Internet Multifunctioning

You have got your blog up and running on the internet. The next obvious thing to take care of will be to devise promotional strategies that will make your blog visible to others. This requires a certain extent of planning on what kind of tools that you want to apply to the formation of promotional strategies for your blog. These strategies should be given a fair amount of consideration before applying them.

Strategies for blog promotion are many. Nonetheless, what’s listed below are proven strategies that should work effectively for your blog.

(1) Search engines and blog directories

Web directories such as Yahoo and search engines such as Google surfaced to catalog all new sites that are being created. Directories prominently used are Technorati , Blogwise , Blo.gs just to name a few. Send your newly created blog to such directories and search engines for indexing. Your blog will be made visible promptly.

(2) Apt description of your blog to your targeted audience

Write a short and apt description of your blog ; the description must fit the type of audience that you have targeted. Whatever benefits that readers can get from reading your blog must be clearly pointed out. One of the strategies for blog promotion requires you to let your readers know the real reason why they should read your blog in the first instance. What’s in your blog for them? You can support this strategy by using “tagging” which essentially is a subject or category description that you are attaching to your blog and to each individual blog post. This will make your blog more easily searchable by others. Tagging can be done with your posts on directories such as Technorati, for instance you can add tags like “London” and “shopping” to a particular post so that your blog will show up when others search for these topics in blog search engines.

(3) Make use of the “ping”

The “pinging” action will enable you to automatically alert readers that you have written a new post on your blog. This action is executed through the various blog directories and other services that do publish blog updates. Upon publishing your latest post, you will “ping” directories and search engines. The latter will search for the new content on your blog. The “pinging” action will show your blog up in a list of recently updated blogs. To save you the time of “pinging” major search engines and directories separately, you can perform this action in one huge ping , by making use of BlogExplosion , Pingoat or Ping-O-Matic . It is important to remember that you need to “ping” only once. Take note that this “ping” act is one of the more important strategies for blog promotion that should not be neglected.

(4) Two-way comments

If you want to get more traffic, one way is to post your comments on the blogs of others. You should also allow others to post their comments on your blog too. Your perceptions on your blog can be read by others. Posting your comments is in effect equivalent to your contribution to a discussion with other bloggers. Anything topic that is insightful and interesting will surely draw more readers to your blog. It is a door to the building up of your reputation as an expert in your industry. The provision and availability of good helpful resources and relevant links to the topic in question will please the readers and should help to add value to the discussion.

(5) Performing exchanging of links with others

Linking up with other blogs and getting linked back to your own blog is a proven strategy that is intrinsically perfect integration with the blogging model. Readers will be able to access more sources of information on your blog. Your blog will be able to capture more traffic as other blogs link up with your blog. Importantly, the incoming links to your blog should be absolutely relevant to the content of your blog. This is another vital strategy for blog promotion, simply because if the incoming links originate from relevant high-traffic sites, your blog’s search engine ranking will be positively affected. Links can be placed within individual posts.

(6) Put “trackback” to full use

In blogging, you can use “trackback” to the list of other blogs that have linked to particular posts on your blog. You can locate these in the comments section under each post. With this feature enabled through your blog software, each time someone makes a link to a post on blog, you will be informed via an automated message from the other blog, and in return, your blog software will automatically add a link to the other blog below the post that is being referred to. You can use Haloscan where you can find free trackback tools to manage.

(7) Good quality content

What’s needed most on your blog is content. Content must be of quality in order to attract readers. If you want to write real good content, you must ensure two things:

(a) Information that you give on your blog must be unique. Give expert content from various perspectives.

(b) Keep yourself informed and abreast of latest developments in your industry. Be the one to make the first spin of news.

(8) Create repeat traffic

Readers come and go. The solution to this scenario will be for you to write new post on new topic every day. It appears to be hard work, but there isn’t much choice if traffic is to be repeated. Remember that the content must be great. This is a vital strategy for blog promotion, especially for the purpose of generating repeat traffic. Writing up a series of posts will help in getting repeat traffic as readers will come back for more revelation from the future post. You can even try to request from your readers their email addresses, so that you can notify them of your new updates. This is essentially building up an opt-in list that opens the door to numerous email marketing opportunities.

(9) Social bookmarking, blog awards, web ring

Join social bookmarking sites such as Del.icio.us that permits users to share their favorite web sites with one another. Just “tag” to your blog posts and readers will be able to bookmark your site in their Del.icio.us account. Another great social bookmarking is Digg. Blog awards are given out online. You can participate for the fun and traffic that it will potentially drive to your blog. You can also join a web ring where you can find many groups of like-minded people who may fall into your category of target audience. This will enable you to build your relationship with them on same platform.

