Promote Your Blog in 5 Steps

You work hard on your blog, so you want to implement promotion strategies that give you the most bang for your buck, right?

But exactly what to do and how to promote your blog can be an overwhelming task. Believe me, I know - I've tried nearly all of them.

I've paid hundreds of dollars on all sorts of bookmarking, directory submissions, not to mention social networking and extensive "Googling."

But what I've discovered is that there are a handful of tried-and-true, tested methods that can bring loads of visitors to your blog. And you don't have to pay money to promote your blog - these are all FREE!

You can learn how to promote your blog very quickly and easily with these 5 simple steps.

Don't worry if they seem long - they are really very easy and will bring you more readers than you ever imagined -

Step 1 - When looking at how to promote your blog, the first step is to pinpoint what your goals are for your promotion efforts.

Picture a business - businesses don't just purchase ad space or hire sales people without a clearly defined plan in place. They have a goal in mind and everything they do relates to that goal.

The same goes for your blog. Jot down a few goals you want to accomplish with your promotion efforts - do you want to hit the 100, 500 or 1,000 visitors/day mark or get 500 new subscribers to your newsletter or sell $x amount of dollars in your amazon store? Why are you promoting your blog? This is a crucial step - one that can't be ignored. Having a goal guides you in deciding where to send all of your blog visitors.

You wouldn't want to send readers to your blog without having it structured to receive those visitors. Imagine getting loads of new readers, new potential customers to your blog, only they are leaving within minutes of arriving (check this percentage on how to use Google Analytics) or they are being sent to a page that is not relevant to what they were expecting. All of your promotion strategies just flew out the window! Setting up goals and clearly defining what the customer should do next is critical in any promotion strategy. Key question here - Why are you promoting your blog?

Step 2 - After you've come up with a concrete goal, then it's time to put the wheels into motion. I will use the well-known example of dog training to help explain this step. Dog training is a very broad niche - imagine your niche is more specialized - dog training a lab.

Your blog, Dog Training a Lab, is all set up and you have been posting quality content for a few weeks. You want to promote your blog with the goal of selling items from your amazon links. That is your ultimate goal - to sell items that you will refer your readers to, through Amazon links from your posts.

Since we've defined a goal, we can move on to putting a plan into action.

And as with any marketing or promotion efforts, the question to ask is how do I get in front of the people interested in what I have to offer? Where are all these people hanging out? Where do people who want to talk about dog training gather...

Well, they gather on Forums -

People who want to know about dog training are on community forums discussing dog training with others.

I Googled dog training forums and several websites came up, then I Googled dog training a lab forums and a few forums came up that are geared just for labs!

Brilliant!

Go where the people are - there are people interested in dog training a lab on community forums. Go there and participate. Contribute and you will get visitors coming to your blog to purchase your latest and greatest dog leash or some other item you are blogging about.

Step 3 - Next it's time to get on Twitter and start tweeting, notice I said start tweeting. Just being on Twitter doesn't do anything for your business, you have to actually say something.

If tweeting is just too far out of your comfort zone, try tweeting someone else's posts or reTweet what someone else has said to start with. You still gain popularity because your name is on the tweet. Keep using it and you will gain followers. Take a big leap of faith and tweet something - spread the word on a new dog training video you just saw. You will start tweeting, which will send people over to your blog, which will make you sales in no time.

Step 4 - Set up Facebook for your business. Tell your friends about a sale on dog toys or mention a new blog post you just posted. The point is to be as exposed as possible so visitors can find you anywhere and everywhere. Generating friends on Facebook will be covered in another post, but for now put a button on your blog to encourage others to find you on Facebook.

At the bottom of your posts in your blog, put a social connect button with a Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg and Google+ button so readers can simple click a button to post to Twitter or any of the others - again, this makes it easy for visitors to share a great post with others and it will generate more traffic to your blog. If you use WordPress, there is a plug-in for this, Blogger will have an option on their set-up as well.

Step 5 - Comments make the world go round. You may have heard this from me before, but comments really are like gold. Find other blogs in your niche or a little outside of it. Let's look at the dog training a lab example. I would hop over to other dog training a lab blogs and read their posts and make an intelligent comment. Then I would scale up and hop over to some general dog training blogs and read their posts and comment there. See where this is heading?

Treat the comments you receive with care - they do so much more than take up space on your post page. Comments show interaction - visitors like to see and read comments. Comments build your rapport with the search engines. They provide links coming in to your website; they build links out of your website. Comments mean you have an interactive, attentive blog and that is what means the difference between a successful blog and an unsuccessful blog.

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