stress enough the need to do link building, submit to some directories to get crawled and other similar websites. Most people's journey's START on the search engines but from there it becomes more of a stumble upon effect only via links on sites. You search "for whatever" and a page comes up, from that page you link to others until you are 5-10 clicks away from the initial starting point. What site are you on? Why are you there? You're there because the owners of both sites did link building. Without link building you are seriously limiting your exposure and reach on the internet. Search engines are GREAT for traffic but by all means are NOT the only.

Please do yourself a favour and avoid burnout by working on some link building and promotion. Nothing is more disheartening then spending lots of time testing and tweaking a site but never getting any visitors. I'm convinced this is why many blogs fade away into oblivion is because they never got an audience and the sad part is, the author often never gave the blog a chance to get one.

So spend just a bit less time blogging and some more time doing promotion. It will pay off 10 fold if done correctly and give you a chance at getting an audience. If you are already participating in forums like this and reading techniques from other members you are on the right track but just keep going!

Best of luck!

[Kamigoroshi]

You can't get readers though just submitting your links to directories and such. Content is still king. If you don't have anything to offer people, submitting your blog to directories might be akin to just promoting spam.

Developing reputation means interacting with the community, whether it be the people that comment on your blog, the networks and forums you join, the niches of blogs you belong to. Anyone given the right circumstance can get their stream of hits and your 15 minutes of audience. What you want really is those people to keep coming back.

You can't do that when you really have nothing to offer people.

[Bloggeries]

I couldn't agree more, that is why I also wrote the Content is King thread. Promoting something that offers no value is pointless, but one you've built a great resource you have to get the word out and let the world know.

Originally Posted by Kamigoroshi

You can't get readers though just submitting your links to directories and such. Content is still king. If you don't have anything to offer people, submitting your blog to directories might be akin to just promoting spam.

Developing reputation means interacting with the community, whether it be the people that comment on your blog, the networks and forums you join, the niches of blogs you belong to. Anyone given the right circumstance can get their stream of hits and your 15 minutes of audience. What you want really is those people to keep coming back.

You can't do that when you really have nothing to offer people.

[scottfow]

Indeed content is still king! Links are useless if your posts are boring. If your content is really good. Your readers will be the ones to promote your blog for you.

[Bloggeries]

Very true, someone also told me that if you always build your site with the end user in mind you are indirectly building a site that search engines will love.

Originally Posted by scottfow

Indeed content is still king! Links are useless if your posts are boring. If your content is really good. Your readers will be the ones to promote your blog for you.

[mwgr5]

While content is the most imporant part of the blog, link building can be very effective for driving targeted traffic. For example, a large amount of my traffic comes from my signature in postings in forums that are related to the subject of my blog. Also, link building in related blogs help drive targeted traffic. In addition link building is good for seo and Page rank.

[Bloggeries]

Agreed, only after link building and seo you need to have a solid product or service to offer or maybe even adsense in some cases so that you properly monetize the traffic. If you get creative you can come up with good matches for your content. That's what I"m in the process of doing now in some parts of the site.

Rob

Originally Posted by mwgr5

While content is the most imporant part of the blog, link building can be very effective for driving targeted traffic. For example, a large amount of my traffic comes from my signature in postings in forums that are related to the subject of my blog. Also, link building in related blogs help drive targeted traffic. In addition link building is good for seo and Page rank.

[Zhuli]

I think 90% of my readers came to my blog because I left a comment on theirs, or because we're on the same forum (i.e bloggeries). Linking really makes sense for personal blogs. Since I'm not selling or teaching anything, I need good content and regular readers. I can't really advertise anything.

I found blog review was a great was to get blog promotion as well. I got a few so far and I got some new readers.

[DrunkenHousewife]

I'm really happy with how my blog does on search engines. If you search for a number of things (such as "drunken housewife", for example), you'll find my blog right up near the top, if not at the very top.

But that doesn't mean huge readership. I get about 100-200 readers a day (usually closer to 100 unique readers with about 200 page views per day, as some people read more than one page). On the biggest day, I had over 1,000 readers (there was a link to my blog on the Daily Kos that day).

I'd like to develop my readership, but I really want GOOD readers who want to read my stuff. (It's a personal blog: snarky anecdotes about my daily life, cute stuff my weird children did, my cynical observations..). I got some good new readers from a blog review on I Will Tear You Apart and from being on The Rising Blogger as Blog of the day. I'd love more suggestions on places like that I can submit my blog which will help readers find me. (My readers are largely highly educated people with dark senses of humor, typically middle-aged).

Suggestions appreciated! (I like this forum, by the way. I'm glad I found it).

[jshaffstall]

Originally Posted by Zhuli

I think 90% of my readers came to my blog because I left a comment on theirs, or because we're on the same forum (i.e bloggeries).

That's the best way for new blogs to get readers, in my opinion. My early traffic came exclusively from comments on other blogs, and casual traffic from MyBlogLog.com.

Now that I have enough content in place to interest Google, I'm getting regular search engine traffic, too.

Another tool is holding contests. There are now a number of contest roundup blogs that list various contests. Hold a contest and get a mention in all of those, and you'll attract some new readers, too.

Jay