31 Ways to promote and improve your Blog

Since Blogging has become popular and useful to marketers today, here are few ways that may be useful for promoting your blog:

1. Commenting on other people's blogs : Comment fairly on other people's (similar to your's); Make sure you post relavant and useful comments, otherwise you'll be considered spam. Commenting helps you get : Spiders, New visitors and useful backlinks.

2. List your blog on blogtopsites (Google hasn't considered these linkfarms yet). May get you new visitors and SE placements.
www.blogtospsites.com .

[Link edited to make it work. Admin.]

3. Allowing commenting on your blog and inviting new users to contribute. This is a basic use within a blog itself. Comments help give your blog a certain popularity and maybe an identity. Blogs such as Wordpress and Blogger allow multiple users to contribute to a blog. However this may take time as you may have to wait till your blog gets some traffic.

4. Try traffic exchange for blogs such as www.blogxchange.com (similar to trafficswarm); I'am not keen on it.

5.Posting reviews of products that may help your visitors. Blogs not only allow you to give your personal opinion, thier main flexibilty lies in using other people's articles, reviews etc without copyright issues (Complete article and review duplication is harmful though; You may add your personal opinion on someone's articles; Usually they'll be happy because your sending them traffic)

6. If you're using blogs like Wordpress, several plugins (extensions) allow you to aggregate RSS feeds, Easy insertion and promotion of affiliate links etc. So consider changing over to Wordpress or MovableType over from Blogger-type blogs.

7. Use Services like www.feedburner.com which allow your Blog's feed to be easily distributed in a ready format to your site users. They also allow email subscription of your feeds.

8. Another way of posting fresh content is by using News sources such as News sections of Google, MSN, Yahoo etc. If you pick up an article fast, you may rank well in the SEs. You can also pick up fresh news from ww.PRweb.com or submit your press-releases which helped me getting some traffic from SEs (for my food blog)

9. Hosting your own blog is a better option (or use a host which give you free or cheap PHP hosting). Since many blogs are based on PHP, you are easily in control in case you want to expand your Blog.

10. Sometimes, if you look up your server stats, you may find that visitors may have landed up in a totally different post then they intended (from the Search Engines). try fixing up your Permalinks or post a new post related to the search term. For example people might have searched for " sports trivia " and somehow they landed up in your post " Sports in England" , where you have nothing to offer in "sports trivia". Then write a new post on sports trivia and make sure you link to this post from the "sports in England" post

11. Apart from regular adsense and other ads, you can opt for Ads for your feeds such as :

www.feeddirect.com
www.kanoodle.com

Though not popular, these ads allow you to monetize your RSS feeds.

12. For clickbank prducts you can try www.affiliatesensor.com which allow you to display contextual Clickbank ads (with or without images).

13. A popular way of promtion is through services like technorati which allow users to find your blog or post through tags. For example you've made a post on Traveling to the Vatican and tagged it as "Travel to Vatican", tecnorati may help people find your blog post on that topic. Technorati is a definite and a must-use option for any blogger. www.technorati.com

14. Social Bookmarking is another must-have for a blogger. Allowing people to Bookmark your Blog and specific posts help spread your blog's popularity. Social bookmarking sites are also a nice way to get many visitors fast to your site.

www.digg.com
www.furl.com
http://del.icio.us

Apart from social bookmarking these sites ( Digg and Furl) allow you to submit "stories" or to specific articles on your blog which may bring immediate traffic.

15. Some ways, other than news sources, to get articles are RSS feeds ffrom other sites/blogs. RSS feed search engines like

www.syndic8.com, www.pheeds.com allow you to get RSS feeds from million os sites.

16. If posting directly to blogs using thier GUI seems difficult to you try tools like Wbloggar ( free ) or Post2blog ( trial)
that allow you post, edit and retrieve to one or many of your blogs right from your desktop. This is helpful if you post many articles a day and hate to use your Blogger's interface. Post2Blog even allows you to add adsense and chitka codes to your ads.
www.wbloggar.com
www.post2blog.com

17. Sometimes your Sever Stats (Keywords, referrers) may give you valuable info on search terms that you may have improvised on. In such cases do a research for those terms and make new posts.

