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How To Market Your Blog in 2007

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It breaks my heart to see blogs with great content languish in utter anonymity, devoid of comments, saddled with a seven-figure alexa traffic ranking, and rotting in pagerank purgatory.

Well, no more, I say!

For those bloggers out there who have decided to start their blogs, or launch their blogging careers, in 2007 I salute you — and present to you with 41 ways to kickstart your marketing efforts. Kick back, grab a cold one, and check it out. And if, in a year’s time, you’ve cracked the Technorati 1000, don’t forget where it all began! :)

Get Your Own House In Order

  1. Write well, write consistently, don’t give up: All the marketing in the world won’t help you if you have a lame-duck blog. In your search for more traffic, more promotion, and more publicity, never forget it starts with great content — and needs to continue with great content on a regular schedule. There’s no question that maintaining quality and regularity is difficult while you’re starting out, particularly if you’re time strapped … but hang in there, because if you sacrifice this, all of your marketing efforts will be for naught.
  2. Become an expert on something: Develop a keen interest, continue to read and write intelligently, and after a while, your experience will grant you this informal title; bloggers will seek you out, your reknown will grow, and it will be easier to be noticed, linked to, and get cross promoted (see below)
  3. Design is more important than you think: Your mother’s right — first impressions count, and they can count for cash money. If you’re serious about blogging, don’t stick with a n unaltered top10 WordPress theme no matter how cool you think it is. You want to separate and elevate yourself from the blogging masses, and its impossible to do if you look exactly the same as them. Easy to say, hard to do, but absolutely necessary if you don’t have the money to pay for a private ground-up theme: learn CSS and a photoeditor of choice, and learn to tweak your theme yourself, so that your blog looks professional, stands out, and screams “yes, I am worthy of your attention!”.
  4. Get Your SEO On: An entire post in and of itself — get your own domain name, host your own blogging software, enable permalinks, create keyword rich headlines, create unique title tags, enable trackback and ping functionality, ensure your blog pings pinging-services.
  5. Publish full feeds: A controversial topic. Publishing full feeds puts you at the mercy for content scrapers who will scrape your RSS feeds and repost your content, create traffic, and reap adsense bucks. On the other hand, some data suggests that it can also increase your traffic, and a few pundits swear by it. Feed subscriptions are critical; get your feeds burned through Feedburner so you can track how many are subscribing. People who subscribe to feeds rarely unsubscribe, and every single feed subscriber is a potential source of traffic to your blog.
  6. Do interviews with other bloggers: Score interviews with newsworthy individuals (who may be linked to newsworthy content), to create link worthy content, but more importantly, create news on THEIR blog to get back to YOUR blog.
  7. Break important stories: See the post on how to find news. Long story short: if you have an interest in an area, it is still possible to do this as long as you’re willing to put in the time and energy to find stuff. Benefit: being picked up by A-list blogs, mainstream news outlets and more.
  8. Have a contest: Or, have regular contests, which encourage participation and buzz in your corner of the blogosphere.
  9. Publish original research: If you’ve got the time, start with a question, try and figure it out with the data available, and “publish it”. For fun, I asked myself “How many of the Top 30 Diggers actually blog?” And I just went through their profiles and created a table of how many blogged. I then talked about what it meant, and tried to answer the question “why?” [answer: not many do blog, its because being a top 30 digger requires a huge time investment]
  10. Put out Press Releases: Particularly if you have something new, unique, or particularly important to say (such as an important story, or research)
  11. Work your long tail: A tip based on your SEO efforts; there is a free service called Hit Tail that will analyze the search terms leading to your blog traffic, and yank out high quality key words you should be focusing on that you might not immediately think of. This can help you focus your future posts as you are already getting traffic for those key words.
  12. Answer your comments, in your comments, and off blog: Of course you have enabled comments on every post, right? So, when you do get comments, answer as many as humanly possible, and if its an interesting enough issue or question, contact the poster directly for a friendly follow up. Treat every potential poster as a potential subscriber to your feed, and a future friend and contact.
  13. Spend time to create links and trackbacks: In every post spend as much time as you can to create outbound links to relevant and high linking blogs; many blogs automatically have trackbacks enabled, so in their comments section they will have a link back to your blog. If its a highly trafficked and ranked blog, this can mean traffic BACK to your blog, and it can draw notice from the author themselves — because, let’s face it, we’re all vain in a fashion, even A-listers, and we’re all interested in who is linking to us.
  14. Get Your MyBlogLog widget and work it, work it, work it (in a nice way): MyBlogLog — know it, love it, and embrace it. Since its been acquired by Yahoo, it has the potential to explode all over the blogosphere. The two sentence run down is that it offers a free widget that enables you to build a free community around your blog, and to easily see which other bloggers have been to your blog. You can “add” friends, and generate traffic, but more importantly, your own network of like-minded blogging colleagues in a way that is relatively easy and efficient. Just go easy on the unsolicited messages. I wrote a complete review over here.

