Blogging as a Marketing Tool for your Online Business: (C) Promote your Blog

(A) Plan Blog → (B) Maintain Blog → (C) Promote Blog →
(D) Monetize Blog

After publishing your blog, the ultimate aim is to build a massive group of loyal readers. You should differentiate yourself from other writers by communicating in your unique and believable style. The first few months of your posts are crucial for you to experiment and fine-tune your content to capture the attention of your audience, eventually enticing them to follow your blog.

Moving forward, you should create a list of future topics that you intend to write about and to space out your posts to maintain a consistent posting schedule. You should not post all available information at once, which will reduce the impact of your content and you may run out of topic ideas subsequently.
You should submit your blog to search engines like Google and Yahoo in order to publish your blog to the whole world. Though these search engines may find your blog eventually, it is advantageous to submit your link to them to get a headstart in increasing the visibility of your blog. This can help reduce the listing time by weeks or even months. Some submission pages to top search engines include Google, Yahoo! and Bing.

Now that you have listed your blog on these popular search engines, you will also need to explore search engine optimization (SEO) to get your blog listed in the first few pages of the search engine listings. SEO is the process that results in your website appearing in the first few pages of the search engine listings. SEO is a campaign that focuses on (i) identifying keywords that are relevant to the content of your blog, (ii) making sure that these keywords stand out throughout your blog posts and (iii) increasing the number of quality and relevant external links to your blog.

Do note that search engine crawlers will collect words from your blog and report to their respective search engine services. These search engine services will then filter out the nouns and meaningful adjective to find out what your blog is all about. When identifying and choosing the keywords in your blog posts, you should consider (1) the frequency that these keywords appear in the search engine and (2) the keyword profitability which is the commercial value of the keyword (Keyword profitability: For instance when choosing between iPhone and an unknown XYZ brand, the word iPhone is a more obvious choice as ads are more likely to pay a pay-per-click for iPhone than XYZ brand).

Another method is to pay to advertise your blog in search engines such as Google Adsense, Yahoo! search engine marketing and Microsoft adCenter. You can write a short ad with inclusion of keywords that fulfill (1) and (2) that clearly summarises the main content of your blog. You should only pay when people click on your link to manage your financial budget.

If you are looking for free blog marketing options, you can promote your blog on Facebook and Twitter by attaching your blog link in your social networking sites by increasing its exposure among your friends and eventually the other users of these social networking sites.

Alternatively, you can utilise blog aggregators that retrieves RSS, Atom or XML feeds from blogs and list published blogs across the Internet (You may wish to refer to Top 55 RSS Submission site and Technorati. You can also submit your blog to Digg to be searched on google and reddit to be voted on reddit.)

If you are an avid writer, you can seriously consider writing reviews on books, magazines and newspaper articles that is likely to interest your target audience on popular e-commerce websites such as Amazon.com. In your reviews, you can identify and magnify problems that your target audience is facing before highlighting the solutions that your blog can offer. This is an effective way to generate interest for your blog and to build up your audience over time.

Another good strategy is to get traffic from other bloggers’ referrals. You can do so by visiting other related blogs and to exchange blog links with these high quality and traffic generating blogs. Make sure that your referred blogs are your complimentary partners and not a competitor to your online business.

Monetise your blog.

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