All About Blogs - Part IV: Promote Your Blog

The end is in sight! You are rolling along with your blog but you notice that your visitors are limited. Sure, you have everything set-up and all your connections made but still, something seems out of place. You have followed all the suggestions but you only have ten visitors a week. What's up? You need Web Crawlers. No, these are not bugs. Web Crawlers are part of search engines such as Google and Yahoo. When a Web Crawler scans your blog it is looking for certain things in order to rank it among the other sites and blogs on search results. Some of these aspects are:

• Frequency of updates
• Videos
• Images
• Links (both to and from the blog)

Wait a minute! All of those things were mentioned to attract visitors and build a following. Yep, by doing these things you kill two birds with one stone. Hang on though; you have to tell the Web Crawlers when to look at your blog. To do this you have to ping it. The best time to ping your blog is when you add a new article. The more you ping it the better; however, many ping sites will make you wait 24 hours before you can ping your blog again. I use these ping sites for my blogs:

www.pingomatic.com
www.pingoat.com
www.feedshark.com

All you need to do is provide the blog title, URL and feed URL. The Web Crawlers do the rest.

With the search engines covered let’s move on to other ideas. Include your blog URL in the signature of your e-mails and in forums. Actually, include the URL anywhere you can think of: profiles, business cards, in guest posts or interviews. Share the link and your articles on your social networks. You can syndicate your blog to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. By doing this your articles will be posted on these networks automatically so basically you are writing it once and posting it in four maybe five different locations. That is very efficient.

Whether it be a services, blogs or books the goal with promotion is the same - to draw as much attention to it as possible. The more you put it out there the more people will see it.

How do you promote your blog?