Getting the Word Out

  1. Join a blog carnival: Where every blogger who joins one blogs about a topic, then each blog gets promoted. Here’s an index of blog carnivals to get you started.
  2. Join blog network: Between 9rules, b5media, and others, there is networking potential, income potential, and a link-a-palooza waiting for you (through the linkroll as every member may have to link to every other member) if you’re able to get into one. Goes back to tip #1 — don’t forget to keep up your blog.
  3. Participate in forums: Forums with tons of pages, huge lists of members, and a responsive community are an easy way to not only connect with other individuals, but an opportunity to tastefully demonstrate your expertise and a link back to your blog
  4. Participate on larger blogs in comments: Like number three, except that by participating directly in another blogger’s comments you a) get their recognition and b) get the recognition of the blogging community. Also, here’s a tip: try and be one of the first few commenters on heavily trafficked sites to get recognized — most people won’t read past the first 10-20 comments. Here’s another tip for traffic: IF (and ONLY IF) you have posted something relevant that is pursuant to the ongoing conversation and IF the blog has a commenting policy that will allow you to do so, post a link back to a post on your own site (“hey guys, I wrote about how we can solve this problem! — check out the link over here, but let me summarize it for you … “). Sometimes you’ll be surprised at how much traffic comes back.
  5. Join Blogburst: Blogburst is a type of “blog network”, which syndicates content across American newspaper’s websites, such as USA Today and Reuters. That’s right, you could get a post syndicated on Reuters. Trust me — it can happen . Highly ranked inbound links + traffic + bragging rights to your mom that your post got featured in a newspaper. Not too shabby. Also on the upside, they have a new revenue sharing scheme. The bad: read their terms of service carefully — you give up certain rights when they republish your content, and the revenue sharing works on the top100 publishers only.
  6. Participate in Darren’s contests: He has enough of them, and often publishes links to all of the participants.
  7. Submit to blog directories: So people can find your blog.
  8. Submit to Google sitemaps: Really part of “get your house in order”, but when you do, Google will be able to find you so much easier; translation — more Google juice, more traffic, higher rankings faster. Tip: for WordPress fans, this plugin is particularly useful.
  9. Submit to article directories: You might want to submit your favourite posts to article directories, where they will enable you to have a biobox / blurb with a link back to your own blog. Again, demonstrating your expertise, and moreover, the article might get picked up in a ezine or another blog, leading to more traffic and more inbound links.
  10. Get interviewed: If you’ve demonstrated your expertise, or have done something newsworthy, or reported on something newsworthy, try and get interviewed. As long as its done in a fair way (doesn’t need to be a completely puffpiece) by a site or blogger with some reknown, its more traffic for you.
  11. Get listed on a news aggregator, or blog aggregator: Like Techmeme for technews, or Tailrank for blogging news. Hint: some news aggregators will actually accept submissions if you ask them nicely; double hint: try and get listed by linking to a top story within your first 100 words.
  12. Create free stuff for yourself and give it away: Like ebooks, digests of your favourite posts, pdfs, and so on. Make sure to include a link back in the document, back to your site.
  13. Create free stuff for other people: the same, let them distribute it, get a link back.
  14. Pay for pub: Efficient means of using your cash is to buy targeted Adwords, or keywords in Yahoo’s advertising network; you could get other bloggers to write about you using PayPerPost or ReviewMe; or you purchase text link ads through Text-Link-Ads.com

