Effectively Promoting your Blog (or WebSite)

By

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.

Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. Anonymous11:25 AM

    Thank you. I appreciate your article on Promoting a Blog...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous9:55 AM

    Thanks Peter - eloquently written as per usual :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous12:32 AM

    Your article is much more informatics for all of the visitor. I am very happy to read it. This is really very nice. Thank you for it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous4:28 AM

    Great post. Blogs are a very natural way to attract links. I’d love to see a post on how to get your company to blog.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Dungeon Keeper 2 on Vista7:15 PM

    Really great article, I am going to use a lot of these tips. Have you ever considered using Squidoo at all?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Some observations on Script Callbacks, "AJAX", "ATLAS" "AHAB" and where it's all going.

By
I've taken a more than cursory interest in the whole Remote Scripting (.NET species) vs. AJAX and now ATLAS discussion, mostly because I started using Remote Scripting since Microsoft first released it, and because I continued to refine it after seeing Brent Ashley's excellent work with JSRS, which was one of the first "real" cross-browser solutions back in 2000 (that's the turn of the Century for you history buffs). Now Bertrand Leroy, a Microsoft guy whose work I like , has authored some very interesting ASP.NET 2.0 script callback stuff that he points to on his blog, and he is obviously (at least, to me he is) involved quite heavily in the development of this new ATLAS infrastructure that they'll preview at PDC. Leroy's most recent post brings to the surface what I agree are the major differences between the "AJAX a - la .NET" approach as popularized by Michael Swartz with his AJAX.NET library, and Leroy's RefreshPanel, the ASP.NET 2.0 b...
Read more

IE7 - Vista: "Internet Explorer has stopped Working"

By
Image
This one was a bitch. All of a sudden for no reason at all, out of the blue, I get this dialog "internet Explorer has stopped working". I didn't install any new software, crap- I didn't do anything! So here I am using FIREFART to go on the internet and find out what to do! Damn! Good thing I've got the sucker on the same machine (I'm not "anti-Firefox", i just don't use it that much except to check my page renderings). The Fix The fix (at least for me): 1) Go into Control Panel, and choose "Internet Options". 2) Under the "Advanced" tab, press the "RESET" button at the lower right: Don't ask me why this happens, or why the fix works. That's a BUG, D00D - I don't care how you slice it!
Read more

FIREFOX / IE Word-Wrap, Word-Break, TABLES FIX

By
One of the most annoying things a developer (who would normally delight in writing code, not futzing with markup) can have is getting rendering issues between different browsers. The two biggest players are of course Internet Exploder and Firefart (as I lovingly like to refer to each). In most cases that's going to take care of 98 percent of your total site traffic. IE has had a proprietary "word-break" style attribute for a long time, and this made it into the CSS 3.0 spec. But that doesn't necessarily help you with Firefox right now. Firefox literally - (and I consider this completely idiotic, since it's been in their bug database for FIVE YEARS) does not have a reliable CSS style element to force table cell content to break in the middle of a word in order to stop the content from expanding your table / div off the page or over other content on the page. Here's a partial fix, which will work for most tables and browsers. The style declaration (I call it m...
Read more

System.Web.Caching.Cache, HttpRuntime.Cache, and IIS Recycles

By
Recently I chimed in on a newsgroup thread to an OP (Original Poster) who was questioning why he was losing Cache items. This individual would load a dataset from the Cache object into a local object to use to perform processing. He had been using httpcontext.current.cache and noticed that sometimes he was not able to get the dataset out of the cache. He tried switching to HttpRuntime.Cache and it seemed to help. The OP claimed that the application is under heavy hits, and once or twice every month he would see this error. He wanted to know why does the HttpContext.Current.Cache call work sometimes, while some other times does not. A couple of posters replied, one of whom is a respected MVP who usually makes very astute, high-quality posts. He posted," The cache is only valid during the life of the request. how is you[sic] code using the cache?" Somebody else (also pretty astute, usually) responded, "Cache is valid during lifetime of application not request.....". W...
Read more

FIX: Requested Registry Access is not allowed (Visual Studio 2008)

By
Symptom: in Visual Studio 2008, you attempt to add a new WebContentForm and associate it with a MasterPage. You receive an error dialog "Requested Reqistry Access is not allowed". Don't ask me what caused this; I'm guessing that the registry keys involved had their access denied due to removal of a previous version of Visual Studio, leaving the new guy (Visual Studio 2008) in the lurch. Here's the fix: Download "subinacl" here . This is a command-line tool that enables administrators to obtain security information about files, registry keys, and services, and transfer this information from user to user, from local or global group to group, and from domain to domain. After installing subinacl.exe (it will be in the C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools folder.), drop to a command prompt and run the following batch file, which you have saved in the same folder with the filename "FIX.bat": subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudi...
Read more