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It breaks my heart to see blogs with great content languish in utter anonymity, devoid of comments, saddled with a seven-figure alexa traffic ranking, and rotting in pagerank purgatory.
Well, no more, I say!
For those bloggers out there who have decided to start their blogs, or launch their blogging careers, in 2007 I salute you — and present to you with 41 ways to kickstart your marketing efforts. Kick back, grab a cold one, and check it out. And if, in a year’s time, you’ve cracked the Technorati 1000, don’t forget where it all began! :)
Get Your Own House In Order
- Write well, write consistently, don’t give up: All the marketing in the world won’t help you if you have a lame-duck blog. In your search for more traffic, more promotion, and more publicity, never forget it starts with great content — and needs to continue with great content on a regular schedule. There’s no question that maintaining quality and regularity is difficult while you’re starting out, particularly if you’re time strapped … but hang in there, because if you sacrifice this, all of your marketing efforts will be for naught.
- Become an expert on something: Develop a keen interest, continue to read and write intelligently, and after a while, your experience will grant you this informal title; bloggers will seek you out, your reknown will grow, and it will be easier to be noticed, linked to, and get cross promoted (see below)
- Design is more important than you think: Your mother’s right — first impressions count, and they can count for cash money. If you’re serious about blogging, don’t stick with a n unaltered top10 WordPress theme no matter how cool you think it is. You want to separate and elevate yourself from the blogging masses, and its impossible to do if you look exactly the same as them. Easy to say, hard to do, but absolutely necessary if you don’t have the money to pay for a private ground-up theme: learn CSS and a photoeditor of choice, and learn to tweak your theme yourself, so that your blog looks professional, stands out, and screams “yes, I am worthy of your attention!”.
- Get Your SEO On: An entire post in and of itself — get your own domain name, host your own blogging software, enable permalinks, create keyword rich headlines, create unique title tags, enable trackback and ping functionality, ensure your blog pings pinging-services.
- Publish full feeds: A controversial topic. Publishing full feeds puts you at the mercy for content scrapers who will scrape your RSS feeds and repost your content, create traffic, and reap adsense bucks. On the other hand, some data suggests that it can also increase your traffic, and a few pundits swear by it. Feed subscriptions are critical; get your feeds burned through Feedburner so you can track how many are subscribing. People who subscribe to feeds rarely unsubscribe, and every single feed subscriber is a potential source of traffic to your blog.
- Do interviews with other bloggers: Score interviews with newsworthy individuals (who may be linked to newsworthy content), to create link worthy content, but more importantly, create news on THEIR blog to get back to YOUR blog.
- Break important stories: See the post on how to find news. Long story short: if you have an interest in an area, it is still possible to do this as long as you’re willing to put in the time and energy to find stuff. Benefit: being picked up by A-list blogs, mainstream news outlets and more.
- Have a contest: Or, have regular contests, which encourage participation and buzz in your corner of the blogosphere.
- Publish original research: If you’ve got the time, start with a question, try and figure it out with the data available, and “publish it”. For fun, I asked myself “How many of the Top 30 Diggers actually blog?” And I just went through their profiles and created a table of how many blogged. I then talked about what it meant, and tried to answer the question “why?” [answer: not many do blog, its because being a top 30 digger requires a huge time investment]
- Put out Press Releases: Particularly if you have something new, unique, or particularly important to say (such as an important story, or research)
- Work your long tail: A tip based on your SEO efforts; there is a free service called Hit Tail that will analyze the search terms leading to your blog traffic, and yank out high quality key words you should be focusing on that you might not immediately think of. This can help you focus your future posts as you are already getting traffic for those key words.
- Answer your comments, in your comments, and off blog: Of course you have enabled comments on every post, right? So, when you do get comments, answer as many as humanly possible, and if its an interesting enough issue or question, contact the poster directly for a friendly follow up. Treat every potential poster as a potential subscriber to your feed, and a future friend and contact.