18. Some Plugins (Wordpress) allow you display Popular posts, related posts etc. These may help keep the Stickiness to your blog

19. Also make use of tradtional Link exchanges like : www.linkmarket.com and www.gotlinks.com (I think now they are a paid service). Even though some may not find this useful, Search engines and people may find you through these directories.

20. Sites like www.blogexplosion.com allow traffic exchanges. members of this service are required to surf other member blogs before they earn credits. These credits can then be used for Posting free ads on member blogs for a particular time-period.

21. Linking to other blogs can be made easier with www.blogrolling.com which allow you to easily add and manage links.

22. You may try for a blogger award from sites like www.bloggies.com ( a private awardee). These may make you famous (If you win ) and more popular. Alternatively if money is lying in your bank sponsor an award and be famous .

23. Another alternative to adsense is www.blogads.com. This is gaining popularity among bloggers and may provide you with additional monetizing opps.

24. Podcasting and Videoblogging are extras that you may use to enhance popularity (though I don't use them). Sites like www.youtube.com allow you to upload videos and then directly embed them in your blog using thier code.

25. Scripts like MagpieRSS, CARP RSS, FeedforALL allow you display other sites feed or feeds in a search engine friendly format. Helpful if you want additional content to supplement yours.

magpierss.sourceforge.net

www.feedforall.com

http://www.geckotribe.com/rss/carp/

26. Using Photo hosting services like www.Flickr.com (Yahoo) may save a lot of your bandwith ( If you're hosting your own blog). Wordpress and MovableType Blogs provide plugins which allow easy photo posting Through Flickr.

27. Though Pinging ( Announcing to the world when you've posted a new article) is part of many blogging platforms some don't offer that facility.

www.pingomatic.com(only pinging) and www.feedburner.com (pinging and many other features) offer you just that.

28. Stickiness to your blog may be improved by : Quizzes , Polls and other such fun-stuff. People may atleast be willing to play and have fun even though they didn't find what they were looking for.

29. Categorization of Posts (offered by many Blog softwares except Blogger) help vistors and SEs find relavant topics easily. If you 're using blogger consider switching over to Wordpress or Movabletype

30. www.weblogsinc.com which is a huge company running a blognetwork on different topics, accept Bloggers and content writes to write articles for thier blogs or allow you to run your own blogs. You're paid to write good articles. Apart from getting good publicity you also get good traffic and get paid fot that.


31. Last but not the least and the most important is CONTENT which keeps people coming over to blogs again and again.

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Cheers and Success be with us all.

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24 Simple Tips to Promote Your Contents

How to get more visitors? The content below are simple tips to help you promote your contents. Maybe you have used some of them, and also there should be some tips you have ignored. In this post, you can know a lot of promoting ways. Before you read below, you should know that web promoting is a long-time process, you should have target and plan, and also should be ready for doing this.

1. Add title for every webpage

Add a 5-8 words title for every webpage. The title should be simple and short, and make sure it can represent the most important content. Title will be displayed as a link in search engine results, so you need to attract the visitors via writing a attractive title. Also, you need to add your website name in title and a few important keywords. All webpages should have different title.

2. Add description via META tag

Beside title, search engines are interested in META tag too. This is a description to describe the contents. And also you can add some keywords into META tag. But now META tag seems not really useful, but SEOers often do this.

3. Add your keywords in bold font

Search engines attach importance to bold font text, because text in bold means important content. So make sure add a few keywords in bold font, and try not to use image as title. Remember, add a few<> tags will be helpful, but add a lot of them will be dangerous.

4. Make sure your keywords in the first paragraph

Search engines hope that they can find a few keywords in first paragraph. Google loves the webpage which is in every 100 words there are 1.5-2 keywords. Other place you can put your keywords in to ALT or COMMENT properties.

