How to Begin Marketing Your New Blog

Much like subscribers, traffic is an important factor in the growth of your blog.  Unless you begin a new blog with a strong backing – reviews from other blogs, a previously successful blog, or “followers” from various social networking sites, your blog won’t receive a significant amount of traffic until you have begin marketing it; a process that can leave many soon-to-be bloggers wondering if starting a new blog was the right decision.

photo credit: reborg

Marketing your blog shortly before and following your launch is crucial, or you won’t receive the support (comments, trackbacks, reviews, links) from others who have an interest in the niche and topic you are writing about.  The short-term goal on your part is to grow your blog as quickly as possible, in order to get new subscribers, who will likely mention your blog to others, as long as you have original content on your blog.  

Think of your blog as your “little creation.”  Whatever the subject of your blog may be, the process of growing your bog is quite similar – start off small, then expand until you have met and exceeded your goals.  You can’t force growth, neither can you expect the time you put into your blog to lead to a successful outcome.  Unless you have points of failure, you will never have achievements.

It isn’t easy to promote your blog or any new service, for that matter.  However, once you get off on the right foot, the results will eventually outweigh any negatives that may come as a result of spending time creating and developing your first blog.

The First Steps – Before You Launch Your Blog

Before you place content on your site, but after you have purchased your domain and have created a set of plans and direction for your blog, it is time to begin promoting your site.  You don’t have to start with much.  In many cases, this process won’t take more than a few hours of thought (domain name, hosting provider, and blog software), and usually no more than ten dollars.  If using a WordPress, you can use the LaunchPad Theme designed by Ian Stewart, which gives you a good starting point and domain parking theme before you officially launch your blog for visitors to read.  

Sign up for FeedBurner to syndicate your content and provide daily updates.  The LaunchPad Theme does a great job at allowing visitors to subscribe before you launch.  After you have your entire blog setup, your posts will be delivered through email or a feed reader to those who want to read your blog.

Behind the scenes, you should begin to network with others and prepare for what may become a long, drawn-out process of growing a network with others.  First, join several popular blogging community sites and forums.  Use the same name or nickname to sign up for each site.  It makes the process of growing your network easier, as people will be able to connect with you easier if they can easily associate your account with your blog.  

A few recommended sites for joining and socializing on include: MyBlogLog, Blog Catalog, Digg, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Delicious, Twitter or Plurk, other social networking sites, and Technorati.

Since you’ve figured out what niche you want to focus on, at this step, you can begin connecting with people that are, of course, writing about the same topic as you.  It is especially important that you associate yourself with people who you can trust if you need any help along the way and are knowledgeable about the subject.  These people can give you pointers, subscribe to your blog once it has launched, and spread word about your blog or posts.

Submit your blog to various directories, whether general directories or blog- and niche-specific.  Once your blog becomes indexed by these directories and search engines, anyone will be able to find your blog.  Don’t submit your site to questionable directories, sites like these will only hurt you in the long-term, making your page rank and search engine value go down the drain.

Tell your friends about your upcoming launch – your friends, family, neighbors, and people you communicate with on an everyday basis.  Attach your blog URL to your signature – in forums, emails, or other promotion material (business cards, etc.) to help spread word about your blog.

Next Step – Create Valuable Content

Ask anyone, they’ll most likely tell you that content “is king”, but what does this mean for your blog?  When you have finalized the social networking aspect of your blog launch, you need to work on creating content that others want to read.  It must pertain to your blog, so I find that writing a few posts about what your blog will be about doesn’t make sense, it detracts from the value of content that you have produced.  Visitors don’t want to read about your goals, they want content delivered in their face within the first ten seconds (or less) of visiting your blog.  

It is important that you launch your blog with a minimum of ten to thirty articles, or at least five one thousand plus word posts, packed full of content.  Once a new visitor sees that you have already begun your blog before it launched, it will indicate that you have a strong motivation to keep producing content on that level.  After you have completed revising these drafts, and they are up to your quality level, it is time to finalize your blog for launch.

While you’re still at this step, it is worth noting that you should become an expert at what you are writing about.  It makes it easier to publish new content on a daily/semi-daily frequency, and any questions that commentators arise can be answered efficiently.