- Spend time to create links and trackbacks: In every post spend as much time as you can to create outbound links to relevant and high linking blogs; many blogs automatically have trackbacks enabled, so in their comments section they will have a link back to your blog. If its a highly trafficked and ranked blog, this can mean traffic BACK to your blog, and it can draw notice from the author themselves — because, let’s face it, we’re all vain in a fashion, even A-listers, and we’re all interested in who is linking to us.
- Get Your MyBlogLog widget and work it, work it, work it (in a nice way): MyBlogLog — know it, love it, and embrace it. Since its been acquired by Yahoo, it has the potential to explode all over the blogosphere. The two sentence run down is that it offers a free widget that enables you to build a free community around your blog, and to easily see which other bloggers have been to your blog. You can “add” friends, and generate traffic, but more importantly, your own network of like-minded blogging colleagues in a way that is relatively easy and efficient. Just go easy on the unsolicited messages. I wrote a complete review over here.
Getting the Word Out
- Join a blog carnival: Where every blogger who joins one blogs about a topic, then each blog gets promoted. Here’s an index of blog carnivals to get you started.
- Join blog network: Between 9rules, b5media, and others, there is networking potential, income potential, and a link-a-palooza waiting for you (through the linkroll as every member may have to link to every other member) if you’re able to get into one. Goes back to tip #1 — don’t forget to keep up your blog.
- Participate in forums: Forums with tons of pages, huge lists of members, and a responsive community are an easy way to not only connect with other individuals, but an opportunity to tastefully demonstrate your expertise and a link back to your blog
- Participate on larger blogs in comments: Like number three, except that by participating directly in another blogger’s comments you a) get their recognition and b) get the recognition of the blogging community. Also, here’s a tip: try and be one of the first few commenters on heavily trafficked sites to get recognized — most people won’t read past the first 10-20 comments. Here’s another tip for traffic: IF (and ONLY IF) you have posted something relevant that is pursuant to the ongoing conversation and IF the blog has a commenting policy that will allow you to do so, post a link back to a post on your own site (“hey guys, I wrote about how we can solve this problem! — check out the link over here, but let me summarize it for you … “). Sometimes you’ll be surprised at how much traffic comes back.
- Join Blogburst: Blogburst is a type of “blog network”, which syndicates content across American newspaper’s websites, such as USA Today and Reuters. That’s right, you could get a post syndicated on Reuters. Trust me — it can happen . Highly ranked inbound links + traffic + bragging rights to your mom that your post got featured in a newspaper. Not too shabby. Also on the upside, they have a new revenue sharing scheme. The bad: read their terms of service carefully — you give up certain rights when they republish your content, and the revenue sharing works on the top100 publishers only.
- Participate in Darren’s contests: He has enough of them, and often publishes links to all of the participants.
- Submit to blog directories: So people can find your blog.
- Submit to Google sitemaps: Really part of “get your house in order”, but when you do, Google will be able to find you so much easier; translation — more Google juice, more traffic, higher rankings faster. Tip: for WordPress fans, this plugin is particularly useful.
- Submit to article directories: You might want to submit your favourite posts to article directories, where they will enable you to have a biobox / blurb with a link back to your own blog. Again, demonstrating your expertise, and moreover, the article might get picked up in a ezine or another blog, leading to more traffic and more inbound links.
- Get interviewed: If you’ve demonstrated your expertise, or have done something newsworthy, or reported on something newsworthy, try and get interviewed. As long as its done in a fair way (doesn’t need to be a completely puffpiece) by a site or blogger with some reknown, its more traffic for you.
- Get listed on a news aggregator, or blog aggregator: Like Techmeme for technews, or Tailrank for blogging news. Hint: some news aggregators will actually accept submissions if you ask them nicely; double hint: try and get listed by linking to a top story within your first 100 words.
- Create free stuff for yourself and give it away: Like ebooks, digests of your favourite posts, pdfs, and so on. Make sure to include a link back in the document, back to your site.
- Create free stuff for other people: the same, let them distribute it, get a link back.
