Father Blogger dot Com

In case you missed How to Promote a Blog for Beginners: Part One, I tackled a few things about SEO, Forum Signature, leaving comments on blogs, guest blogging, and submitting articles to article directories. I also included some tips on how to choose the right topic for beginners.

Here in Part Two, I will focus of being sociable as a blogger. To promote a blog, it does not only require hard work and patience, but also the ability to convince visitors to read your blog. Simultaneously, these strategies will also a big help to increase your backlinks. However, they will make you busy so I suggest you also know how to manage your time.

Again, this post might be long for you but I will try to explain each item as simple as possible. So with no further ado, here they are.

Social networking sites

Facebook and Twitter are some of the top social networking sites where you can promote your blog. For bloggers, BlogCatalog and MyblogLog are the most popular ones. The key here is to able to increase your followers instantaneously, and convince them to help you increase your network. To achieve this, you must be sociable, friendly, and will not run out of something interesting to share. Therefore, fellow bloggers may help you promote your blog if they think your posts are worth to share. However, it is better if you socialize with people with the same interest since you will also be learning a lot from them.

Social bookmarking sites

Digg and Stumble Upon are among the very popular social bookmarking sites where you can submit your blog posts. In addition, you can also submit others post to help them. In return, fellow bloggers can submit yours too. Therefore, the key here is helping each other grow and your ability to convince others to submit your posts. Likewise, your posts can also be very popular if they will gain a lot of votes since it may be on the first page of that site. Using attractive post titles is definitely a big advantage. To get a complete list of these social bookmarking sites, just Google the phrase and I am pretty sure you will find a lot of choices.

Blog carnivals and contests

Blog carnivals are group of bloggers blogging on the same niche. A leader or host will choose a topic, say how to promote a blog. Then, he will collect all the posts and put them on his blog. Afterward, he will choose another member to do the same to another related topic. Meanwhile, joining blog contests can also be fun since you can also win a prize. Running a blog contest on the other hand, may be a bit more difficult since you need to be generous enough to give away reasonable prizes. But then, you can look for some sponsors to help you. Since there are a lot of scams, you should also be able to convince others that your contest is legitimate.

Traffic exchange

I think the best example of a traffic exchange site is Entrecard. Although it is also a social site, the basic principle is I visit yours and you visit mine. I used to be among their avid users using my older blogs, and I got most of my subscribers and loyal followers from them. However, I noticed that there are visitors who visit my blog not to read my posts but only to drop their cards. Nevertheless, I suggest you try it since you can easily leave anytime you want if you think it’s not useful to you . There might be other traffic exchange sites, but I think it’s better if your traffic grows naturally which means visitors are there without exchange for anything. But more importantly, buying traffic is something I don’t really suggest.

Link exchange

Blogroll is the most common way of link exchange. Inviting fellow bloggers politely is a good way to start with. However, it is hard to monitor if all of them still has the link to your blog. Therefore, I suggest you befriend them first before inviting them. If you will notice, I don’t have one but I have a post entitled A Salute to all Filipino Bloggers in which I include only those I really like even if they don’t ask me to. I don’t even ask them to include my blog on their list, although it will be my pleasure too. Just like buying traffic, buying links is also something I don’t suggest.

Blog Advertising

If you want to invest money to promote your blog, then you can look for bloggers where you can place your bid to place ads on their blogs. But so far, Google Adwords is the most trusted way of paid advertising and you will only pay if someone click your ads. This strategy is good especially if you treat your blog as a business. Anyway, here is a huge list of Free Advertising Forums that will make you very busy. However, you might think that they are not effective because they are free. But I think that whether it is free or paid, the key here is for you to be able to study which of them are effective to promote your blog.

Off line promotion

Obviously, you cannot always be online to promote your blog. Therefore, you may also promote it off line. You can share with your friends, relatives, office mates, classmates, and even to strangers. You can include it on your calling cards, notebooks, pens, T-shirts, and even provide stickers on your car. However, attending blogging events is a very big help since you will be able to meet fellow bloggers in person, which will prove that you are the owner of your blog and your blog is for real. I have proven this when I attended my first blogging event last year.

In case you did not notice, I did not include submitting your blog to search engines and blog directories in the above list. For search engines, I understand that a blog will automatically be on search engines once you create one, especially to Google and Yahoo. Nevertheless, you can submit your blog to Technorati since it can also be considered as a separate search engine.

On the other hand, submitting blog to blog directories used to be a popular way to promote a blog. But now, blog directories come and go, and most of them are gone now. Although of course, there are still some new and active ones such as Alltop which was founded by one of the greatest Internet marketers of today, Guy Kawasaki.

With all of what I mentioned above, I hope I was able to teach you somehow especially beginners. Meanwhile, I also hope you will watch out for Part Three which is the final chapter. To give you an idea, it will focus on your blog and how you can use it as a promotional medium itself.

As I have always been doing, I am saving the best for last.

Related posts:
How to avoid Scam Blog Contests
Which do you prefer: More subscribers or more commentators?
Father Blogger on You Tube: How to be an Influential Blogger
Father Blogger dot Com: One of Top 10 Emerging Influential Blogs for 2009

By the way, I am inviting you to download the Free Ebook: The Ultimate Super Tip. It is not just an ordinary ebook that will teach you how to make money from your blog, as you can actually make money from it if you will only discover the magic. But before doing so, you may want to read my review about it – The Ultimate Super Tip: A Free E-book Review.

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