Webupon

There are heaps of ways you can promote your blog making it popular amongst readers. If you want your PPC adverts to pay off then you need to consider marketing and SEO, here are a few tips to help you get started.

Relevant Content

Firstly, you need to make sure that your blog contains information that people actually want to read. Sure, having a journal of your day-to-day activities is fantastic for a multitude of reasons but it won’t really help when it comes to earning money. It makes sense though really, who would pay to read about how much laundry you have? If you really want, place some Adsense adverts on your personal blog but don’t aim to make that your bread and butter. If it happens to make a few extra cents here and there then great but if it doesn’t then you have a backup.

So what should be in your backup? That’s a good question and Bloggers have been trying to figure this out since blogging hit the mainstream. The simple fact is that no one really knows. You can publish celebrity gossip and generate a huge audience whilst simultaneously alienating the rest of the planet. There are only so many people that are interested in celebrity gossip which is why I think it’s beneficial to mix it up.

Writing up celebrity gossip really won’t take up much of your time because you already have the foundations for the article. All you have to do is re-write existing news which isn’t exactly difficult. That’s why I’d advise doing it alongside your other work. There are thousands that can’t get enough of the daily scoop and as a result it will pull in traffic to your blog.

Another great idea is offering how-to advice and tutorials. People always need help learning how to do something and most top Google searches relate to this broad area, so it’s definitely a good idea to include some articles like this wherever possible.

The most important thing is that you think about what other people would like to read, not just what you like to read. Think about what is already popular and follow the trend, tere’s a reason it’s popular to begin with.

Advertising

You can plug your articles to death without becoming a nuisance to the rest of the online community. That basically means having a little respect for others. If you want someone to read your blog, comment on their work and actually read it. Don’t just bombard every article you find by spamming the comments board with your blog address.

It’s only polite to take an interest in the work of other writers if you expect them to return the favor. Remember that writers are the best readers. Whether they are looking for inspiration or just checking out competition they will always scour the net for blogs and articles to read.

So, as we’ve discussed you can comment on other peoples articles, politely ask them if they wouldn’t mind giving you some constructive criticism and you never know, other people reading he comments might check your blog out.

You can also submit your blog to a number of link directories/blog directories for free. It may take some time for them to be reviewed and accepted because they receive a high number of submissions every day, so you’ll have to be patient.

All you need to do is do a Google search for “Submit blog for free” and you’ll find tons of results that will be extremely beneficial for you. I recommend blogexplosion.com because everyone earns their blog exposure by surfing other readers blogs. I find this super helpful because I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to search the blogs on Blogger but it’s quite difficult considering most of the blogs that come up are in different languages.

Also, as you’re probably already aware you can use Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Bloglines, shetoldme, Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Reddit etc. There are millions of these sites out there but they don’t find you. It does take a little hard work promoting your blog but with a little perseverance it will pay off.

Another good place to plug your blog is in forums. Whilst you participate in any forum put your blog address in your signature, that way everyone will see it and you may get a few clickthroughs.

You should also try the email marketing thing that’s quite big at the moment. Some companies will charge but often offer a free trial. Basically they have a mailing list and will include your blog details in their newsletter. This is massive because your blog could potentially reach thousands! Do be careful that you don’t end up paying out money that you don’t have though because email marketing isn’t always successful. You’d be better off doing as much self-promotion as you can manage.

SEO

SEO stands for “search engine optimization” and is translated to the layman (very basically) as keywords. It literally means overuse of a single keyword relating to a particular search. You can do this in moderation without irritating your readers although I find that whist SEO does generate more traffic to your site it can often alienate more readers than generate subscribers.

If anything, I would ensure your blog has META tags, and an appropriate description, including author names etc. In addition to this, when using the heading function

Ezine articles

Publish articles through ezine articles because you will automatically get search engine exposure, the top articles on the net are normally from ezine (or so we assume) simply because they are always top ranking in Google searches and ezine have an extremely stringent submission policy.

You can develop a name for yourself within the industry using ezine and a lot of scouts browse through the articles on there to search for new writers. If you’re a freelance writer/journalist this could be extremely beneficial to you.

Submission to search engines

Submit your site to the search engines such as Google, Yahoo etc and also go ahead and submit it to dmoz. Again it ca take some time for everything to fall into place because a lot of the lesser known search engines take longer to submit the information and as such there is often a delay. Dmoz claim to update their system weekly but specify that it can take from weeks to months to start showing up in different search engines. It sounds like a waste of time but you won’t be thinking that in six months when you wonder why you didn’t just submit it in the first place, so do it before you regret it!

RSS feeds

You need to set up an RSS feed because then your content will be available in more formats around the world. If the idea of RSS feeds seems a little daunting to you go to Google and search FeedBurner. This is the easiest place I know to set up blog feeds purely because you just follow the step-by-step instructions as you go along. It really isn’t difficult at all.

Go have fun promoting your blog and watch the traffic go through the roof!

Oh and I also recommend Google’s tracking software to monitor traffic through your site.