- Pay for pub: Efficient means of using your cash is to buy targeted Adwords, or keywords in Yahoo’s advertising network; you could get other bloggers to write about you using PayPerPost or ReviewMe; or you purchase text link ads through Text-Link-Ads.com
Connect, Connect, Connect
- Make friends with other bloggers: Ridiculously simple, but its true. Benefits of “networking” (making friends) include more mentions on other blogs, more requests for interviews, more partnerships in future deals, more “adds” into their MyBlogLog network, more “ads” into someone else’s blogroll (and therefore links back to your blog) — it goes on and on.
- Guest blog: Offer to do it for free, and you’ll be able to demonstrate what you know to an entirely new audience. Gives you great credibility, and of course, most will allow a courtesy link back to your own blog. A free foot-in-the-door to some communities as well.
- Volunteer, intern, scut-monkey your way into a blogger’s graces: Maintaining a highly trafficked site is a lot of work. Offer to volunteer your time with menial behind the scenes stuff (moderating posts, acting as a bird dog for news) for free and with a smile, and you’ll get a foot-in-the-door with the blogger, their network, and future opportunities.
- Get hired: You never know which blog organizations are looking to hire new bloggers; again, an opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge, meet new bloggers, and open tons of professional “doors” … because now that you’re getting paid? You’re a “pro-blogger”, mate!
- Network in person: Find other local bloggers using services like Meetup, and see if they’re literally getting together to commiserate about blogging or their topic of blogging. If you’ve got the time, there’s nothing that makes an impression as actually meeting someone in person. Tip: bring a business card; Another tip: if you don’t have any, make some; yet another tip: if important people are going to be there, really — try and go. Remember, you didn’t know me before Problogger, but I met Darren in person at a function in Toronto that played a part in me writing this. Think about that.
- Join virtual groups: Through Yahoo Groups, Usenet, and more; then bring the conversation off the group with emails and instant messages. Be friendly, be helpful, and it will pay dividends.
- Cross promote: Once you’ve gotten to know people, you can kindly remind them to promote posts that you’re particularly proud of; or, vote for your submissions on Digg or your social bookmarking site of choice. Reciprocate.
Make Social Media Work For You
- Facebook: Its a social network that has opened its doors behind its college beginnings. Anyone can sign up. Start connecting with old friends and colleagues, like any other social network. But, unlike other social networks (as far as I know), you can import your own blog’s RSS feed, so that your connections can see what you’re blogging. Who knows where that might lead? Update: Myspace also allows this function, i believe.
- Join Helium: Helium is a new site that is actively looking people to head new categories of content. Think a paid “about.com” — for its authors. If you have a particular interest that isn’t yet served on Helium you might want to check it out; besides giving you cash for content, it’ll also demonstrate your authority in a topic, and you’ll be able to leverage Helium’s own traffic for your own blog through a linkback on your profile.
- Yahoo Answers! A similar idea; but this time, you’re answering questions that people are posting. Yahoo! is quite careful about spam, however, and including a “signature” is a dicey proposition at times. There is a fairly sophisticated registry and voting system that tries to prevent “gaming”, but given how much traffic yahoo! answers gets, AND its inclusion as a separate result area in Yahoo SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) it might be something worth looking into.
- Create a Squidoo
PageLens: On a given related topic to your blog; participate in the Squidoo community; Squidoo has a ton of traffic, and you could funnel traffic and tastefully include links to other relevant sites and perhaps your own blog. - Use MySpace Marketing: Far beyond the confines of this post, but in a similar fashion to Squidoo, the idea is to capitalize on the HUGE amount of traffic MySpace gets (some interesting thoughts over here). Create a profile, create relevant content and links back. Start adding friends. Comment on your friends space. Join groups. Start enjoying the trickle back traffic.
- Get Dugg / Netscaped / Reddited / Stumbled upon: Whole articles (and sites) are written about the intricacies of socially bookmarking. Here’s a tip: focus on creating great content, make friends on these sites if they allow you to, and submit your stories judiciously. ‘Nuff said (for now).
