Just as a website won't do you any good with visitors, a blog won't do you any good without readers. However, getting blog readers is often easier than getting website visitors. There are several ways to go about this. First, make sure that each time you make a blog entry, you ping the blog. You can do this by going to Ping-O-Matic. Also, make sure that your blog has RSS capabilities. This will allow readers to load your blog in their newsreader, and it will also allow them to syndicate what you write on their own websites, which gives you more exposure. Read and contribute to other blogs! This is vital if you want to succeed with blogging. Blogging itself is a community, no matter what the topic is. For instance, if you have a blog about cats, you should visit other people's cat blogs. Read the posts, and when you can, add a comment that is relevant to the post, and link to one of your blog posts that is also relevant. Avoid blog spamming! Alternately, you should quote other people's blogs and provide Trackback links in your own blog posts. Those Trackbacks will appear on the other person's blog, leading back to your own blog. List your blog in the search engines! You should only need to do this once, as spiders will then crawl your blog regularly and will find and index your blog entries. Even though you will be pinging the blog directories, you should also visit the directories initially to get your blog listed there as well. Look for sites that allow you to add a link to your website, and list your blog and your website. Look specifically for sites that relate to your topic. A reciprocal link may be required, but you can easily do this with software that is provided by your hosting company. You can do everything that we have been talking about here manually. But there are some good software programs on the market that will do all this automatically for you. Once you get the hang about blogging you will set up multiple blogs and this will take a lot of your time. Therefore do a search on Google for "blogging", "blogging software", etc. Finally, put the link to your blog in your signature file. When you post to newsgroups and forums, and when you send email, make sure that you include that signature file! Just remember, it is easier to promote a website than it is to promote a product, and it is easier to promote a blog than it is to promote a website. For this reason, make blogging a priority, and you will be astounded at the results. |