To make your blog effective, you will have to work hard on your content. Using the above listed strategies for blog promotion, you will be able to drive traffic to your blog, as well as succeed in your creation of repeat traffic. So, put these strategies to good use and blow away your competition.

Advertising Your Blog In Your Email Signature: If you have a blog that you are particularly proud of, and that you want to share with other people, there are a lot of free ways that you can get your blog noticed. One of those ways is something that you do everyday, and that you may not even consider as a way to share
your blog. Put the link to your blog in your email signature. Chances are that you send out emails more timese that you can count during the day, Each time you send out an email, you can advertise your blog by putting the address of your blog in your email’s signature. It’s always a good idea to write something catchy like, See what I am up to now, or Read my latest chapter of my fanfic here, depending on what type of blog you have. The thing to remember about putting an adveritsement in your signature for your blog is to make it short,
but eyecatching. You want people to be interested enough to want to click on it, but you also don’t want to scare them off. Just like it is with any adveritsement, you want to give them just enough to be interested and take a closer look at what it is that you are advertising. Think about what it is that your blog is about. What is really going to interest people abuot it and want to visit That is what you should include in your signature, and that is what is going to get people to go to your blog.

Blogger Forums – A Great Place To Advertise Your Blog: No matter what type of blog that you have, one of the best places that you can advertise your blog is to join a blogger forum. After all, everyone who posts there has a blog and thats the main subject. It’s a great place to meet other bloggers and to advertise your blog. There are quite a few blogger forums that you can sign up for on the Internet. One is known as Bloggeries, where you can show off your blog, get your blog reviewed or review other blogs, and find lots of tools that you can use for your own blog. Another good place to go is to Blog Forum. Blog Forum, like Bloggeries, has spots for you to market and show off your blog, Blogger forums are a great place to advertise because everyone in them are of the same mind and want to make certain that their blogs get noticed and read. If you use your blog to advertise something that you are selling, or you want to get a lot of traffic to your blog in order to make money, you want to go someplace where it can get exposure. When you advertise on a blog forum, you know that you are placing your advertisement in a place where blogging is something that people enjoy. Just remember when you are posting to a forum to read the rules and abide by them. That way you’ll get your blog noticed and you will know that you are doing the

Blogging Directories – Great Advertising Venues: If you want to have more people visit your blog, there are plenty of blog directories on the Internet that you can submit your blog to so that people will come and visit it. Most blog directories are listed by the topics that the blogs that are submited cover. Blog Catalog is a free blog directory that offers categories such as career and jobs, writing, Iraq, and many others. It has features such as featured blogs and other things to offer those who submit their blogs there. Another great place to add your blog is blog-drectory.org. Not only do they have an an extensive list of categories with sub categories, you can get your blog reviewed. For the most popular blogs, it shows the amount of hits that blogs have and if they have any reviews. As well as listing by category, the blogs are also listed by location. There are other blog directories on the Internet – these are only a couple of them. But blog directories are a great place to advertise your blog and to make
new friends. You never know what you will find when you browsing through the directory, and you may just find out information that you never knew. Some of the blog directories offer chat features as well, so that you can meet other people easily. As you can see, blog directories are a great place to get your blog noticed and bring people to read your blog and look at your pictures.

Blogging Traffic – Give And Take: Blogging traffic is a give and take relationship. Sometimes one of the best ways to get traffic to your blog is by visiting someone else ’s blog. Go to their blog and read one of their entries, or read a few of them. Chances are that you are going to find something that you have in common. When you find something that you find truly
interesting on a blog, leave a comment so that they know that you were there. One of the best known blogs available is LiveJournal. A great feature of LiveJournal is that you can search
for interests on their site and it will come up with results of those who have that interest. Are you interested in horseback riding You can see what other bloggers are interested in horseback riding as well. When you are commenting on someone’s post, you want to make sure that you don’t leave generic comment. If you like the post, say something about what you read in the post. After you have commented on the person’s post, then you can say something like, ‘I really like horseback riding too. I had a similar experience to yours.’ and
then use it to link back to your journal. But be sure that you sound sincere when you are
commenting, and don’t make them feel like you’re just fishing for traffic. If someone thinks that you are using their blog to get more traffic to yours, they won’t visit your site and your efforts will be wasted.

Join A Community To Advertise Your Blog: Something that you will find, especially if you join something like LiveJournal or GreatestJournal, is that users just like you have created communities for people with common interests. There are communities for just about any subject, and if you find that there isn’t a community for the subject you can create one. This is a great place to advertise your blog. The nice thing about communities is that there isn’t
any limit as to how many communities that you can join. For example, say that you love blogging about books, horseback riding, and skiing in Tahoe. All you have to do is look through the communities for ones that have those interests and join them. As long as you post something related to the topic to the chosen community, people will see you and perhaps
they will check out your personal blog. Something to remember is that you don’t want to write
a post tht is one sentence long in order to get people to go to your blog. They will want to know that what you write is interesting and is something worth reading. Joining communities can be a great way to advertise your blog and drive traffic to it. If you are referring to something that you posted about on your blog, you can use a link back to your entry in your post. As with posting comments on someone else’s blog, you don’t want people to think that you joined a community simply to get traffic to your blog. Otherwise, people won’t visit your blog and you may get banned from the community as well.

