Strategies For Promoting Your Blog

Unless you have found a way to live entirely without money, you probably need some steady income in order to survive. The traditional way to earn money, of course, is by having a job. Most people discover, at times too late, that this way of earning money doesn't guarantee optimum satisfaction.

On the other hand, if you have established a digital presence in the form of a blog, you can turn such into cash. In my last article, I focused on how to be a successfully blogger. Most of the emails and feedback I received centred on the need to know how to promote a blog and, especially, how to make money from it or other forms of online presence.

Before an individual begins to talk about making any form of income from a digital presence, such individual must understand that there is a process. In this case, it is a three-step process: Build content, build traffic and make money. If you jump straight to making money, you will surely fail.

In this piece, the spotlight would be on how to build traffic for a blog. The first step is to ensure that you have good content and then we can go ahead to promote your blog. Blog promotion is not an exact science, but using the right method with the right materials in the right place at the right time you can create explosive results. And best of all you can do so at zero additional cost.

Keep in mind that the list below isn’t exhaustive and is in no particular order. Rather, the purpose is to show some of the strategies that I have implemented successfully.

•Search Engine Optimisation: Search Engine Optimisation is simply a way to improve the structure of your blog so that the various search engines can easily locate them. A blog with good SEO will come out on top during a search.

For example, when you open www.google.com and search the word ‘online+newspapers +in+nigeria’ what websites show up on top? These websites have good SEO. This is a big way to promote your blog in Google and other search engines absolutely free.

Some companies provide SEO services at a premium, however with a small amount of computer know-how, a huge dose of inquisitiveness and an equally large amount of insight you can save some money and carry out SEO by yourself.

It is informative to note that SEO is a broad strategy but I would focus on two areas that would kick-start the process, these are: keyword density and back links.

Think about your keywords as search terms: How would someone looking for information on this topic search for it? You should carefully place appropriate keywords in appropriate amounts throughout every page on your site: your titles, content, URLs etc.

Be strategic in your keyword use. For instance if you are blogging about real estate, your keywords could include such words as; real estate, housing, rent, home, land, building etc. In your post, use these words generously and it would improve your keyword density and consequently help promote your website.

Backlinks are inward inks which are coming towards your blog / website from other websites; this is also called inbound links. It is important in ranking up your website in search engines. This can easily be achieved, for instance, when you drop a post on facebook, you could include a link to your blog such that when someone clicks on the link it directs the person to your blog.

You should include links to your blog on forums etc. The importance of this is that search engines keep an eye on backlinks coming towards your website / blog. These backlinks help website to get ranked high in search engine quickly and thus promote your blog.

•Have guest writers: Publishing posts from guest writers is a great way to expand your reach and build your audience, especially when you’re just starting out. A sizeable number of blogs that have become successful are implementing this strategy.

You need to understand that if you must succeed, you would need help at some point. By getting other people to contribute articles to you blog, you would also enjoy the traffic generated from each guest writer’s ‘fans’.

It is noteworthy to mention that while it’s worth the effort, coordinating contributor’s content isn’t easy. It takes a lot of clear communication, brainstorming, editing and planning. You need a very decent people management skill to ensure that the contributors are on their toes at all times.

A workable strategy would be to get 14 guest writers, one for each day of the week, each contributing an article in two weeks. By so doing, you would have a steady flow of content and a crowd of readers brought in by each of the contributors. This is immense promotion for your blog.

In conclusion, you won’t know if your efforts are working unless you monitor your webometric ranking. This you can do with tools like www.alexa.com — just type your website name and you would know how much traffic you have been able to attract. Some people insist that you need money to make money and this belief has held them back. The strategies discussed above would not cost you an extra dime, implement them and enjoy the results. I look forward to reading your questions, comments and suggestions.

 BY PETER OKOLIE (THEPETEROKOLIE@GMAIL.COM)

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