Many of my friends have suggested me to write about how to promote a blog, especially free ways that work. After the creation, development and optimization of your new blog, in this post I will give some suggestions on how to promote your blog.
The majority of web users still don’t understand the true concept behind Twitter (why tell people what you’re doing at an exact moment, right?), but the fact is that Twitter is one of the best websites to promote your blog. Even if you don’t Twitter, you will need it for your blog! I personally find it a very valuable tool to promote good news or articles.
If you don’t like to sign in on Twitter everytime you want to promote your latest post, then you can use WordPress plugins to do that for you. There are many WordPress plugins for that purpose but the one that I recommended is Twitoaster. Twitoaster is easier to set up and it tweets faster then other plugins.
Okay, let’s get back to blog promotion thing. Another good idea is to offer readers a simple and effective way for them to share your articles. You can do this by installing WordPress plugin that will provide links to some favorite social bookmarking sites. For this blog I use AddToAny plugin. The links to the social bookmarking sites will be added to each of your posts, pages and RSS feeds (of course this is customizable).
It may sounds silly and obvious, but .. always write your own content! In this way, you can promote your own writing style, your own ideas, and really make your own brand. Be unique, intelligent, informative, and always write in popular topics that your readers may need to know.
Another WordPress plugins that could really help you to ptomote your blogs are:
- WP Related Posts:The plugin will collect another related posts you wrote into a list blog and place the list below each of your posts. Of course, you can then manually run a section on “related posts” that is just ending your article with other relevant things you have written that readers might like to visit.
- Comments with OpenId: by Using this plugin, users are allowed to use OpenID for authentication
- WP-Polls: build interaction to your blog by creating a number of surveys (some of them may be short-term surveys, but others may last several months).
- Popularity Contest: This plugin counts the number of views, comments and trackBacks for each of your posts, basically to create the “best of”. This is a very interesting, because blog readers are usually attracted to the most popular and most visited part of a blog.
Please bear in mind that you can’t just promote your blog for days and get a fantastic result that soon. You need time before the traffic flows to your blog. Keep on write informative articles for your readers regularly. At the end of the day, you will realize that in blog promotion thing, blog content is the king.
