Marketing Your Blog
The strings have been pulled again by Charles at Charles Lau Dot Com. His request? To discuss various aspects to marketing a blog. If you have a topic that you would like to see covered on BlissLogs, turn me into your puppet and pull my strings by sending me an email. So without further ado, here’s my 2 cents to the topic:
Free Marketing Methods
You’ve heard the saying “Nothing in life is free?” Believe it or not, there are ways to market your blog for free. It’s been said before, but that doesn’t make it any less true; that commenting on other blogs is a good way to market your blog. Charles commented on my blog, which got me to visit his blog. Don’t limit your comments to just other blogs, forums are another great place to provide links to your site. Just remember though, don’t spam the blogs or forums. . . that’s a good way to get banned from them.
Pay Per Click
Setting aside some money in pay per click advertisers such as Google AdWords, Yahoo! Marketing Solutions, and Microsoft adCenter are the 3 major players in the arena. If you’re not familiar with this method of advertising, here’s a quick top 10 steps to get you started (all 3 work basically the same).
- You create an account with the pay per click organization.
- Deposit some money in your account.
- Investigate relevant keywords for your site.
- Create a campaign/ad based on your chosen keywords.
- Publish the campaign / ad.
- Watch as new visitors find your site based on searches or relevant content.
- Tweak your keywords and ads to get better click through rates.
- Tweak your bid for each click to make the most out of your money.
- Repeat steps 7 & 8.
- Repeat step 9.
Explaining this pay per click advertising method should be an entire post in and of itself, which I’d love to do and will do soon. I just bring it up here to give you an idea of ways to market your blog.
Site Specific Advertisements
Many sites would be willing to put up an ad for you on their site if your willing to pay for it. You don’t necessarily have to find a site that is actively looking for advertisers. If you find a site that interests you and is relevant to your site, contact the owner to see if they would be willing to put either a text ad or banner on their site for a monthly price. Picking a site with LOTS of traffic is optimal, but would probably demand a hefty price for the advertising space. Advertising on a site that gets “humble” traffic would be cheaper, but you wouldn’t get quite the exposure. The advantage though of choosing this lower traffic site is that it will grow. If you stick with them while they grow, you may end up advertising on a site with LOTS of traffic and still a modest advertising fee. You can expect the price to increase as the site gains in popularity, but you will have a relationship and can usually get discounts.
Pay for Blogging
This is another option that has gotten lots of buzz over the past year. These sites are popping up all over the place that will let you ask bloggers to blog about your site (for a fee of course). PayPerPost, CREAMAid, LoudLaunch, ReviewMe, SponsoredReviews, Blogitive, and Blogsvertise are just a few that I can think of this second. The method here is simple enough. . . You request to have someone, or a group of someones, blog about your site in exchange for a set price.
Online Communities
If you have well thought out posts and they are interesting to lots of people, then online communities can be a fantastic way to generate some traffic. Sites such as Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon serve a purpose and when used correctly can get you thousands of hits a day. You’ll notice that the links to these communities open another window/tab in your browser; I did that on the off chance that you wanted to reference this site when submitting it to the community. 
These communities are all fairly similar, sites that get the most votes (diggs, stumble thumbs up, etc) gets more traffic. So you see why I said it is so important to have well thought out posts and interesting? If your readers find the post interesting, they’ll submit it and more traffic will flow to your site. There is a downside to these sites though. The traffic that these generate generally don’t sustain for the long haul. You may see a couple days that a post is popular, but it will eventually dwindle down. The readers that found your site in these communities generally won’t become regular readers. Don’t get me wrong, you probably will pick up a few loyal readers from these sites, so by all means use them.
Offline Marketing
This method isn’t used too much in the blogging world, but depending on your niche it could be highly successful. With offline marketing, you could think small and just put your business card in fishbowls at your local restaurants, or put up small advertisements on bulletin boards around your community. Or you could think big and take out an ad in your local newspaper, a national paper, or a magazine that is relevant to your niche.
Summary
So what you should take away from this post is that there are not set rules to follow when marketing a blog/website. The first step is to have content that people want to read. From there you have many choices as to how to get the word out about your blog. If you find one of these methods don’t work for you, try something completely different. Or better yet, try to figure out what about it wasn’t working and make the corrections needed to fix it. I’m sure there are many more ways to market your blog or website so come up with something that is new.
If you liked this post, be sure to submit it to all the online communities I mentioned and any others that you know of.
Posted on September 21, 2007
By Jason Spence
Filed Under blogging |
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Scarlett T.
LinkWorth Staff
http://www.linkworth.com