5. Navigator must be clear enough

Some webmasters like to use frame or iframe in webpages, that is a serious problem for search engine. Although search engine can find your content page, they may cannot find your navigator to find more. If you use Javascript or even Flash in navigator design, though the navigator will be very beautiful and wonderful, the search engine cannot deal with these types of navigators. You can add another navigator in links at footer of webpages. Also, some spiders do not like dynamic pages with arguments, so you need to try to avoid link to URL with "?", and you can use urlrewrite instead.

6. Create special pages for a few important keywords

SEOers do not recommend to use bridge pages to cheat search engines, these pages will let the whole website be in danger. But you can create some special pages include different keywords or key phrases. For example, you do not need to introduce all your services or products in one page, you can use many pages to do this, so that every page can have its independent keyword.

7. Submit your website to search engines

It seems not very useful at present, but if your website is really good and search engines have not capture your website, you should submit by yourself. Remember, do not use any software to submit your website automatically, that is unhelpful and dangerous.

8. Adjust your main content to get better rank

You can change the most important pages or default page and let them get better rank. Some software can help you to check your rank, and compare your rank with other websites in keywords.

9. Submit your website to main directories

Make sure your website is in Open Directory, this directory provides contents to main search engines. It is very important for Google.

10. Be professional

Make sure your website has a focus, like Education or Finance, because professional website can have a lot of fixed visitors and target customers. You can submit your website to professional Yellow-Page system, that is useful sometimes.

11. Request the links exchange

You can ask some similar websites for exchanging links. The best choice should not be the big traffic websites because the webmasters will ignore you, you can consider about smaller websites. Friend-link should be an independent page. Remember, notice the quality of target website.

12. Write articles with your website address

You can write some free articles and publish them to professional news websites, you can use short description about your website to promote it. You can get a lot of links if you can successfully do that.

13. Print your website address on Name Cards, Printings, Books, etc

That's a traditional way but it is really useful sometimes, make sure your domain is easy to remember.

14. Promote via traditional media advertisements

Traditional media should not be given up. Both newspapers and magazines are really helpful for you if you can show your website address on them. Please put your website as add-ons, to remind the reader to find more at your website. Professional magazines are even better, because the target readers are fixed.

15. Provide free services

Everyone love free services. Free services can help you to attract more people to visit your website. Create free services need a lot of time or money, but they are really helpful to promote your website. For example, provide free mail services, free information publish, or any other things you want. Something special or interesting will be even better.

16. Publish some news

Find some valuable event about your website, like interviews about you. You can publish them on your website. Or even create some news about your website and publish them to news media.

17. Add a footer in all your e-mails

Most of the E-Mail systems support to add signatures, they will add as footer of all the mails you have sent. Add signatures about your website can help the recipient to find you.

18. Create mail list and send mails to your users like news or promotions

That is the best way to let your users know more about your website. You can ask your users to submit their E-Mail addresses for you to send these mail, you can use mail list to make it easier. But remember, do not send any SPAMs!

19. Organize A Contest

Why not hold contest? It can attract a lot of visitors and try to let the prizes be amazing. The prizes can be promotions or your products, that is really useful to get more visitors.

20. Ask your visitors to add your website in bookmark

You can add a bookmark icon on your default page, it will be easier for visitors to add your website, but you should never force to do this.

21. Exchange advertisements

Just like exchange links, but you should exchange the banners, size can be much larger than links.

22. Paid for advertisements of search engine

If you need, you can pay for advertisements, the best choice for ads is search engine, because search engines sell attentions from visitors. You can use CPM or CPC for your ads.

23. Paid Placement

Another PPC mode from search engines, nearly all search engines have this service except for google, you can pay for a better place or rank.

24. Submit your website to 'compare and purchase' websites

It is a easy way to promote your products, but if your websites do not sell anything, you can ignore this tip.

That's all. 24 simple tips, if you can do all of them, you are doing a successful social-network marketer!

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