20 Easy Ways to Promote Your Blog Across the Social Web
One of the key points I explain in my book, 30-Minute Social Media Marketing, is that for a business to succeed in building a brand and growing, it needs to surround consumers with branded online experiences, so those consumers can self-select how they want to engage with the brand. The same theory holds true for bloggers who want to grow their own blog brands and audiences across the social web.
Following are 20 easy things you can do to promote your blog across the social web. You’ll notice that many of the suggestions listed below require a one-time set-up and you’re done. Some of the suggestions don’t even happen online! Others require you to do a bit more work, but the end result is worth it in terms of directly and indirectly promoting your blog to a wider audience. Take a look and try to implement as many of the suggestions listed below as possible to jump-start your blog promotion efforts.
- Feed your blog content to your Twitter profile, Facebook profile and page, LinkedIn profile, and so on. Use tools like Twitterfeed and the tools incorporated into social networking accounts to do this.
- Publish eye-catching social media icons in a visible location on your blog’s sidebar, so visitors can easily connect with you on your other social media profiles.
- Make sure your various social networking and other online profiles include current links to your full spectrum of online profiles, blogs, and so on.
- Feed your blog content to any LinkedIn groups that you belong to that allow you to do so using the News feature in LinkedIn.
- Include the URL to your blog, Twitter profile, and so on in your offline correspondence.
- Include links to your various online profiles and blog in your email signature.
- Make sure links to your key online profiles and blog are included in the signature line in any forums you participate in.
- At the very least, the URL for your blog and Twitter profile should be on your business card.
- Make sure your blog content gets in front of as many people as possible by syndicating your content through services like Demand Media Blog Distribution Network and Newstex.
- Use widgets and social tools offered by Twitter and Facebook (such as the Facebook Like button) to publish your other social web activities on your blog.
- Continually publish comments on other blogs and link back to your own using the same keyword phrase in the name box every time.
- Hold a blog contest and be sure to promote it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on.
- Make sure you offer sharing links on your blog and other online content using tools like the TweetMeme Retweet button.
- Write guest blog posts for other blogs in your niche and be sure to include links back to you blog, Twitter profile, and so on.
- Hold a tweet chat or tweetup with people attending the same events or conferences that you plan to attend.
- Create an email newsletter to go with your blog and be sure to include links to your Twitter profile and other social networking profiles in it.
- Be retweetworthy in an effort to get more of your tweets that include links to your content retweeted.
- Publish press releases about your blog with links to your blog and social media profiles.
- Brand your Twitter profile background and provide more URLs than the standard profile allows.
- Keep publishing amazing, shareworthy content and organically interlink your branded online destinations!
BlogBurst Joins Demand Media Blog Distribution Network
BlogBurst was once known as the free and ad-supported blog syndication service that could help bloggers get their content in front of wider audiences. I’m a proponent of syndication with some caveats that I explain later in this post. Since Demand Media announced at Blog World last week that BlogBurst was relaunching as part of the Demand Media Blog Distribution Network, I thought revisiting the topic of syndication would be a good idea.
Let’s take a step back and look at who Demand Media is. If you’re not involved in the world of freelance writing, then you may have never heard of Demand Media before. It’s actually a company that draws a lot of negative attention from the freelance writing community with many writers viewing Demand Media as nothing more than a dreaded content mill. I actually disagree with that because in at least some of its published content production process, Demand Media does try to hire people who can actually write coherently. Furthermore, Demand Media does pay freelance writers more than the typical content mill.
So what does this reputation mean for bloggers who have or are considering syndicating their content through BlogBurst — now Demand Media Blog Distribution Network?
The simple answer is two-fold — quality and association, which are two of the caveats I mentioned about blog syndication earlier. Let’s take a closer look at each.
When you consider syndicating your blog content through another online publisher, you have to think about the quality of the sites where your content will be published as well as the type of content that will be published around your own blog content on those other sites. Unlike licensed content syndication, free and ad-supported syndication models, like the syndication opportunities available through BlogBurst (now Demand Media Blog Distribution Network), publish your content on the free-Web. That means it appears on multiple websites, which might steal a bit of page views from your own blog, but are more likely to drive more traffic to your blog through increased exposure.
However, you need to understand where your content will be viewed as part of the syndication agreement. For example, Demand Media Blog Distribution Network publishes content on a variety of sites, including its own properties such as eHow.com and LiveStrong.com. You need to determine if these sites are ones that will help or hurt your reputation and your blog’s reputation. Also, you need to consider whether syndicating your content and allowing Demand Media Blog Distribution Network to earn money from it is worth it to you or if it would be better for you to take the time to publish your content on some of those other sites (such as eHow.com) without a middle-man.
