12 Blog Promotion Tips For Newbies

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Newbies are everywhere, as are bloggers. Today blogging is gaining so much fun and flavour that everyone is motivated to start a blog. Blogging is good. It is so nice to share your thoughts, your perspectives, opinion, advice to people, solution to their problem and so on.

When one starts a blog, there are so many stuff that startles the person. Some worry with the technical aspects. For those who are experts in the technical side, there may be other issues like writing articles, keeping up to the schedule, getting traffic, advertising, getting a good design, so on and so forth.

Before getting drowned in the heap of blogging issues, I point out a few things that every newbie blogger should take care of. The points I give are partly on the setting-things-up process and the rest are developing stuff. This is an exclusive list (from my own experience) for newbies who want to promote their newly launched blog.

This is where your blog is parked. So choose it wisely. I would not point out *one* perfect host for you since every blog is unique, so is its purpose.

If you blog for hobby or just want to share your everyday experiences, picture etc. just for fun you can choose a range of free blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogger, Movable Type, Serendipity etc..

Don’t get me wrong, these are excellent platforms for free. However there is a chance that they make take back their service, may increase the price or even delete your blog for some reason (I’ve had it!)! You wouldn’t want to wake up one day and be shocked to find your blog nowhere!

If you want to run a small business blog and if you are willing to pay for hosting, just go for a self-hosted WordPress blog right at the beginning. I did this mistake of choosing Blogger at the beginning (no regrets on the hosting though). It is hard when you switch things over to your own domain (this is the url of your site for which you pay for) and hosting, you lose traffic, startle your audience and so on.

You also need to spend a lot of time on design and other stuff when you have already established your blog and are half way through. It is always good to set these things right at the beginning.

For those who want to run a serious business blog and want to make their living on it (eventually) I strongly recommend buying domain and hosting at the start.

This you need to do once you set up your blog and have made few posts on it. If you don’t do this your blog will be indexed by the search engines but this may take ages. Submitting your blog to search engines means you wave the big flag to those spiders and invent them to crawl on your site.

If you do this and are updating your blog regularly and if your blog has enough content, then your blog will be indexed by search engines in minutes. For a list of search engines follow my post on submitting blog to search engines where you have a handy list.

There are certain blog directories to which you can submit your blogs. Some are more like communities cum directories. Technorati, Blogcatalog, MyBlogLog (this is closing soon, thanks for pointing it out Marcus!) are a few worthy to start with. You may also need to create a good profile of yourself with a consistent name in all the communities/directories so that you create your own brand for yourself and the blog eventually.

UPDATE: Shame on me that I forgot the wonderful blogging communities I am addicted to and am myself one of the top users. My friend Marcus from Marcus-Baker.com kindly pointed out these sites. I *highly* recommend every newbie blogger to join the following blogging communities and actively participate. Your flight will really take off smoothly and swiftly.

Blog Engage

Blog Interact

Blokube

Feedburner not only deals with your feeds but also provides excellent statistics, for the level it is free. There are a few excellent perks too. Just burn your blogs feed to feedburner to get more subscriptions to your blog.

Once you have burned your blog’s feed add your feeds to your Twitter or Facebook account. With Facebook you can automatically add you blog (or its feed) so that every time you make a post it is shared with on your profile. With Twitter you can either tweet your posts manually (I won’t recommend that) or Twitterfeed is a service which does this automatically for you.

The ‘Subscribe To’ link and the chicklet (the button) should be easily accessible and visible in your blog. It makes it easier for your blog’s visitors to subscribe to your blog’s feeds. Also make the subscription procedure as easy as possible. Too many captcha codes or multiple questions/maths will normally irritate people.

Ya that’s natural for a blogger to register an Adsense account and visit it every 30 minutes to see the updates in Adsense earnings. Don’t do this at the beginning while your blog is new, for two reasons:

1 You become obsessed with money making and will not focus on writing and

2 Your earnings at the beginning will discourage you since you would not have gained much traffic at this earlier stage.

This is the right time to start reading. You should get to know about SEO strategies and techniques, right at the beginning. Don’t think that it is a geeky thing! It is not.

You will need to implement them soon after starting the blog or atleast a while after. So develop knowloedge on SEO.

Content is king is the popular saying. While you are interested in promoting your blog through all other options available, people won’t be interested in reading your blog, if your content is not valuable. So write valuable and useful content in your blog.

More importantly, give to readers what you promise. If your blog is about freelance coaching then don’t post comics in the blog. Also stick to a posting frequency.

Online business relies mostly on socializing. Get more friends. Join social sites like Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, LinkedIn and so on. Don’t immediately start sharing your blog url or a blog post after joining. Build your profile and connect to good friends.

Establish yourself first and then start sharing valuable content from your blog. Having said that do not become addicted to these social sites, you need to write your blog! This is a word of caution.

Link to other blogs in your niche and most preferrably a blog of similar size. You will be easily noticed this way. Don’t just say “nice post” or “great stuff”. Add value to their blog by leaving contexual and useful comment.

Don’t spam their blog by leaving links to your blog (you don’t need to actually, since comment forms ask for your link by default), but if your comment is valuable you will be automatically noticed both by the author and the audience of the blog.

The actual promotion process. After all, it is your blog and you need to do it manually apart from all those applications and pluggins that do it for you. Include a link to your blog in your email signature.

Print your blog’s url in your visiting card. Give your blog’s link to your friends and ask them to spread it over. There are various ways to promote by word of mouth.

Article by JaneSheeba

+Jane is the founder of Problogging Success. She is an expert blogger, consultant, freelance writer and blog designer. Don't forget to get your hands on two FREE Ebooks she offers.

Jane has written 224 awesome posts for Problogging Success.