Connect, Connect, Connect

  1. Make friends with other bloggers: Ridiculously simple, but its true. Benefits of “networking” (making friends) include more mentions on other blogs, more requests for interviews, more partnerships in future deals, more “adds” into their MyBlogLog network, more “ads” into someone else’s blogroll (and therefore links back to your blog) — it goes on and on.
  2. Guest blog: Offer to do it for free, and you’ll be able to demonstrate what you know to an entirely new audience. Gives you great credibility, and of course, most will allow a courtesy link back to your own blog. A free foot-in-the-door to some communities as well.
  3. Volunteer, intern, scut-monkey your way into a blogger’s graces: Maintaining a highly trafficked site is a lot of work. Offer to volunteer your time with menial behind the scenes stuff (moderating posts, acting as a bird dog for news) for free and with a smile, and you’ll get a foot-in-the-door with the blogger, their network, and future opportunities.
  4. Get hired: You never know which blog organizations are looking to hire new bloggers; again, an opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge, meet new bloggers, and open tons of professional “doors” … because now that you’re getting paid? You’re a “pro-blogger”, mate!
  5. Network in person: Find other local bloggers using services like Meetup, and see if they’re literally getting together to commiserate about blogging or their topic of blogging. If you’ve got the time, there’s nothing that makes an impression as actually meeting someone in person. Tip: bring a business card; Another tip: if you don’t have any, make some; yet another tip: if important people are going to be there, really — try and go. Remember, you didn’t know me before Problogger, but I met Darren in person at a function in Toronto that played a part in me writing this. Think about that.
  6. Join virtual groups: Through Yahoo Groups, Usenet, and more; then bring the conversation off the group with emails and instant messages. Be friendly, be helpful, and it will pay dividends.
  7. Cross promote: Once you’ve gotten to know people, you can kindly remind them to promote posts that you’re particularly proud of; or, vote for your submissions on Digg or your social bookmarking site of choice. Reciprocate.

Make Social Media Work For You

  1. Facebook: Its a social network that has opened its doors behind its college beginnings. Anyone can sign up. Start connecting with old friends and colleagues, like any other social network. But, unlike other social networks (as far as I know), you can import your own blog’s RSS feed, so that your connections can see what you’re blogging. Who knows where that might lead? Update: Myspace also allows this function, i believe.
  2. Join Helium: Helium is a new site that is actively looking people to head new categories of content. Think a paid “about.com” — for its authors. If you have a particular interest that isn’t yet served on Helium you might want to check it out; besides giving you cash for content, it’ll also demonstrate your authority in a topic, and you’ll be able to leverage Helium’s own traffic for your own blog through a linkback on your profile.
  3. Yahoo Answers! A similar idea; but this time, you’re answering questions that people are posting. Yahoo! is quite careful about spam, however, and including a “signature” is a dicey proposition at times. There is a fairly sophisticated registry and voting system that tries to prevent “gaming”, but given how much traffic yahoo! answers gets, AND its inclusion as a separate result area in Yahoo SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) it might be something worth looking into.
  4. Create a Squidoo Page Lens: On a given related topic to your blog; participate in the Squidoo community; Squidoo has a ton of traffic, and you could funnel traffic and tastefully include links to other relevant sites and perhaps your own blog.
  5. Use MySpace Marketing: Far beyond the confines of this post, but in a similar fashion to Squidoo, the idea is to capitalize on the HUGE amount of traffic MySpace gets (some interesting thoughts over here). Create a profile, create relevant content and links back. Start adding friends. Comment on your friends space. Join groups. Start enjoying the trickle back traffic.
  6. Get Dugg / Netscaped / Reddited / Stumbled upon: Whole articles (and sites) are written about the intricacies of socially bookmarking. Here’s a tip: focus on creating great content, make friends on these sites if they allow you to, and submit your stories judiciously. ‘Nuff said (for now).

[Yes, I excluded “create viral videos”, because I thought that extended beyond blogging and into video casting — which, I’ll admit isn’t tremendously different, but hey … gotta draw the line somewhere. ]

And at this point, we open the floor to comments, questions, cheers and jeers. If you have any further tips, share’em so we can all learn together! :)

*Tony Hung is the guest blogger for the week, and he blogs at DeepJiveInterests.com

Comments
  1. This website itself is bringing in a good amount of traffic!

