iamned.com

Best and worst ways to promote your new blog

From personal expeirence and common sense here are the best and worst ways to get traffic and promote your new blog. While most lists include only the methods that work, I have decided to include those that aren’t as effective you will be able to avoid them.

In order from most effective to least effective:

1. Forum signature link. This is by far one of the most effective ways to get traffic to your new blog. As an added bonus a forum signature link can help your blog get spidered by the search engines. Nearly any forum will allow signature links and sometimes you can add multiple links. A good signature link should be written to capture someones attention. Since signatures are short, your words must be descriptive and suspenseful. A good title would be “Why does your website suck?” A mediocre one would be “How to make your website better”. The first headline is more likely to grab the reader’s attention because people tend to be more receptive to negatives than positives.

2. Link exchanges to related blogs A link exchange with a blog similar theme as yours can provide a steady stream of traffic and search engine spidering with little work. After you have written several quality pages of blog content, send an email asking for a link exchange. Put his link on your blogroll first before sending the email to increase the odds of success.

3. Write an article for a forum Join a forum become a productive contributing member. (Don’t forget to add your signature link!) After making a week’s worth of constuctive posts and establishing yourself as semi-knowledgeable member create a separate thread promoting your blog, but do so in a subtle manner. Begin by creating headline like “Dell releases new gizmo!” Then in your own words write a paragraph about the gizmo, and at the very end of the post include a link to your blog which has a complete summary of the new gizmo. This method will drive a lot of traffic if done properly.

4. Contribute to other blogs This method isn’t very effective most of time since most blogs don’t have many readers and the blogs that have a lot of readers your link may be overlooked. Some bloggers may not allow live link in comments, but a lot of bloggers will alow you to hyperlink your username to your website in every post. Most readers don’t read all the comments and of those, few if any will click your username.

5. Traffic schemes Recently there have been a surge in various blog traffic exchange programs such as Blogrush, Blog Explosion, and many other traffic generating schemes. I don’t recommend any of them. The problem with these systems is that they tend to operate though pyramid scheme where in order to move higher up the list you must recruit other people to join. While these programs my send a lot of traffic, in order to benefit you must be high on the list, which excludes 99% of people who join. The blogs that are most likely to benefit are the largest blogs, but if you’re blog doesn’t have many readers you won’t get much if any traffic.

6. Blog search engines. There are dozens of blog search engines and aggregators and I have found that none of them generate any appreciable traffic. The probalem is that the number of blogs indexed in these search engines VASTLY exceeds the number of readers. The blogs that are likely to benefit the most from blog search engines are large blogs since they will be ranked higher, while smaller blogs are buried in the fray.

7. Search engines. Unless your blog is established, getting search engines traffic is exceedingly difficult. Iamned.com has dozens of pages of original content, yet generates a meager quantity of search engine traffic.
While this list is far from comprehensive, it will provide a good starting place for anyone who wants to promote their blog.

7 Responses to “Best and worst ways to promote your new blog”