Again, I’m an advocate of blog syndication for boosting exposure and growing an audience, but you need to research syndication opportunities and ensure you’re choosing the ones that will truly help you reach your long-term blogging goals rather than working against those goals. Is syndication through Demand Media Blog Distribution Network right for everyone? No. Is it right for some bloggers? Yes. It’s up to you to evaluate the pros and cons and determine if this type of syndication will help or hurt you and your blog.
Image: stock.xchng
Has Digg Been Buried?
As Facebook and Twitter continue to grow in popularity, social bookmarking sites like Digg have seen their own traffic and usage wane. The question of late has been whether or not a site like Digg is still relevant. It’s not a secret that for years Digg has been the subject of controversy as users complained a small group was controlling submission popularity. Regardless of how that battle went down, one thing is for certain — Digg is not the powerhouse it once was.
In response to steadily decreasing traffic, Digg launched Digg v4, a newer, sleaker, cooler version of the once groundbreaking social bookmarking site. A new CEO, Matt Williams, was brought on board, and there was hope for Digg’s future. Then Digg v4 launched and Digg’s problems exploded. Suffice it to say, the new version of Digg had performance problems, missing pieces (for example, users’ submission histories disappeared), and a renaming of critical elements (for example, submissions that users could previously ‘bury’ if they didn’t like that content, they could now only ‘hide’). Confusion and complaints from the Digg user community were loud, and Digg has been trying to pick up the pieces for the past month and a half since Digg v4 debuted.
Yesterday, Digg CEO Matt Williams published his response to the Digg v4 controversy on the Digg blog. He wrote:
“As many of you know, the launch of Digg v4 didn’t go smoothly, and we’re deeply sorry that we disappointed our Digg community in the process. Thank you for your patience and your extremely candid feedback — we hear you loud and clear. … Digg has always been a place where users help one another find out what’s interesting, fun, and important. Unfortunately, our re-launch managed to get in the way of that happening. I don’t need to tell you that without the Digg community, we’re just another news web site. So we’re working hard to quickly improve the Digg experience. Our top priority is to make Digg as good as it used to be. Then we plan to make it even better, through innovations in both Top News and My News.”
It’s interesting that Williams would refer to Digg as being “just another news site” without the participation of the Digg community. He’s absolutely right about that. Many social bookmarking sites have become little more than aggregators. Now, the question is whether or not Digg truly will come out of this controversy as a better business, brand and site. In other words, will Digg still be relevant a year from now or has Digg been buried?
What do you think? Leave a comment and weigh in on the debate.
Image: stock.xchng
Blogging Strategically Not Tactically And 5 Steps to Do It
If your goals for your blog include growing your audience, developing an online platform to establish yourself as an expert in your field, or making money, then you need to start thinking strategically and not tactically or those goals will always remain just out of reach.
There is a reason why companies create marketing plans — because it takes a broader vision than the day-to-day activities to meet your bigger goals. You need your own strategic vision and plan for your blog, too. After all, if your blogging goals include one of those listed in the preceding paragraph, your blog is akin to a mini-business. It’s time to start thinking like a business owner.
How do you blog strategically rather than tactically? The first step is to understand what strategy is as opposed to tactics when it comes to marketing.
Strategy is the long term plan or direction you develop for your blog that clearly defines your end goals and what it will take for you to get there.
Tactics are the specific actions you will take to drive your blog along the path of that strategy and reach your goals.
Most marketing plans include both short-term and long-term goals, and therefore, some of the tactics you implement to drive your blog forward in the direction you want it to go will be tactics that elicit immediate responses while others will support your long-term goals and ensure you’re heading in the right direction to reach those goals.
For example, tactics might include holding a blog contest to boost short-term visitors. However, blog contests can also support your long-term blogging goals because some of those visitors who come to your blog to enter a contest might like what they see in your content and come back again. Alternately, participating in conversations on Twitter related to your blog’s topic is primarily a marketing tactic intended to indirectly boost traffic to your blog as a result of the relationships you build. In other words, Twitter activities overall are a strategic, long-term marketing initiative, but specific tweets can be short-term tactics. You’re unlikely to see big changes in your blog’s traffic overnight when you tweet, but in time, your blog traffic will grow organically from those efforts.
