Tips on promoting your blog

I started blogging almost two months ago. It has been a learning process. As I had predicted in my first blog post, it is addictive, time-consuming, and fun. I wanted to share with you some tips on how to promote your blog.

1. Ask a blogger to review your blog before announcing your blog. Write a few posts to ensure that it is ready to go public.
2. Sign up for Feedburner to allow people to subscribe to your posts via RSS. RSS allows people to read your subscriptions on readers such as Google Reader, Netvibes, My Yahoo, or Bloglines without having to bookmark. To do this, you have to add the URL produced from Feedburner to your blog before people can subscribe to it. In basic WordPress, you have to copy and paste the URL in Widget, go to Edit > RSS Widget > Paste URL
3. Always provide an About/Contact section
4. Add your blog URL to any web page with your name on it (e.g., LinkedIn, Facebook, Faculty web page).
5. Facebook is not only about socializing, but also promoting. Post your posts on Facebook, MySpace, StumbleUpon and any other social networking site. My friend Tom Johnson does this with his blog.
6. If you have blogger friends who write about your topic. Let them know about you. They may write a post about you or they may add you to their blogroll. This will increase traffic and exposure to your blog.
7. You can cross-post to promote your blog and to reach a wider audience on a blog such as Open Salon or the AEJMC blog.
8. Add your blog to Wikipedia under external links. Think about what key words people would use to find the topic that your blog is about.
9. Sign up for an account on Technorati, BlogPulse and other blog search engines to add your blog to their directory.
10. Allow people to comment on your blog.

I have ten more tips on my teaching page under Promoting Your Blog. The Innovation in College Media blog listed several blog tips as well.

4 Responses to “Tips on promoting your blog”

1. rob, BtG on October 7th, 2008 7:54 am

   great tips, check out my blog for continued blog tips and news

   thanks

2. Serena Carpenter on October 7th, 2008 4:12 pm

   Thank you. Your blog looks great

3. Carol Schwalbe on October 11th, 2008 3:45 pm

   Thanks for the tips, Serena! Here are some others:

   Marco Folio lists 60 ridiculously useful tools for your blog or website.

   Seth Godin’s blog lists 56 ways to drive traffic to your blog.

4. Serena Carpenter on October 12th, 2008 7:20 am

   Thanks Carol, I will have to check them, especially that first one.

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