  2. You’ve saved me lots of research time–now I just need to figure out how to apply it. Your article is bookmarked for future reference.
    I just placed my first AdSense ad and have generated $8.88 –you gotta love those lucky eights!

  3. I tried article directories, and google sitemaps, but the most effective way was by far, commenting on your accurate information.

  4. Good content delivered frequently, and marketed with the tips you’ve presented above, equals traffic galore.

  5. very useful article thanks.

  6. Well, I’m a little late to the game, but I think the collection of great resources will help me get started right! I am amazed at all the potential anchor points for traffic you have identified. Where do you find the time to collect all this research?

  7. Thanks Tony. A very helpful article. Much appreciated.

  8. Thanks Tony!

    I am new to blogging but this one helps me a lot!

  9. Great tips. I have been trying to market my blog for a while now. Atleast I am an expert in my blog topic!

  10. admonition to back up (I am paranoid and I know they’re out to get me!). But I haven’t been able to burn an archieval DVD of my photographs from the Lightroom application and the Genius Bar at my local Apple computer store (Tysons, McLean, Virginia) has so far not been able to help me. Can you provide me with step-by-step instructions?
    Many thanks, Monteaa

  11. Great tips. I have been trying to market my blog for a while now. Atleast I am an expert in my blog topic!

  12. Great tips. I have been trying to market my blog for a while now. Atleast I am an expert in my blog topic!

  13. Wow Darren, you’ve just offered up a whole day’s worth of quality reading in one post. I added about a half dozen bookmarks to my delicious account from these links. Thanks!

  14. what a good tips! In fact, i will have to read it again. thumb up

  15. I’m a beginner and this is the kind of information that I’ve been looking for all in one place. Thanks, too, for links provided as examples in many of the recommendations.As a beginner I made a list of about 30+ terms that I don’t know. Is there a glossary out there where I can look them up.

  16. Phew! Those were a lot of ways to get traffic to your blog, would try as many as possible, cheers.

  17. This is by far the best list put together about getting a blog to be a great blog. Some of these things I already do but will incorporate some of these other helpful hints to see how they pan out.

  18. Great ideas. By the way, does anyone know how to make it possible for people to subscribe to a blog on Blogger?

    I’m trying to increase readership on my blog http://ricketyrickshaw.blogspot.com which talks about my ongoing travels / experiences in India and my perspective as an Indian who grew up outside of India.

  19. Wow, this is just incredible! It’s already 2008 but this information is classic! I will definitely have to put this information to use on my new Creative Writing blog!!!!

    Thanks a ton!

  20. gosh blogging feels like a contest. its like when u join myspace at 1st it’s for your real friends, networking & fun, then u realize apart from u’re top listed friends, its just for the numbers, and it’s no more fun.

    anyways great info!!!

  21. Thanks Tony! Very helpful.

    Michael Gass

    http://www.agencynewbiz.blogspot.com

  22. Thank you for these great tips. It is very helpful and helped me cleared some things.

  23. Great post tony! I’m so impressed with this article, I’m a newbie in blogging and got confused how to market it. Great post…

  24. Free Flat Screen HDTV Free HD TV says: 03/03/2008 at 4:33 pm

    Gosh blogging feels like a contest. its like when u join myspace at 1st it’s for your real friends, networking & fun, then u realize apart from you’re top listed friends, its just for the numbers, and it’s no more fun.

  25. Great article and although it is already 2008, thanks a lot for these tips!

    Igor Polyakov

  26. I guess I missed the top 20 on this one. Thanks for the hints.

  27. This is a great post, and just what I needed!
    I have a brand new blog, and it looks like here is enough
    ideas to keep me going for some time now.

  28. It’s a great article, Tony! I hope your ideas will help me.

    give me some more ideas on my blog http://keybrand.ru

  29. Seriously, this is the best advice that I have read about blogging! I truly appreciate the excellent research and insight! Rock on!

  30. Great tips, many thanks!

  31. I have just started a blog and this info is great. i’ll be working my way thru it step by step. Have already registered with Hit Tail.
    Thanks for your time and effort to share your expertise.

    If http://www.maketimenow.wordpress.com makes the Technorati 1000 you will certainly be hearing from me.

