10 Ways to Promote Your Blog

As a small business owner, you probably know that writing is a key component of marketing. However, only writing an article and submitting it to as many article directories as you can isn’t enough. Here are ten more ways to build more traffic to get better results:

1. Offer to Write Guest Blog Posts
Many blog owners are actively looking for guest bloggers. You can research blogs in a directory like Technorati or go to Blogger Linkup that can connect you with blogs looking for a guest blogger.

2. Blog Communities
Examples of Blog Communities that you can submit your blog to include MyBlogLog, Blogged, BlogCatalog and NetworkedBlogs. The search engines will index your blog faster because these blog communities have great search engine ranking.

3. Blog Directories
Blog Directories are great places to submit your blog to. The advantage of this is that more people will find you since the blogs are listed by category. Technorati is a great blog directory, but you can find more doing a search in Google.

4. Submit to Document Sharing Sites
Document sharing sites are often totally overlooked by the small and home business owner. Examples are Scribd, Issuu or Docshare, each with great search engine ranking. You will have to make your article into a PDF document for this.

5. Feed Directories
You should also submit your blog’s RSS feed to Feed Directories. Here are some good free ones: Feedage, Feedraider, GoldenFeeds, BlogDigger, RssMountain, RssMicro.com, RssMotron.com, Technorati.com and IceRocket.
After you submit your feed once, these directories should keep track of your new posts, and will index them.

6. Pinging Sites
Because pinging your site is very important if you want the search engines to index you and give you those coveted top positions, you need to do it every time you update your blog. By default, WordPress pings your blog to one pinging site every time you update. This can work against you as it pings after you edit as well, making it appear you are pinging unnecessarily. I found a great plugin that can stop this from happening. You can set it to ping every time you update your blog or to ping once every fifteen minutes, thereby safeguarding you from getting blocked by search engines for pinging too often.

7. Social Media Sites
If you sign up for a social media site such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and YouTube, use your blog name as your username. This will also help your blog get indexed quickly.
Share your blog posts on your social media sites to invite comments and retweets which will help your search engine ranking. You can make this process automatic through services such as Onlywire or Scoop.it if you curate as well.

8. Social Bookmarking Sites
Social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit and Delicious can also help to give you more traffic back to your website. Onlywire also automates this process.

9. Blog Broadcasts
Add your blog links to your autoresponder and invite your subscribers to comment on them.

10. Offer to write for Ezines and Associations
You can offer to write for ezines and associations in your niche. You can also use the search engines for this.

Remember: content is king. If you apply all these strategies and your content is poor, everything will just be a waste of time. You also need to post daily so that people who want to read more from you can keep coming back for more.

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Article by Hannah Du Plessis.