[Yes, I excluded "create viral videos", because I thought that extended beyond blogging and into video casting -- which, I'll admit isn't tremendously different, but hey ... gotta draw the line somewhere. ]
And at this point, we open the floor to comments, questions, cheers and jeers. If you have any further tips, share’em so we can all learn together! :)
*Tony Hung is the guest blogger for the week, and he blogs at DeepJiveInterests.com
My name is Darren Rowse and I’m a full time Blogger making a living from blogs like 
Jeffrey,
I think we know what you mean ;) Glad you enjoyed it.
Cheers
Tony.
Michelle,
Glad you’ve found it useful. Getting your SEO on can definitely reap dividends. Can’t speak for blogger, but self-hosted installations offer the greatest flexibility if you’re willing to put down a few bucks a month.
Cheers
Tony.
Lee,
Thanks for the kind sentiments. If anyone does find any success because of this post we’d love to hear about it — drop us a line to let us know! :)
Cheers
Tony
I’ll keep these tips in mind as I continue to grow my blog.
Jeremy,
Glad to hear that you’re getting the most out of this feed!
Cheers
tony.
VC Dan,
Always a pleasure to help a fellow blogger out — particularly when its such a great opportunity to say “hello” to another community of bloggers! :D
Cheers
TOny.
Lynda,
Thanks for stopping by. How’s Delightfulblogs coming along these days? :)
Cheers
tony.
Hehe, sorry Tony I didnt see that, nice read still btw, and keep up the good work :)
Dave,
Great site — let us know how your marketing effort goes … how involved are you in the PSP community?
Cheers
Tony.
Maksim,
How do you translate “languishing in utter anonymity” or “rotting in pagerank purgatory” in Russian? :)
Cheers
Tony.
Like you, I thought that submissions to article directories were a good idea. I have since found out that people usually take and reprint these articles without your biobox/blurb/backlink, suggesting they wrote it themselves! :(
Great info, I’ll have to read this again when I leave work… I don’t spend much time on my blog, I just share info with my friends but maybe I’ll start really working on it.
Thanks!
Great post! I will definitely put it to good use.
Tony,
Thanks for the interesting and helpful article. I just wrote a post about this wonderful article on my company’s blog in hopes that more people will see it and benefit from it.
As I mention, I started out thinking “Great, ANOTHER article that lists the same 10 things”, but you go way above and beyond any list I’ve seen in recent memory and provide many new and refreshing ideas for marketing and increasing traffic for your blog.
Nicely done and keep up the great work! :)
In the first tip you tell us to write well.
In tip #3, you have a grammar error: “You’re mother’s right — first impressions count, and they can count for cash money.”
That should be “your”. It took my eyes less than 3 seconds to realize that you were contradicting yourself, and subsequently stopped reading the article.
*kisses*
Thanks for the tips, I am always looking for new ways to get the word out about my site.
http://www.freestufftimes.com
I had already nailed a bunch of things you’ve suggested, but wow, there’s a lot of new stuff here that I can’t wait to get involved with! Thanks.
Tony:
This is all great stuff. I tried contacting you but do not seem to find your email address anywhere… and did roll up my blogger sleeves on your first post with a long and meaningful comment, which went completely unanswered.
So, maybe some advice on how to connect with someone who feels swamped? Keep up the great work.
Great post. Gave me several ideas to explore. The one thing I have trouble with is spending a lot of time answering comments, and writing responses that are almost as long as the original post. I know I’d make better use of my time researching more and writing more, but I thought it important to build relationships (even sometimes antagonistic ones that keep a poster coming back, heh heh) at the start when a new blog is launched.
Again, great post.
Great tips! There are alot of tips here that I had no idea about.
Awesome. I didn’t realize you could import your blog at Facebook. The option is under ‘My Notes’.
Tony, thank you thank you x100 to the power of 50. This was great – I implemented some ideas last night.
Plus you’re taking the time to respond to people! Wow :)
This is very useful! Thank you!
I will try some of them out for sure!
i’m saving this entire entry. awesome, and thanks. geez! i didn’t have to buy a book!
Great post Tony! I just started a new blog a few days ago and this list will be very helpful in getting more readers and subscribers.
Another tip: Post lists – people like lists and they often get dugg/added to del.icio.us/etc…
Very cool tips – thanks!
