Ways To Market A Blog
There are many ways to market a blog. Depending on your business model and budget, one can go for either the free or paid options. Personally for me, I feel that for new bloggers, it is best to go for the free options first. Once you understand and master the various ways to market and promote your blog, you can then go for paid options to market and expand your blog’s visibility.
First of all, you must understand there is no best or assure way to market and promote a blog. The degree of success for each method depends on a number of factors such as the niche your blog is in, the quality of your blog and so on. That is why it is important for you to get a good web analytic program to track your traffic sources.
Google provide a good web analytic service called Google Analytics which is free to use and you should really take advantage of it. With Google Analytics, you can track where your traffic is coming from and know which marketing method is bringing in the traffic for you. Discard the ones that bring in the least traffic and focus on the ones that are bringing in the most traffic.
With a good tracking program in place, you can then move on to the various free methods to market your blog. I have listed below some free methods which you can go about marketing your blog:
Article Directories
Submit your best articles to the top few article directories to gain more exposure and traffic and at the same time build some links back to your blog. It is also a good chance for you to establish yourself in a particular niche.
Blog Carnivals
Taking part in blog carnivals is one good way to market and expand you blog’s visibility. Basically a blog carnival is some sort of event in which a number of bloggers will write about a specific topic and then cross promote each other links. This is a very simple and effective way to getting more links and exposure.
Blog Directories
Submitting your blog to blog directories is a good way for people to notice and find your blog. It is also a good way to get your blog indexed quickly.
Comments
Commenting on other people’s blogs is a good way to drive targeted traffic. Just take care to provide quality comments rather than just spam other people’s blogs.
Forums
It actually pays to be active in forums that are related to your blog. By posting quality posts and building up your reputation in these forums, you are establishing yourself as an authority. You also get lots of targeted traffic and you can build a decent list quickly.
Freebies
Create a short report or product and distribute it for free. For example, if you can code and design a wordpress theme, you can offer it for free and let others download and use it in return for a backlink in the footer. Many webmasters and internet marketers are using it to great effect.
Link Requests
Link exchanges are a good way to get quality incoming links for free. However, the success rate is quite low unless your blog is already established and carry some page rank.
Networking
Networking with fellow bloggers in the same niche is another effective way to market and promote your blog, especially when your blog is fairly new. Once you are on friendly terms with them, you can start asking for links exchanges and even blog posts to market and promote your blog.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Traffic from search engines is the best traffic source, basically because it is free. However, to get there, you need to understand on page and off page SEO factors. It takes s a certain level of experiences and expertise before you can understand and master the fundamentals to get free organic traffic from the search engines.
Social Bookmarking
Bookmarking your blog’s content is one good way to drive traffic and build links at the same time. To fully take advantage of social bookmarking, you need to create quality content and make large number friends at social bookmarking sites.
Social Networking
This is a very powerful way to gain truckloads of traffic to your blog if you do it right. Build up a solid network of friends in social networking sites such as FaceBook, Friendster and MySpace and leverage on these networks to market and promote your blog. If you do it right, expect a steady stream of repeat traffic.
As you can see, if you applied some of these free methods to market and promote your blog, you can probably see some good results soon. As mentioned before, you have to test and track to see which method is bringing in the best results for you and keep them while discarding the ones that are not working or bringing in the least results. However at the end of the day, you still need to provide quality content in order to make your blog sticky and make people keep coming back again. If you have some other great free methods to market a blog, feel free to share it with us.
