Universal truth – We all want attention. Be it in the form of spotlight shining on us, people seeking our autographs or merely getting more readers for our blog. The last one is what we will be tackling in this post. Unlike common perception, it is not a difficult task to generate readers for your blog. And this surely is not by spamming inbox of all your friends!! Your blog must have these features before you start promoting it
Go through these suggestions and try them out for yourself for your blog.
· Registering at directories:
Like any product listing, blogs too have directories where they can be listed. There are Indian blog directories like ‘desiblogs’ and ‘indiblogs‘ among others where you can list your blog under appropriate section. There are also international blog directories like ‘blogcatalog‘ and ‘mybloglog‘ among others which generate high level of leads to your blog. For bloggers who have been blogging for more than 5 months and have more than 50 articles then you can register it with Labnol – started by Amit Agarwal
· Linking your blogs:
Ensure that your blog posts have links with other blogs and websites especially if you have borrowed their thought or writing in continuation to that original article mentioned there. Likewise other bloggers too will create links with you and this cross linking between blogs will help in generating traffic. Most of the bloggers also maintain a blog roll on the sidebar of their blog
Do visit other people’s blogs and leave comments. Everyone likes to know that they have been read and commented upon.
· Register on User Voting sites:
There are several user voting sites like Digg, Reddit among others. You must submit your blog post to these sites and users who read your post have the option of voting for it. The more the votes your post collects, the higher up it goes in visibility. While there are no written reports but posts with high dig votes also score high with Google search engine.
Digg voting button on blog post
Incorporate the Digg voting button in your blog post itself so that readers can vote from there rather than logging on to Digg for that. Currently, there aren’t many Indians using Digg but that’s just a matter of time. Also if your content cuts geography then these sites will definitely boost traffic substantially.
· Title of Blog Post:
My experience shows that writing negative framed titles generates more traffic than something that is plain and appropriate. The title of the post has to induce or tempt the reader to click and read more of that post.
For eg. ‘Microsoft’s browser market share under threat’ as title will generate more hits than ‘Google launches its new browser’
· Emails & Social Networking Sites:
Promote your blog post by aggregate your blog feeds to your profile on social networking sites so that you can drive traffic from your profile site too. Use signatures mentioning your blog title and link in your emails. Read the post Using Facebook to promote brands for information on how blogs can be integrated in your Facebook profile.
· SEO your blog:
SEO ensures that your blogs gets better visibility and rank higher when a user writes related key words in a search engine. Most of the blogging sites like WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, Rediff etc do SEO by themselves. Between all of them, I have found wordpress to be more SEO-ed than others.
· Sharing and Bookmarking your posts
Make it easier for people to save or bookmark your blog post or send it to their friends. Use tools like ‘Add this’ or ‘Add To Any’ for this. You have to simply register your blog at those sites and select the HTML code that they provide you. Insert the code in the master template so that your each new post will carry sharing option.
Sharing button on the blog post
Remember, ultimately the participation of users and hits also depend heavily on the popularity and informatory nature of the topic you have written on.
Read on what are the essentials of a website and essentials of a blog before you start promoting them