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This is a guest post from Rebecca Leaman. She writes on nonprofit technology and web 2.0 topics for the Wild Apricot Blog, and doubles as 'Jen/domestika' at Domestik Goddess and on the Authority Blogger forum.How often to promote your blog - what kind of time investment and effort you'll need to put into networking and promotion activities - depends on two main factors:
- What do you want to achieve with your blog?
- What promotion methods will you use?
Adsense Bloggers
Bloggers who seek ad clicks need a constant supply of traffic to their blogs. Regular readers do become "ad blind" over time, and stop noticing the ads, let alone clicking on them. This means that if advertising income is the main purpose of your blog, you will need to attract a steady stream of new visitors or that ad revenue will drop. In that case, blog promotion needs to be an on-going and intensive effort. Think, a significant daily investment in networking and/or advertising.Authority Bloggers
At the opposite end of the blogging spectrum are bloggers who seek to build a loyal core following of readers and subscribers. The main goal of such a blog is to support the blogger's other professional activities (web design, writing, public speaking, and consulting services, for example), online courses, books or e-books, or a host of other products and services. For a blogger of this type, on-going promotion is still essential - it's a total myth that you can "build it and they will come," and high-value content, while a critical component to building readership, won't float a blog that no one knows about.Best-of-Both-Worlds Bloggers
The majority of bloggers are somewhere in the middle - striving to build a steady base of readers and subscribers, yet depending (more or less) on advertising income, to meet expenses or simply to justify the considerable amount of time and effort it takes to build a successful blog.Does this sound like you?
For the Best-of-Both-Worlds Blogger, how often you should promote your blog will come down to the goals you set for your blog, and the blog promotion methods you choose to use.What's realistic in terms of goals will depend on the individual blog. Some subject niches are overcrowded, while others are so narrow that the potential for growth is limited by the relatively small target audience - but it's likely to be most useful to think in terms of steady gains rather than leaps and windfalls, and to measure your progress in percentages rather than fixed numbers.
Some bloggers keep an eye on their site stats and do a promotional blast whenever they see their traffic begin to drop. Others see promotion as an on-going activity - and I'm in that school of thought.
As for promotion methods, there's no shortage of possibilities. It seems that every day brings some new directory or social-networking site or link exchange widget; new blogs with which to network are springing up each minute; advertising opportunities are limited only by time and funds.
3-step blog promotion strategy
I like to subdivide that overwhelming array of options into 3 different types of blog promotion. There's a good bit of overlap, but I’ve found this a useful 3-step blog promotion strategy.1. Advertising and listing: Kick start a new blog
In real life, think of roadside billboards, classified ads, and phone book listings. In the blogosphere, we're talking about a specific online space where your blog link, name, tag line, Feedburner headline animation image, logo, and/or display ad is shown to prospective visitors. Advertising is usually for a limited period of time, while a listing in a directory may be retained indefinitely.Advertising requires very little time and effort, once you've done whatever extra keyword research might be required and got yourself a nice ad banner or button graphic. Make an Adwords purchase, for example, or buy ad space on another site, sign up for a feed-exchange widget like BlogRush, or exchange blogroll links with another blogger - and that's it, your ad is out there. No more action is required.
Conventional wisdom says (and everything I've seen tends to bear this out) that straight-up advertising like this will do the most good when a blog is first launched. Do submit your newly launched blog to those reputable directories that readers in your niche are actually using, avoiding the blatant link farms that search engines tend to penalize - for a very small effort, it can give a good start on getting a new blog crawled by the search engines. Better yet, submit your blog's dynamic sitemap to the search engines directly. Think about buying a few well-placed ads, if your budget and comfort level will allow.
Some blogs do better with advertising than others. Watch your site metrics and make an assessment of how your ads are performing: an occasional ad campaign may give a much-needed boost if traffic starts to drop off. For most of us, however, advertising and listing will be a one-shot effort.
2. Outreach and social networking: Grow your blog
Outreach promotion includes those methods where the level of success is in more-or-less direct proportion to the blogger's actions. Consider the use of social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace, and countless others, where success depends on the blogger's ability to make "Friends" - just posting a link or RSS feed is not going to cut it.Signature links, displayed when you participate in a forum, for example, are actually just another form of advertising - a passive display that the viewer may or may not choose to follow up on - but active participation in the forum discussions will greatly increase its effectiveness. Entrecard members, similarly, find the credit-based program works best for those who take advantage of the site’s forum and its recommendation and message features to interact with others.
The key to successful social networking is reaching out to make a human connection with other bloggers - person to person. It takes a genuine effort, but the results are invariably worth it.
