Ways to Publicize Your Personal Blog

Jonathan Loe — Wed, 13 May 2009 06:05:44 +0000

Introduction

As a new blogger I always hope I could draw more readers to drop by my site at the same time increase my site traffic or in marketing term “increase your branding”. However I realise I’ll be competing with millions notable bloggers out there and this is not an easy task. Here, I believe my patience and persistence are being challenged. So, if you’re up to this challenge I will share some guidance on where and how to start. But do take note though that there is no guarantee that my guidance will definitely do the magic.

To start off, I believe that first you have to begin with your own blog – get yourself ready first. It’s just like constructing your home or house: first you start with building a strong foundation and thereafter you can easily stack up your block. Once you think you’re ready to go, then you start publicizing your blog with confidence.

I must admit these guides are not totally created by my own, instead I collated based on other sources I found, along with my own intuition. I’ve separated the guidance into two: What to prepare and How to publicize.

Prepare your Blog

Timeless is Everlasting

Means do write posts that will be readable in a year or more. A constructive and useful post may not immediately catch readers’ attention (just as this post) but sees it in long-term view. Personally, I know that there are millions posts out there with the same topic as mine, but here I did not think of marketing this post but instead regarding this as my future reference.

Create Sitemap

Sitemap (or a site map), according to Wikipedia, is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users as this helps search engine bots to find pages on your site. For WordPress user, you can easily achieve this by installing a plugin called “Google XML Sitemaps” mentioned in other post. Think of sitemap as shortcuts for search engine bots.

SEO Compliant

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. What does this mean? This means that any websites including your blog has to be SEO compliant in order for search engines out there (like Google) can easily index your pages and return your pages when people search. Again, a WordPress plugin called “All in One SEO Pack” is the magic wand.

More Ping Services

This may be the simplest one to do. In WordPress what you need to do is go to “Settings > Writing” and look for the ping list text-area and add more ping services into the box. This is to notify the ping service providers when you published a new post. You can easily find a long list of them from Google or you may refer to my sources below.

Be Opportunist

As opposed to my previous point, if you think there’s a very interesting topic that may grab some-one’s attention immediately, do attempt. Short announcement may be a short-term branding selling strategy.

Be Social

Give social readers option to promote your post if they like it. These readers may come from other sites, like twitter, stumbleupon, digg, technorati, and alot more. In WordPress, a plugin “Add to Any” will help you fill the job for free and hassle-free.

Be Smart

Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not talking about how you dress here instead how to dress your blog. Impress your readers with unexpected catch. Fortunately in WordPress you can easily fulfill this with the power of plug-ins. Kindly refer to this post for the list.

OK, that’s my last point on what you need to do first with your blog. Next thing is to start to publicize your blog.

Publicize your Blog

Submit to Blog and RSS Directory

First is to submit your blog – tell your existence. Blog and RSS directory provides a catalog of blogs or posts for readers to find on a specific topic or category. Submitting to these directories will definitely help you climb up the ladder in search engine results too because these directories may be more popular and therefore make your blog quickly recognised.

Contribute

Make contributions to other blog posts. Contribution doesn’t mean to dig out your pity pocket and donate, instead post your comments to the blog posts if you find it interesting and useful. Give kudos to the authors for their hard work in sharing their ideas.

Be Proactive

Join free Internet community out there, namely facebook, twitter, technorati, digg, stumbleupon and many more, and market your blog in your profile. These communities grows bigger and faster than you could imagine.

Appreciate and Respect

Appreciation and respect are what people always look out for in office, and even in your daily life. And here in cyberspace, the same rules apply. If you post a topic in your blog with sources from other blog, do include the URL to their site in your post to allow pingback/trackback – a way to notify the author your token of appreciation. As a result they feel encouraged and may post more stuff for your feed.

My One Cent

Lastly just my one cent, always think outside the box because I’m pretty sure you can do better than my above list which may be less effective as time lapses. And also keep in mind that this virtual space will always evolve, just like our life.

Hope you find this useful and I welcome your feedback or help me complete the list. Don’t forget to leave your rating or comment below. Thanks and Cheers!

Sources

Extend Your Blog to Twitter with twitterfeed

Jonathan Loe — Mon, 04 May 2009 17:51:28 +0000

First, have heard of Twitter? Probably some of you have heard of this word many times but not sure what it is exactly. Here what I found from wiki.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets.

If you are familiar with friendster and facebook, well I guess this is just another social networking site with different sets of features, in my opinion. I might be wrong but I’ll find out about Twitter more and let you know more in this post.

Well if you’re new to blogging and wish to publicise your blog, you may want to make full use of Twitter to expand your network. And to do that, as usual you need to register to the site to create a new account. Registration is quick and easy, despite of having to verify/authenticate your email. But yeah that is it! And Twitter is ready for you.

Ok now I have my blog and my twitter and wish to publicise myself via these media. Well I think it’s really a hassle to maintain two sites with probably the same posting and I simply do not have the luxury to spare. Luckily just found a service which saves me time from doing the task. This service is called twitterfeed. It gives you the convenience to feed your blog entry to the twitter automatically with just a few mouse clicks and keyboard press.

All you need to do is to sign up, authenticate to your twitter account, and finally add your blog rss feed url as one of your feeds. That’s it! and your twitterfeed is ready to feed your twitter with your blog entries regularly.

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