Alice

I keep an eye on many LinkedIn Groups, especially ones about blogging, and one question was asked ‘What are your 5 favourite ways to promote a blog?’.

Well, I couldn’t resist! So here they are:

1. Writing great content with excellent SEO through carefully chosen keywords.

2. Adding your blog to blogging directories to encourage a larger audience and therefore inviting comments and sharing your posts to other social networking sites.

3. Encouraging subscriptions through RSS and asking fellow bloggers to add your blog to their blogroll.

4. Telling everybody you know about your blog through your newsletter, leaving its URL everywhere like your email signature, on your merchandise, links from your website and other online profiles.

5. RSS feeds to social media profiles like LinkedIn where you can see the latest permalinks when they are published.

For me, the most important one of all is writing great content, because without that the other points won’t work successfully. And, of course, this needs to be consistent ? set yourself a goal of contributing to your blog at least 3 times a week, say, if that is practical for you.

Some prolific bloggers publish several times a day (!), and I know of highly successful and accomplished marketers who unfailingly produce a mind-blowing post every morning. But you shouldn’t consider this a chore, it should become part of your business routine to think of subject matter that your readers might be interested in and that you can share with them. When you’re out and about, have your sixth sense switched on to watch out for blogging fodder, and have somewhere to jot down an idea when it comes to you for future reference. You’d be surprised what information can be transformed into a blog post!