Business Builders

How to Promote Your Blog for Free

Promoting your blog is a process that takes adequate time, patience and dedication. Unfortunately there is no one resource you can plug your website into and have 10,000 readers over night (with the exception of receiving a Digg or earth shattering news event that is found by a large media outlet). Here I will outline a series of steps that you can take to start getting some legitimate traffic to your website.

A prerequisite - you have a blog that has good content, advice, topics, etc. I advise you to write at least 10, if not more, blog entries before you start heavily promoting it. Now, let’s begin.

 1)  Join Communities / Social Media - This is one of the quickest ways to get new traffic. Here are a few that we have found effective: Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Facebook, LinkedIn,  MyBlogLog, Bumpzee, MySpace, YouTube,  Blog Catalog. That should be enough to get you started. It’s best to start a community at these sites (the ones that allow you to).

 2) Forums - Become active in a forum that is geared towards your industry. This is hard to determine without knowing what your business is but all you have to do is type in your main topic followed by forum in Google and I’m sure you will find tons!   

 3) Start your own Group - You can easily start your own group on Yahoo, Google, MSN and more. If you have a good enough Niche, you should easily be able to find new members. Here is an example of one we just started http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/The_Business_Builders/database

 4) Let the world know - There are various free places where you can advertise your business for free.

            a. Classifieds - Craig’s List, Oodle, Kijiji, INetGiant, Sales Spider

            b. Share Photos - Flickr, Photobucket

            c. Submit a Press Release - PRBuzz, I-Newswire, Free-Press-Release.com

5)  Promote Your Blog Feeds - Create a place for members to easily subscribe to your blog.

 6) Create a Contest - Offer something that you can give away that will draw in visitors, maybe some free advertising or something free that pertains to your industry that is worthwhile.

7) Leave Comments - visit industry related blogs and leave comments. Caution: don’t overkill this, you don’t want to be seen as a nuisance. Leave comments only when you have something valuable to add.