  32. Hi Darren,
    Not that you need another comment, but your post was extremely helpful. The best compilation of specific tips I’ve found thus far. Many thanks for your efforts.
    Sincerely, Tatiana

  33. Hi Darren,
    This is yet another great post and very helpful to me in trying to increase traffic to my blog. I have also been learning a few things on viral marketing. I just started a viral link exchange called “Reciprocal Review Carousel” involving a review of your favorite blogs and have seen an increase in traffic to my blog recently. Do take a look at how this is done and I’m sure you’ll want to join this “carousel” and start to get viral links to your blog.

    How To Get Viral Traffic To Your Blog

    Peter Lee
    Work From Home Business Blog

  34. Thanks for all the wonderful tips. I have started blogging recently and look forward to using this tips.

  35. If its a highly trafficked and ranked blog, this can mean traffic BACK to your blog, and it can draw notice from the author themselves — because, let’s face it, we’re all vain in a fashion, even A-listers, and we’re all interested in who is linking to us. thank you.. nice word

  36. Nice list of tips Tony! =)

  37. I’m in the process of attempting to increase traffic to my blook – THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS (http://stephenjsweeney.blogspot.com)

    So tips like these are helpful!

  38. Great article thanks for the tips! This is more useful then anything else I’ve come across Thanks!

  39. Fantastic and very thorough article. I’ve got a fledgling blog and your tips are exactly what I was looking for.

  40. Nice one, also good to confirm what you are already doing is down on the list, as well as finding some new ones. Thanks for that. Some of them Im not so sure I have the interest to do as others are doing well for me right now. Lastly, I got stung by putting up two new articles a day for a couple of days just recently, Digg closed my account down so yes, as you say, “submit your stories judiciously”.

    I heard that Digg was the only one worth adding too what is your view? is it worth the time to do any others, if so which ones and in which order? Im off to check out http://themulife.com/ for my site http://www.discoveraid.com

    Thanks once again

    Guy

  41. What a long list of tips. Worth reading though.

    Thanks for the tips.

  42. This is the most comprehensive list of guidelines I have received. Hope they will help me. I really enjoyed going through them.

    I have interesting short stories and stuffs posted here. Take a moment to go through them. You are free to comment, criticize or laugh at.

    Here is the link

    http://freedomnwriters.blogspot.com/

    And once again, a comprehensive piece of information. Was really helpful.

    I am surely going to come back again.

  43. chris says: 04/22/2008 at 1:49 pm

    Nice list, thanks for sharing.

    “Good content” + “connections” is the key in my experience.

    You need the content to keep people coming back but you definately need connections for the first launch.

    It’s not easy anymore to get to the first page on Digg. And as it gets popular “lighter” stories start to dominate.
    So digg like sites with niches become the next destination:
    N4G.com is great for game news
    BizHeat.com for Business news
    Y Combinator for Tech news
    etc.

  44. Really good and informative article in the masses of recycled copy+pasted content.

    It’s funny the way the bloggers community creates itself. Link to me and I’ll link to you and we get hundreds of subscribers which actually have their own blog and subscribed to yours so you’d subscribe to theirs… amusing

  45. I love this blogging phenomenon of people helping each other out. So many tips, so many stories, so much interesting web content! Thanks for the tips I’ll be sure to implement…

  46. Hope you find the time and musings to write the “how to market your blog in 2008″ in a few weeks!
    thanks again,

  47. Cool post!

    Loads of stuff to learn but I believe the effort involved to become a successful blogger will be worth it when the money starts flowing in.

  48. I would only add that a *great* resource for folk to become better writers and better-known bloggers is to join Blogcritics (full disclosure — I’m exec producer over there), a place where 1,700 writer-bloggers get fully edited and mentoring advice from a hard-working editorial staff. So writers get the opportunity to improve as writer-bloggers *and* they get exposure to a much larger community and audience than they could on their home sites

  49. Thomas says: 05/20/2008 at 11:35 am

    Very informative and interesting post. Thank you for posting it. I think what bloggers should also try to get the word out apart from participating in forums and adversiting on different websites is to employ services of tools like MyPRGenie (www.myprgenie.com/business/) which builds PR and resolves all marketing related issues.

  50. Fantastic and very thorough article. I’ve got a fledgling blog and your tips are exactly what I was looking for.

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