Effectively Promoting your Blog (or WebSite)

Over the last couple of years I've learned a few "tricks" that help to promote blogs and WebSites. Most of the time, the techniques work for both a blog and a WebSite, especially if the site has at least one RSS feed. Blog and site promotion is an ongoing process, it takes time. There is no "Magic Bullet". Use the following steps to start promoting your blog or website:

1. Submit your blog's URL to each major search engine Google, MSN (live.com), AOL, and Yahoo. Also go to
   http://www.1stopsubmit.com/
   http://www.submitexpress.com/
   http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
   and submit your URL. The first one will automatically submit your blog URL to over 50 search engines for free. They ask for a reciprocal link, but it is not required.
2. Open http://www.blogmetafinder.com/ (our site) and submit your blog to as many of these blog and RSS feed directories as possible. Use your key phrase in the title and at least once in the description if you are able to enter one. This will take a long time, but the effort is well worth it.
3. Open http://yahoo.com/ and set up an account if you don’t already have one. Add your RSS feed to your "My Yahoo" account as a news feed you want to monitor. You will need to add RSS Headline Module to your My Yahoo content if you don’t have it. For more info on how to do that, go here: http://my.yahoo.com/s/rss-faq.html. You will now add your blog into the RSS feed in My Yahoo. To do that, click on edit in the RSS feed section. Enter the URL of your blog. RSS will increase your blog’s reach. It is important that you include your blog’s content in an RSS feed to increase readership and distribution.
4. Go to http://www.feedburner.com/ and subscribe your blog.
5. It's also necessary to submit your blog to Internet directories because people might find you through these. One of the important web directories is http://dmoz.org/. It is hard to get listed there, but if you are successful, it will have a very positive effect.
6. Add your blog to blogtoplist.com website. Visiors may come to your website from resources like this.
7. Post your comments on highly trafficked blogs; also put your blog link in your name or at the end of your comment, if they don't provide a form field for same. Make sure any comments you post are relevant and not "blog spam" or it will work in reverse!
8. Write good quality articles related to your blog / subject and submit to free articles directories like http://www.ezinearticle.com/, http://www.goarticles.com/ or yahoo groups. If you write for a technical niche subject, there are sites that want your content. For example, our eggheadcafe.com site accepts articles about web development and .NET. If your stuff is good, we'll publish it and you can have a one-way link to your site from a PageRank 5 website.
9. try to update your blog once a week if not daily; it will give you an advantage in terms of search engine ranking. Write a few lines (400 words) of article and post it to your existing blog regularly.
10. Register with Blog Search Engines – Search engines that specialize in blogs http://www.daypop.com/
    http://www.blogvision.com/
    http://www.blogsearchengine.com/
11. Use the listing services to popularize your blog. There are lots of "blog directories".
    You can find most of these listed on our blogmetafinder.com directory -- along with many more. In fact if you join the forums as a member, it lets you download the entire directory for free!
12. Register with Tracking Services – These services note when a blog has been updated and publish an ongoing list. They even keep track of the most updated and most visited weblogs. Plus you'll get to learn what pinging is. http://blo.gs/ http://www.weblogs.com/
13. Create and increase the "Why Should I come back" value of Your blog. Everyone knows that blogs get returning visitors because of their constantly updated content. As long as you can efficiently and consistently increase this Return Value, it is virtually guaranteed that you'll be getting repeat visitors.
14. Track Your Blog: Google Analytics is free, and offers some very sophisticated metrics.
15. Join Technorati, and claim your blog there. It will generate traffic for you. Technorati makes it easier to find your blog through Technorati tags. Technorati is a large blog ranking engine; it will rank your blog by the number of links to your blog from various WebSites (e.g., "Authority"). The higher you rank in Technorati the more traffic you will generate for your blog.
16. Ping the ping servers with your blog whenever you update with the following:
    http://www.ipings.com/
    http://kping.com/pings/ping.php
    http://www.pingomatic.com/
    http://pingoat.com/
    There are numerous other ping servers, including Yahoo's API. For .NET developers, this article provides "fire and forget" ping code in C#.
17. Study "SEO" - Search Engine Optimization. Learn how the search engines rank a site and also what criteria they use to downgrade a site. Don't get all hung up about "keywords" - Just write good content and the keywords will be there.
18. Make sure your site has a sitemap.xml file that's updated preferably in real time. That's a "google" sitemap, not an "ASP.NET" sitemap. Google, Yahoo and MSN (Live.com) all read these map files to index your site better. If you cannot create a sitemap, consider a page that has a list of hyperlinks to every page on your blog or site - specifically for the crawlers to chew on.
19. Look at your content: So-called "Web 2.0" sites make up the fastest-growing category on the Web--doubling their traffic over the last year, according to data presented by Nielsen/NetRatings.
    
    Web 2.0 sites--defined loosely as those allowing users to "talk" to their "friends" via e-mail, messaging, blogs, and other social media tools--ranked first in year-over-year growth in unique audience and Web pages viewed.
    
    Social networking sites with the highest traffic growth included Feedburner (385%), Digg.com (286%), MySpace (170%), Wikipedia (161%), and Facebook (134%).
    The Nielsen//NetRatings data also showed that engagement with Web 2.0 sites had grown over the last year, with retention rate increases of 10% at MySpace, 46% at Wikipedia and 20% at Facebook. Web 2.0 users also tend to be more active than typical Web users in online search, with 63.8 searches per month compared to 44.7 for the total market.

A lot of this advice may seem superfluous or not relevant. All of it is relevant; some actions have more effect, and a quicker effect than others. But they are all valid.