Being an avid blogger with a perpetually growing menagerie of websites, blogs, web 2.0 sites, and other online properties; I know full well the importance of promoting those windows onto the various rooms in my creative writer’s mind. There are several methods of getting the word out to the general content hungry public and I’ll cover a few of my favorite here in this post.
Let’s start with “commenting your way to the top” as I like to call it.
So, what do I mean by that? I’m glad you asked. Let me explain…
Blogs are very special content medium, in that they allow a two way interaction between blogger and reader in the form of comments. If a visitor to a blog likes what they are reading, they may feel moved to comment on a particular post. If the blogger is enthusiastic about what he does, he’ll reply to the comment. Other readers may also get involved in the conversation and what you end up with is a social meeting place of like minded people who are all able, thanks to the beauty of the comment box, to exchange thoughts, ideas and information.
So a blog can also become a social networking platform if sorts.
So far, so good. How does a blogger (like me) take advantage of this?
By getting into the blogosphere and visiting lots of other blogs that inhabit the same niche, a blogger can not only get a good deal of inspiration and alternative viewpoints on a variety of subjects, but he can comment on other bloggers’ posts.
That has a severalfold positive effect.
- He becomes known to the blog owner he just commented in – more so if he comments regularly
- He becomes known to the regular readers of the blog
- Those readers may well click his link back to his own blog out of interest
- If the blog is a “Do Follow” supporter, he gets a free, one-way back-link to his blog
Let’s analyze these points a little.
Points 1 and 2 are obvious – networking gets you known and raises your online profile and that of your blogs/sites.
Point 3 is a major benefit, because it means more targeted traffic to your blog. If you write well and your posts are interesting and entertaining enough those people may well become regular readers of your blog too.
Point 4 can be a killer benefit. There are a lot of “Do Follow” supporters and a good number of high authority blogs are in on the movement.
Note: For those of you who are unfamiliar with this term, “Do Follow” is a plugin or coding that cancels out the hard-coded “rel=nofollow” in the HTML of most blogs which effectively blocks the search engines from accrediting you with the backlink from your comments. In other words, “Do Follow” blogs give you real backlinks from your comments.
This means that newer bloggers have an incredible chance to not only get indexed by the search engines fast by commenting on these higher PR blogs, but they also boost their chances of a higher authority and rankings for their own blogs by creating enough of them from lots of different sources.
These points makes it so worthwhile writing and hosting an excellently written blog and making friends with other bloggers by writing good, relevant, creative and thought provoking comments in their blogs. Because don’t forget, real bloggers strictly moderate their comments and simply won’t approve any old rubbish. Spammers don’t get a look in!
So, as you can see, commenting is a great way to promote yourself and your blog(s)!
Okay, now, let’s continue one to another powerful method of attracting visitors to your website/blog…
Using social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Google Plus, YouTube, Stumbleupon, or any of the MANY others out there – you can make a name for yourself while also promoting your blog to a high number of potential visitors.
The great value of belonging to these social networking sites is that you can relatively easily build up a new readership and get a flood of traffic to your blog quite quickly in some cases. This boils down to the fact that once they get to know you, they’ll be beating a path to your door as long as what you’ve got to offer is what they want.
And what do most people want?
They want to know how to make money online of course. Even the ones who vehemently shake their heads when you mention earning a few bucks for their trouble won’t turn down some easy money if you tell them how to get it. So for internet marketers who run their own “make money” blogs, such as this one, this is an excellent way to attract a large number of curious people to your own information stockpile.
But you better be ready to give away some juicy secrets and money making techniques that really work, or they will soon get bored and go someplace else. The trick is to have some really top quality articles ready and waiting for their inquisitive eyes to soak up. If they like what you’ve got and you show them that you are following up regularly with quality posts, then they will keep coming back for more and hey presto – your site visitor stats go way up, which likely means your earnings will too.
I’ll bring you some more inspiring insights into the fascinating world of social networking and the eternal quest for more quality traffic in future posts.
Continuing on to the next strategy…
In order to escalate the exposure and ultimately the popularity of your own blog, you need to use all the best free promotional techniques at your disposal to spread the word as widely and quickly as possible around the internet. Here is another great, zero cost method of exposing your blog to a greater number of readers.
It’s called Guest Blogging.
Yep, writing as a guest blogger in other people’s blogs is a surefire way to get yourself and your blog(s) known to a much wider circle of blog readers and fellow bloggers. It works beautifully because the concept is so simple.
You write in your usual style and standard so that your guest blogging posts are every bit as good as what you would write in your own blogs. The readers of the blog you are guest blogging in will naturally see and read your posts. Assuming they like what they see then natural human curiosity takes over and they will most likely click on your link at the end of your post and visit your own blog to see what else you’re writing about.
If you author several blogs of your own, you can make this great method work for you by doing this intelligently. Simply by changing the links in your sign-off paragraph to point to a different blog for every post you make and you’ll spread the word around about all of your blogs.
Of course you need to be sensible about this and don’t go spamming lots of links in a single post as that will likely get you banned from further posting in someone else’s blog and greatly diminish the impact gained from the links anyway.
Perhaps you don’t want to keep changing links for every guest post you make, especially if you have a lot of other blogs. The simple solution to getting all of your blogs seen is to only link to your main blog and from your guest posts, then make sure you have prominent links to all your other blogs from there.
You don’t need to go crazy, but it’s a good idea to do one or two guest blogging spots per week in different blogs if you can. That way you spread yourself around enough so that lots of different people will see your posts and you are getting a lot of exposure to your content.
Well, there you have it, 3 very powerful (and free) ways to skyrocket your blog traffic and earnings! Try them. I think you will be pleasantly surprised at the results.