So how do you start blogging strategically rather than tactically? Following are five basic steps to get you thinking and acting in the right direction:
1. Set your long-term blogging goals.
Believe it or not, many bloggers have not put their long term blogging goals down in writing. Quantify those goals. For example, in 2 years you might have a goal to have a specific number of page views on your blog per month. Now you have something to work toward and you can implement tactics, measure your success, and make changes to those tactics to reach that goal. Be specific and realistic when you set your goals.
2. Think long-term with every blog post you publish.
Of course there will be days when you won’t be able to publish an amazing blog post. However, you do need to think before you write each day. Ask yourself how the post you’re about to write will fit into your long-term blogging strategy.
3. Promote each blog post accordingly to position yourself to meet your goals.
Create an integrated marketing plan where all of your efforts to promote your blog work together to reach your long-term blogging goals. When you publish a post, think about how you can promote that post to move you closer to reaching your goals. Is this post worthy of social bookmarking? Can I start a separate conversation about the post on Facebook? Should I share this post in a LinkedIn group? Find the best fit and pursue it.
4. Stick to the 80-20 rule of marketing.
The 80-20 rule of marketing states that 80% of your business comes from just 20% of your customers. You can switch that up and make it apply to blog promotion by ensuring at least 80% of your online participation across the social web is not self-promotional and no more than 20% is self-promotional. By focusing on building relationships, you’ll achieve greater success in the long-term. That’s because your online connections will help you share your content, talk about your blog, and more. The stronger those relationships become and the more relationships you build with online influencers, the more long-term blogging success you’ll achieve. That organic, indirect growth in traffic to your blog is worth far more strategically than short-term traffic bursts.
5. Don’t let the day-to-day grind deter you from your long-term blogging goals and strategy.
I think all bloggers are guilty of getting caught up in the daily grind, comments from particularly vociferous visitors who might not have the same vision for your blog or outlook on your blog’s topic as you do, and pressure to think and write a certain way. If you see yourself falling into that trap, take a few days off to regroup. Pull out your written long-term blog goals that you created in #1 above, and remind yourself why you started your blog in the first place and what you want to achieve from all of your time and efforts. Tweaking your goals and strategy is perfectly fine when warranted. However, always think strategically and long-term rather than being swayed by short-term occurrences or bumps in the road.
So what are you waiting for? Go write down your blogging goals and start putting together your strategy to get there!
5 WordPress Plugins that Increase Traffic to Your Blog
If you want to grow your blog’s audience and you use WordPress.org as your blogging application, then you need to try the five WordPress plugins listed below. They’re easy to use, free, and can have a significant impact on the number of visitors to your blog.
1. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)
The more great content people are exposed to on your blog, the higher the chances are that they’ll find something they like causing them to return to your blog again, share your content with their own online connections, and ultimately, drive additional traffic to your blog. YAARP is a great plugin for automatically including a list of related posts at the end of each of your blog posts. The Link Within widget is another alternative.
2. Tweetmeme Retweet Button
The Retweet button is a must-have for all bloggers who want to increase traffic by making it easy for readers to share your blog posts with their own followers on Twitter. You can add the Retweet button to your blog as a widget or as a WordPress plugin. The TwitThis plugin offers similar functionality.
3. Share This
There are a number of WordPress plugins that make it easy for people to share links to your blog posts through their social web profiles like Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, and more. Share This is a popular choice. Others include Sociable and Add to Any.
4. All-in-One SEO Pack
You can use the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin to give your blog posts an SEO boost and drive more traffic from keyword searches on popular search engines like Google.
5. Subscribe to Comments
When you allow people to subscribe to the comments published on a blog post, they receive an email when new comments are added. This drives them back to your blog again to keep up with the conversation and continue participating. The Subscribe to Comments plugin makes it easy for WordPress.org users to allow readers to stay involved in ongoing conversations on their blogs.
What are your favorite WordPress plugins for boosting traffic to your blog? Leave a comment and share your thoughts!
Image: stock.xchng
How To Be Retweet Worthy – 3 Tips to Get More Retweets
Many bloggers have great success driving traffic to their blogs through Twitter. However, you’ll only get so far on Twitter if all you do is tweet your own articles all the time. Twitter is a community, and you need to spend time building your network of brand advocates who learn to recognize your name and expect great content from you. This is a form of loyalty that builds over time through your consistent tweeting of great content — your own and content from other publishers across the web.
But that’s not all! Check out the tips below to get more retweets!
