Let me guess. You’ve started a blog, started writing content but have yet to see the traffic you hoped. Sound familiar? Let’s walk through some easy techniques to ensure you’re promoting you blog posts properly.
1. Optimized Posts
This should be standard practice for every blogger. It’s no secret that search engines rank blogs very well. Increase your chances of rankings by optimizing every blog post. Each blog post should be targeted to a specific theme with identified keywords. This will help rank the post in the search engines and possibly drive a significant amount of traffic. Additionally, identify popular topics (or search phrases) within your industry and focus your writing there. You can write an optimized post, but if no one is searching for information on that topic it becomes irrelevant.
2. Link Out
If you’re blogging, you obviously know a thing or two about a particular industry. You probably also know the other bloggers or thought leaders in the space. One of the best ways to promote a blog post is to mention and link to other blogs. If they’re savvy bloggers, they’ll know you gave a mention and link and hopefully return the favor through reciprocal linking or a link on their blogroll. Now don’t expect this to work every time, but if I want to get a blogger’s attention without having to send that “Hey I’m here now” email, I give them a mention and link. Most of the time it at least leads to a comment from them on the post.
3. Comments
First off, enable comments if you haven’t already done so. If you want to moderate comments, do so in a timely matter and don’t fall days behind. This will kill the conversation. But don’t just enable comments, encourage comments. Comments help keep a blog post fresh and ranking well. Ask for feedback or thoughts where applicable and join in the conversation. This isn’t Web 1.0 here.
4. Pinging
If you’re on a blogging platform with automatic pinging, then you’re covered. However, if you have a customized blog you’ll need to tell the search engines about every new post via pinging. You can either download a script for each engine or I would recommend a pinging service like Ping-o-Matic.
5. Share & Syndicate
Add a social bookmarking feature to your blog template. This allows users to save blog posts of interests and share the link on the bookmarking site for others to see. Not only does this let others see your content on other sites but it also provides a link back to your blog. Services like addthis have made it easy to get all the popular social bookmarking sites in one install.
Follow these techniques and you’ll begin to see some increased coverage and traffic. Just remember, promotion is meant to help good content get seen. If you don’t have quality content, start there first.