Fantastic post. Very comprehensive.
One question. How does having a free blogspot blog affect traffic and rankings etc? Also does it make a difference if you have a blogspot blog whether it is hosted on your own ftp as a sub page of your own domain or on blogspot hosting.
Thanks again for the great tips.
Talia
Wow! A lot of info. in this post – I might just have to print this one off and keep it for future reference!!!
I belong to a small, but tightly knitted and very active web forum and I have a link to one of my blogs in the signature of every post. I have well over 1500 posts right now – that’s a lot of links! Anyway, I get a lot of traffic from that forum, even if I don’t post for a while. The bad news is, this isn’t my “serious” blog so I don’t post that often. But it still gets traffic and I still get hits on my adsense!
Hmm, just a thought about blogburst..
Reuters published one of our article about the iPhone on their technology page, but since the article appears integrally, readers don’t have to clickthrough to get the full content. On 1000 page views, less then 20 people clicked on the actual blog link.
Hi, Thank you this really helped me a lot, as I am just starting a Blog.
thank you again, and go on.
I’ve had a few articles picked up by Reuters. Not many clicked through to the website (despite it being read by > 100,000 people each time an article was picked up) but I did get a few people clicking through to Amazon to buy one of the products I discussed so I have no complaints. I got free publicity, a small amount of Amazon revenue, and being featured on Reuters put me in the top 100 leaderboard at Blogburst so I also will be getting some money from Blogburst.
All in all, a happy experience.
GREAT TIPS and i doing work it !!!! hope success too… thx a lot
I think the real value of this post that it reflects most blog trends observed at the end of 2006 and expected to develop in 2007.
Easy said then done right guys :) Hopefully ’07 brings us all a little bit of blog cash!
This is one of the best articles about marketing your blog that I’ve ever read. Kudos! I signed up for the hittail.com and I’m looking forward to implementing your other suggestions.
Hurrah for Tony!
You broke the bookmarks bank with this one.
Thank you for a great post. We are thinking of moving our blog to its own domain name and you have almost convinced me of that :)
Best,
Alex.
Thank you for a great post. We are thinking of moving our blog to its own domain name and you have almost convinced me of that :)
Best,
Alex.
Wow, the 100th comment. Just wanted to say congratulations on the great week so far Tony, awesome post.
Thanks for Yahoo Answers! and MySpace info. It is very interesting
Wow… there are so many things that are new to me! Thanks for the awesome sharing. Has bookmarked it for constant reference!
Thanks! Great post!
Thanks for a great article. I am going to implement some of these tips right away with my web site. It’s sort of a blog, and sort of not, but anything to get more traffic is a good thing.
Wow, great article, Tony! Thanks for all the insightful pointers. I think I might have to make this my TODO list for 2007!
Oh, and don’t forget to visit my site THRILLING|heroics for some ideas on how to positively affect the world with business! (Had to use your advice! :) Thanks
Wow! Tons of great information! I appreciate you taking the time to share this wealth of information.
Tony,
I just wanted to say thanks for such a great article. I just recently started a nonprofit organization to help raise money to donate computers to kids and i was wondering how i was going to help generate traffic and buzz around the blog. This article gave me alot of ideas and hopefully it will help in the long run. Thanks again could not have come at a better time.
Thanks
Russ
Awsome artical man! Just what I as looking for as I change the content and even the domain name of my site.
I’ve been looking for advice on what steps I should take or the direction my blog should go.
Gotcha bookmarked now and will be back :)
By the way…your site looks good man.
This one is a bliss! Now, I won’t have to grope in the dark when it comes to marketing my blog this year.
Excellent list, thank you.
Nobody has excuses anymore for not generating traffic.
The only thing sadder than a blog without traffic is a blogger who decides, after several months of hard work blogging, that it just isn’t worth it anymore because there’s no instant gratification. So they abandon the blog and chalk it up to a fruitless exercise.
Good content delivered frequently, and marketed with the tips you’ve presented above, equals traffic galore.
I can hardly wait to dig in and start taking action on your tips!