1. Format for Retweets
Not only do you need to tweet content that is interesting, relevant and adds value to your target audience, but you also need to format your tweets for optimum retweetability. The first thing you need to do is to make sure the link you include in your tweet stays intact when your tweet is retweeted. Don’t stick your link at the end of your tweet! Instead, move it toward the beginning of the tweet, so people can add their own message when they retweet it without worrying about losing the link (or worse — not noticing that the link was lost in the retweet).
2. Track Your Tweeted Links
Next, make sure you use a URL shortener that you can track. While it might be quicker and easier to simply tweet any old link without worrying about the structure of that link, there is more to URL shorteners than saving characters. Use a tool like bit.ly or snurl or another URL shortener that allows you to create a free account, so you can track the clicks on the URLs you share. Analyze which links get the most clicks, so you can get a better understanding of what kind of content your followers are interested in enough to click on the link you provide. That’s the kind of content you want to keep providing, so you get retweeted more often and build a larger audience of engaged followers.
Remember, it’s better to have a smaller number of highly engaged followers who actively click on your links, retweet your content, and correspond with you than it is to have a larger number of inactive followers that click the Follow button then disappear. Quality trumps quantity if you’re truly using Twitter to build your blog for the long-haul.
3. Be Shareworthy
Next, make sure the content you tweet is shareworthy. If you’re tweeting content that no one is interested in, then they won’t retweet your content or engage with you at all. Monitor your shortened URLs for clicks as well as your @replies to keep track of which tweets are being shared. Get to know your audience, so you can deliver more content that they’re likely to share with their own followers, thereby building your online reputation (and your blog traffic) even more.
Twitter doesn’t drive a flood of traffic to your blog overnight, but with consistent and persistent effort, you can build relationships with your Twitter followers and slowly build your blog, too. Don’t give up. Just take the time to do your research and learn what makes your tweets shareworthy and retweet-worthy to your target audience. If you don’t take that step, your efforts won’t reach their full potential.
Image: jasonh1234 on deviantArt
How to Find Expert Sources or Be an Expert Source for Blog Stories and Publicity
Did you know there are free resources that bloggers can use to find experts and professionals as sources for blog posts? Did you know that these same free resources also allow you to offer your own services as an expert source, which gives you a great way to promote your blog both online and offline?
Consider this scenario — you’re writing a great blog post, but you need an expert to help you get the facts straight or provide a quote to take the post to the next level of authority. Where do you find an expert?
Consider another scenario — you want to increase exposure for your blog, build your authority and your blog’s authority, and boost awareness and traffic to your blog by providing quotes and interviews to journalists, bloggers and publishers. How do you do it?
The free online resources below can help you find experts and become an expert source for other publishers:
1. Help a Reporter Out (HARO)
HARO is a free tool that journalists, authors, publicists, businesses, and more use to find sources and offer services as topic or industry experts. You can submit your requests for sources using the form on the HARO website. Each day, members are sent emails listing requests for experts and sources. You can respond to any request that you’re qualified for. Just follow the individual response instructions published with each opportunity. Follow the link to learn 5 tips to help bloggers maximize HARO.
2. ProfNet
ProfNet is a service offered by PRNewswire. You can register for a free ProfNet account and then browse through submitted requests for experts and sources or publish your own requests. You can follow the link to learn how to create a ProfNet opportunity.
I have used both of the free tools listed above and recommend both to bloggers who want to find expert sources and promote themselves as expert sources. For example, many of the real-world stories and case studies included in my book about social media marketing come from ProfNet and HARO calls for sources. Through those requests, I met people and heard stories that I wouldn’t have found on my own, and I broadened my own online network in the process!
Have you used HARO or ProfNet? Leave a comment and share your story.
The Benefits of Splitting Off Into Microsites
This is a guest blog by Modi Mann, an SEO expert who loves usable Web design. He works for a toy company that specializes in Christmas gifts
Are two blogs and/or websites better than one?
Many website owners, as their businesses expand, come to the dilemma of splitting their sites into a few microsites so they can rank better for their targeted terms. This is not really an easy topic and before you make such a radical move there is a lot to take into consideration.
Reasons to Split a Site Into Microsites
1. Your brand name is not doing very well and you would like a part of the business to be re-branded and market it separately.
2. Your businesses are expanding into a few different niches, thus the one site you have can’t really serve all those different businesses.
3. You think that by splitting your site into several smaller ones you will manage to engage the visitors interested in a particular service or product. Conversion may increase as users will think that they are at a specialist’s website rather than a generic one offering all sorts of services or products.