Design, Finalization, and Additional Details

Since you blog is now launched, you can tweak your blog design, the leading factor for whether visitors return to your blog or not.  The design of your blog – everything from the design, layout, and content placement, can say a lot about your personality.  In addition, the design of your blog helps readers navigate and further connect with you, the writer and owner.  

Find a blog design, customize it (may require PHP, CSS, or XHTML knowledge) to your liking, create a template from scratch, or hire someone to design your blog theme for you (can be quite costly).  Launching your blog with a custom design can leave an immediate and lasting impact on readers.  The whole experience that readers receive when they visit a custom design is quite overwhelming, to the point that they want to subscribe.  Your pages should be easily accessible, sidebars should be kept distraction-free, and your logo should be prominent and well-styled.  Never clutter a new blog with advertisements, links, images, or other garbage that distract from the purpose of the blog and content.

Another important note is that you should have your About, Contact, and Advertise (if you choose to allow advertising) all finished, so readers can easily find what you are about, and what your blog will be featuring.  

Step Four – The SEO Aspect

Nearly all blog systems have their own method for handling the search engine optimization (SEO) part of marketing and promoting your blog.  In WordPress, the content management system in use at this blog, you can customize from the admin panel the permalink format and further with plugins, you can add keywords to each post, further specify the post title and header format, and other functions.

Plugins can do an effective job at adding the proper structure to the code and format so search engines index your content more effectively, but it is also up to you to add keyword-rich content, images that relate to your content, and titles that grab the attention of anyone browsing through a list of search results.

SEO may not be as important as you think, but it can literally drive thousands of visits to your blog each day/month depending on the relevancy and value the content is to people who need it.  

Ask other bloggers – the people you’ve already networked with – to leave comments on your post, subscribe, and link back to your posts or entire blog.  Don’t hesitate to ask others for a link back to your site, returning the favor by linking back to their blog.  If a few people refuse your request, look for others until you’ve developed a long list of sites that now have your link embedded in their blogroll, posts, or as trackbacks.  

The value of backlinks is important both from a search engine factor and visitor standpoint.  If you are able to connect with larger blogs that receive a decent amount of visitors (several hundred to a few thousand per day), you will see a few people that venture to your site via clicks the person makes in their blogroll or posts.

Further Promotion – Step Five

Time will only tell how people react to your blog, so you may need to adjust your goals on a seemingly daily basis for everything to coincide with your long-term goals and aspirations.  To continue marketing and growing your blog, join a blog carnival, in which people with similar interests help promote each other’s content.

Eventual Outcome: Your blog’s traffic should continue to grow, especially as you produce new content on a regular schedule.  Once your blog becomes noticed in the blog arena, and comments begin flowing in, volunteer or ask permission to produce content on other blogs, with a link back to your blog or a similar post on your blog.  This way, potentially thousands of visitors can see your content and realize the potential that you have as a writer/blogger.  The more content you can attribute to your name, the more respect that you receive as an “Internet entrepreneur.”

Other ways to promote your blog at this point:

• Leave comments on other blogs, write reviews of other blogs/products, leaving trackbacks to those posts/blogs, on a daily basis.  
• Don’t be afraid to step away from your initial goals and slightly change the focus of your blog and refine what you’ve been doing if you lose motivation.  There is no comparison to being unique and being able to do something that no one else can.
• Publish content in article directories, forums, and other blogs to get your name out.
• Respond to each comment and question on your blog – it helps readers know that they are also appreciated.
• Utilize other social networking services and websites to harness the power of traffic and communities.

Conclusion

Blog promotion techniques vary between bloggers, the writing style of the writer, overall type of post format, and niche the blog is in.  With all the variables that exist, there are no true, set ways to promote a blog from buying the domain to basking in the results of having developed a successful blog.  For example, this guide was a general outline of the process that you should be following, so it won’t work for everyone and every blog.  

One monumental cogitation that you need to keep in the back of your mind the entire process is that failure equals success and nothing comes easy.  It has been found that bloggers must perform the jobs of dozens of people while trying to maintain their offline lives, a fact that you must accept during the process of starting your blog and promotion. 

Remember, there are rewards at the end of the “tunnel”; you need to judge when that time will come, by setting your goals, being unique, and setting trends that others desire to follow.