Email Groups – Hidden Treasure Troves For Advertising: Something that has become increasingly popular since the Internet has grown are the email groups that are available through Yahoo, MSN, and other venues. They are a great way to meet other people who have a common interest, and are very similar to the communities that are available through blogging sites. There is plenty of diverse subjects and there are communities for just about any subject. These groups can be a great place for people who have a blog about the subject and want to share it with other people. Most of the time when you join a group, you are
encouraged to take a moment and to introduce yourself. This is a great opportunity to tell people about your blog, but make certain that you don’t overdo it. Just like with any of the other places you will advertise your blog, you want to make people want to go to your blog. If you are too overbearing, you will turn people off. If your blog covers different subjects, you can
advertise it on the other groups that cover those subjects as well. Make certain that your post to the groups is interesting and that you let people know what it is that your blog is about. There’s nothing worse than getting taken to a blog under false pretences. When people visit your blog, make certain that you thank them for visiting and respond to comments that
they leave. If they know that you appreciate the time that they
took, they are more likely to come back again.

Blogging is a great way to get traffic to your website, and if you create a blog for no other reason than that, you are practically certain to get positive results. Blogging and traffic are made for each other, and there are several ways of using blogs to promote products on your site.

The first question is what kind of blog? Although there are alternatives, the most popular blogging software packages are Google’s Blogger and Wordpress. This offers you four blogging options, and three ways of creating a blog to get traffic to your website.

Why four from just two blogging packages? Here is the answer to that question, and how if you create a blog using each, you will maximize your earning potential from your products:

Blogger

Blogger is blogging software owned by Google. Most people run their blog from BlogSpot, Bloggers blogging host. When you do that you have less control over your blog than if you operate it from your own IP address. Blogger is very easy to use, and very easy to get started with, and is popular with those who don’t want to worry about templates, plugins and designing their own blogs.

Wordpress

Wordpress can also be run from the Wordpress hosting site. However, where Wordpress scores over Blogger is in the fact that the software can be uploaded to your website, and can be run from there. This enables you to use any of the thousands of Wordpress plugins and templates that provide an almost unlimited degree of functionality in your blogging that will help to drive traffic to your website.

When you create a blog with any of these two different packages, whether run from your own computer or from the blog host, you are able to provide fresh content daily to your virtual website. Because that is what a blog is: it is in effect a web page, in the same way that a Squidoo lens and a page on a website is a web page.

Blogging and Search Engines

Blogging allows you a presence on search engines such as Google and Yahoo, and allows those with little idea of SEO or even of web design, to sell products online. There was a time when blogs were a rarity and something new, but blogging is now a way for anybody that knows how to create a blog can drive traffic to their website or to their blog page and help them make money through free advertising.

However, even a blog has to be advertised. Blogging in itself is not an advertising technique, but one of displaying your thoughts, idea, products or advertising your products. Now, you might think I am being a bit duplicitous here, stating that blogging is not a means of advertising yet can be used to advertise! Yet both statements are true. Let me explain why.

Is Blogging an Advertising Technique?

Yes and no. You can create a blog in order to get traffic to your website, and in that respect you are using your blog for advertising. You can place a link to your website: your squeeze page, sales page or just a content page. The question is, how do you get people to read your blog, and then click on one of these links? The link could be placed at the bottom of every post, and on a permanent page on your blog, but how do yet get traffic to your blog: you have the same problem now as getting traffic to your website!

What you have here is that blogging can be use to promote another site, whether it be a website, another blog or a social networking site such as Facebook, MySpace or YouTube. You can use all of these to promote and sell products. However, how do you get people, to find your blog? Creating a blog is fine, but that is only the start.

Use Article Marketing in Blogging

There is one way, and that is article marketing. By writing articles about your niche or product, and then including a link to your blog in the article, you can use the article to advertise your blog. If you can persuade a reader to click on your link, they will reach your blog on which you provide them with links to your website, your other blogs and your Facebook and MySpace home pages.

Perhaps you can’t write, and maybe don’t know how to use articles properly, or even where to get them. Well don’t worry. If you want to make the best use of the internet than create a blog, get blogging and then use the help provide online to make best use of your blog make money.

Blogging and traffic go together, and it is easy to create a blog to drive traffic to your website or any other online web page (such as another blog). You only need to know how.