Risks and Dangers
There are certain risks you will be taking by making such a big change and you need to think carefully before you make any decision. [Read more]
Get More Page Views – Add LinkWithin to Your Blog
Want to get extra page views on your blog and encourage visitors to read some of your older posts? If you use WordPress.org, there are a variety of related posts plug-ins that can help you automatically display links to related posts at the end of each of your blog posts (I like YARPP – Yet Another Related Posts Plugin).
Even if you don’t use WordPress, there is an option for you! And if you use WordPress but would love to show images with your related posts link, then you should keep reading, too.
LinkWithin is a free (and currently ad-free) widget that you can configure for your blog in minutes. It works on WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad blogs. Just visit LinkWithin.com, enter your email address, blog URL, blogging platform, and the number of stories you want to show in your widget into the form provided on the LinkWithin home page. Check the box in the form if your blog uses light text on a dark background, and click on the Get Widget button to get the instructions and code to copy into your blog to display related posts with images at the end of each of your posts. It’s that easy!
The image above shows you what related posts displayed using LinkWithin look like at the end of a WordPress blog post.
Getting additional page views can help you in a variety of ways, particularly if you want to make more money from blog advertising. Many advertisers are interested in learning how many page views your blog gets per month, so they can compare apples to apples when evaluating advertising opportunities between different sites. The more page views your blog gets, the more you can realistically charge and expect to receive for ad space sold on your blog. Also, if you participate in impression-based advertising programs (where you’re paid based on the number of times ads are displayed), then increasing page views on your blog can boost your earning potential from those impression-based ads.
Furthermore, adding links to related posts helps your readers stay on your blog longer, get a better idea of what your blog offers, and develop a greater interest in you and your blog.
LinkWithin uses your blog post titles, tags and content to find and display related posts. Don’t worry if you don’t use images in all of your posts. LinkWithin displays text links only when the majority of the related links discovered for a specific post don’t have images attached to them.
Bottom-line, LinkWithin is free, easy to install, and easy to remove if you don’t like it. Why not give it a try and see if it boosts page views on your blog?
What do you think? Do you use LinkWithin or another plugin or tool to display related posts on your blog? Leave a comment and share your preference!
How to Get Massive Traffic to Your Blog Contests for Free
Blog contests are a great way to drive short-term traffic to your blog, and hopefully, if your prize is relevant to your blog topic, some of those new visitors who come to enter the contest will poke around your blog, enjoy what they see, and return! Even better — they might tell their friends about your blog, link to your content from their own blogs and social web profiles, and more.
In other words, a blog contest can kick-off the compounding effect of blogging and help your blog grow in the short term and long term.
How do you get massive traffic to visit your blog and enter your blog contest? Fortunately, it’s very easy and only takes a few minutes thanks to several websites that allow you to promote your blog contests for free!
Following are five websites where you can promote your blog contests for free. All you have to do is register for each site and enter the information for your contest to get it in front of huge audiences of people who are actively searching for online contests to enter. I have used all of these sites to successfully drive traffic to blog contests except SweepsAdvantage.com, so I can attest to the fact that they work!
1. Online-Sweepstakes.com
This is the best site I’ve used to drive traffic to blog contests. Just create an account, login, and click on the Sweepstakes Directory tab in the top navigation bar and then the Add-a-Sweep link in the sub-navigation bar that appears. Complete the provided form with accurate information, and your contest will be added to the directory.
2. ContestBlogger.com
This is another site that successfully drives traffic to your blog contests. It’s actually a forum that you can register for and then post a new message in the forum to promote your contest.
3. About.com Blogging Forum
The About.com Blogging site has a forum that includes a folder dedicated to blog contests where you can register for a free account and post your blog contests to the forum at anytime.
4. About.com Sweepstakes Forum
The About.com Sweepstakes site also has a forum that includes a folder where you can register for a free account and add your blog contest to the list of contests and sweepstakes.
5. SweepsAdvantage.com
To publish a contest on the Sweepstakes Advantage site, register for a new account and click on the Add a Listing link in the left sidebar.
Blog Contest Promotion Quick Tip: To boost traffic to your contest, make sure the heading/title of your contest sounds really great when you submit it, because that might be the only information people see before they click through to enter your contest. Make it impossible for them to resist by enticing them with a great title.
And don’t forget to write clear rules in your blog contest post.!
Where do you promote your blog contests to drive traffic to them? Leave a comment and share your tips!
Image: stock.xchng
