The following post has been submitted by Neil Patel from Pronet Advertising and Quick Sprout.
If you are trying to increase the popularity of your blog, chances are you’ve already looked into search engine optimization (seo) or leveraging social media sites. There is nothing wrong with using these methods and you should probably try using them, but if you have already exhausted all the common methods of marketing your blog then here are 5 uncommon methods that work well:
1. Comments – People get lazy when it comes to posting comments on other blog on a regular basis. You may say that you don’t have the time or that you don’t want to post comments on other blogs because the majority are your competitors. It doesn’t matter, if you post comments on other blogs on a regular basis and give valuable advice many of those readers will start looking up to you and start reading your blog. If you do this for months you can get thousands of new readers as well as increase your blogs popularity.
2. Social Networks – MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo and some of the most popular websites on the Internet, so why not leverage them? They get millions of visitors a day and there’s no reason not to create profiles on every one of these sites. When building your profiles you can talk about your blog as well as link to it which will cause more visitors to flood into your website.
3. Blogroll – Lots of bloggers avoid blogrolls because they hate linking out but by using a blogroll you will get more people to link back to you. Not only does this help with search engines, but more importantly will it drive visitors to your website. When adding sites to your blogroll, don’t just do it because you want a link back from a specific site, do it because you think it is a great blog.
4. Widgets – Who would have thought widgets can increase the popularity of your blog? If you are one of those people, take a look at MyBlogLog. When you setup a community like that, new bloggers will learn about you and start reading your blog. The other great thing about MyBlogLog is that you can friend other random bloggers which causes many of them to friend you back and look into your blog.
5. Offline – When people market their blogs they usually do so online. If you go to work or meet tons of new people on a daily basis you should share your blog with them if you feel it will benefit them. Every time I go to a conference or a meetup, I usually tell people about my blog and within a day or so I see an increase in RSS subscribers.
There are many other unconventional ways you can market your blog, these are just some of the methods I use. Anybody else have other “uncommon” ideas to market your blog?
Don’t offer the ability to post comments on the blog and no one will know that you only get 20 uniques a day. Once you’re upwards of 100 RSS subscribers or 1000 unique visitors per day, you can open up the comments and see light activity.
I disagree. I think that having comments open from the start will help to increase your readership. People like to comment on blogs. If you don’t give them that option, you’ve just decreased the chances of them sticking around. I know there are a few popular blogs that don’t let readers leave comments, but I think these are the exception.
Besides, even if you have hundreds of readers, odds are that most of your comments will come from a much smaller “core” group of readers.
One last thing–a lot of people judge the quality of a blog by the number of comments it receives. If they visit your blog in the early stages and see that you have no comments, or don’t allow comments, they may never return.
These are good reminders, but not really all that “uncommon.” I do at least 4 out of the 5 regularly for several of my blogs, and I know a lot of bloggers do at least use blogrolls and commenting. Maybe it’s just that I’m in niches that have embraced those from the start… I don’t know. It would be good to see more written on offline blog promotion though. A lot of bloggers probably don’t even know where to start with that.
I also have difficulty with commenting on other blogs…I just have to take the time to do it. I think I will carve an hour a day to do just this. I think my main excuse for not doing this is that I have so much ‘real’ work to do, it just seems like I am not working when I do this. But I can see how it can have an impact on my own blogs. So thanks! for the reminder.
:)
for a while I wasn’t commenting on blogs because I just didn’t have the time. but generally i actually enjoy giving other bloggers feedback about what they write, that is why they write, not just to tell others things but to start a conversation with them.
Offline: Traditional marketing is one of the things that bloggers seem to overlook, badly. I always have business cards for the different things I’m involved with. In my wallet now are my personal card (I’m a photographer), my work card (I still have a real job as a network admin), and my “fun” blog (click my name to see it).
For my fun blog, I have several contributing writers in different parts of the country, I’ve created and mailed them all their own cards. This has gone over very well with all of them as they feel part of something now, and feel official.
I’m working on getting some vinyl stickers made too, everyone loves stickers =)
I agree a lot with the comments thing. However, it is a very strenous exercise for any blogger. To visit quite a few blogs and leave meaningful comments on their posts for a consistent amount of time is time-consuming and also required a huge amount of intellectual engagement.
However, if it is followed religiously it can be productive and can drive a lot of traffic and also build wonderful relationships with other bloggers. That is extremely crucial for any blogger.
FeedFlares have provided an excellent means to market my various sites via RSS.
I think this list is missing. Have you checked Peopleized.com ? People make interview with people. After making an interview, you can copy and paste the interview to your blog and publish it. Super cool!
I am sure this way you can market your blog better than any other options mentioned in this post.
Well thats the way to promote or market your blog, but can anyone tell the way to promote your website as its pages are going in supplemental results.
Thanks, Samay Ahuja.
Replies awaited
I think that offline marketing is the most overlooked aspect of picking up blog numbers. I work in the consumer tech publishing field, so I’m always mixing and mingling with people, both PR and the average joe consumer. I always make sure to have my blog cards on hand.
Scream your blog out your car window.
Now i know how i can increase traffic to my site. Thankyou for posting this great information!
Uncommon ways to market your blog… Would you recommend we do these before, after or DURING the ‘common’ ways to promote a blog.
My new blog is getting about 30-80 visitors a day, lately more towards 80. I think most of them are coming from one popular internet marketing forum though. The problem I think with it is content. I need a base of ideas to just sit down and write. I HAVE them, but I feel a lot of it deals with SEO techniques that I myself am still learning. That being the case, why would people want to listen to me? I know they work, I just need to get people to know I know they do. My site is 10 days old, btw.
THanks,
zerk
http://forumsforsocialnetworking.com
I like tips number 1 and 3………Cool info…. :)
A great post Darren! Especially on the social networking, which I think the most important free way to generate traffic. I start to comment on other’s blogs today. Hope I can see some traffic come to my blog :-)
Thank you so much for this site, It have helped me a lot. It is not all of us that understands everything behind promoting a basic thing, so I indeed thank you for the help. I am surely returning to your site here, because you explain things in a very good way. Thank you for sharing what you know with the world.
Sincerely,
Karima / WindBlower
3 and 4 rather interesting.
5 will not make significant traffic.
Great tips, I just recently started bloging and this information is going to really help be to get better at it or so I hope. I am going to start here by leaving you a comment. Kudus to you, I and thank you.
I agree with most of the other comments on widgets, but what a new way to promote your blog, and website, is by incorporating your blog into your site. Then use a program like twitter to send out the daily signal and drive more traffic to your site.
I will certainly give this a try. I am going to start actively responding to posts and see what it does for my site. I am really hoping that readers will spread through word of mouth though.
The best – THE BEST – way to get people reading your blog, is to write stuff that people want to read! It might sound radical, but like others have noted, when people are using the web to merely get clicks, the web doesn’t become too interesting anymore.
http://blog.nburmandesign.com
Blog is your opinion about certain things
donno why you need to market those..its like pushing something to someone
anyway – tips were great
Taking your advice and commenting on your blog.
Hey, thanks for your information. I just launched my blog yesteday and one of the first things I did was list a blogroll. Who knows, maybe it will lead to “friendships” with some of my favorite blogs. Wish me luck and please check out my newborn blog, called Lindsey Lou! Blogs at http://www.lindseyloubloogs.blogspot.com.
I know this is a very old post, but it still has a lot of good advice!
I’ve found the most valuable uncommon way to market my blog is through my Twitter page. I’ll start the post as a Tweet, and then post the link to the complete blog post. Readers will generally click through to read the longer post.
Thanks!
Suz Stewart