Blog commenting should be the main focus of promotion efforts for any blog in the active growing stages, without a doubt. And don't overlook the other side of commenting, too - respond to your readers' comments and keep the conversation going if you can. When it's your blog that the action is happening on, your visitors will have another reason to come back again!
How many blogs should you comment on, and how often? I'd say, check out blogs within your niche whenever you have the time to spare - without taking time away from adding high-quality content to your own blog - and comment wherever you feel that you have something to contribute to the conversation.
Tip: Think of every blog comment as a "mini guest post" - a sample of what your blog has to offer.
3. Writing for others: Ramp up the outreach
This is the most labour-intensive of blog promotion methods, but it can pay off in taking your promotion efforts to a broader audience and a higher level of engagement. Guest posts, interviews, and article syndication are obvious examples of writing that you might do for other blogs and websites in order to help promote your own blog.If you enjoy participating in blog carnivals, group writing projects, and memes, those would come under this heading too. Yes, all involve writing posts on your own blog, but I'm rolling them in here because in most cases you're not only linking back to the originating blog but also writing on someone else's choice of topic. Be sure that it's not pulling your blog too far off-topic!
I'd also include in this category some other small pieces of writing you might do on sites that aren't your own: StumbleUpon reviews, Entrecard recommendations, value-added comments on social-bookmarking sites like Digg and Mixx, good meaty forum posts, and so on. Each of these small pieces will go to build your "brand" as a blogger, and create a positive public profile.
And that's an important point.
Blog promotion is all about branding - and then delivering on the promise of that brand identity. That’s why promotion is an on-going part of being a blogger, not a separate set of tasks to fit in on the side. In the final analysis, every action you take online will count toward your blog’s success - or against it.
What do you think?
What kind of blogger are you?How often do you promote your blog?
What do you think of the 3-step promotional strategy outlined above?
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Tags: blog promotion, promotional frequency, adsense bloggers, authority bloggers, promotion strategy, advertising, social networking
Posted by rjleaman on March 19, 2008 14:22 / Edited: March 19, 2008 14:22
Comments
I enjoyed your article, Rebecca. It seems like there's never a lack of things to do for blog promotion.
I think I'm a blogger with ADD sometimes (please don't take offense anyone). I have a difficult time staying on track and I wanted my blog to offer a couple of different things for people. After reading some excellent blogs day after day, I'm thinking I'll have to break my blog into 2 different ones; in the long run I'll be better off.
As far as promotion I drop cards every day and I try to take the time to comment on blogs while I'm dropping. Commenting only happens when I get up extremely early.
Your post is excellent, I'm looking forward to more.
@GeekMom, you've hit a important point: many do tend to think of blogging as 'just' writing, but it really does call for a whole bundle of skills and activities. Sometimes that juggling act can feel a bit overwhelming, can't it?
@Linda, so glad you enjoyed it. Yes, you're right, no matter how much a blogger does in the way of promotion - there's always something more that could be done!
@B Carter, I'm glad you got up early today and commented here! ;) Keeping focus on a blog is one of the big challenges for most of us, and yet it's also one of the most useful things you can do to build a readership. Readers do like to know, in a general way, what to expect to see when they come to your blog, and keeping to one general subject area makes the blog promotion job a bit easier - For example, if you do Entrecard but often find yourself pressed for time, you might concentrate your card-dropping on blogs in your own 'niche' where you're most likely to attract new advertisers and readers. So, yes, sometimes a blogger can be better off by making one blog into two different, more focussed, ones. Let us know what you decide to do with yours?
Nice article. Found it using SU.
The answer is constantly. You should do something everyday to promote your blog and expose it to new readers. If you don't, it will go stagnant.
@Glblguy, agreed.
Interestingly, Carolyn Middleton and Yaro Starak have both suggested recently that they don't need to market their blogs any more. It seems there's a tipping point beyond which a blog is large enough that the blogger no longer needs to actively promote it: all s/he needs to do is to keep adding value-rich content, once the readership reaches a critical mass and effectively takes over the promotion activities, linking and talking and whatnot. I'm love to hear a mathematician's take on this, but have an idea that entropy would take effect in the fullness of time - no matter how large the blog is at the time when promotion is stopped.
As my clever partner always says "If you're not moving forward, you're moving backward!"
This is an excellent article! As I was reading it, I was thinking about how many hats a blogger has to wear, to make a blog successful. It's not just about writing good posts. There's all that other stuff - marketing, branding, design, etc. - and many of us are just learning as we go along. Thanks for the tips!