Marketing your blog

If you are building your blog for personal use – IE so Grandma can keep up with the family, or so you can share your hobby with your other hobby enthusiast friends, then you already have a built in audience.

If you are building a blog / site to become a well read authority on the subject or to make money, then you will have to market you blog as well.  That is another huge Time Consumer.  There are reasons the CEO doesn’t do everything in a company – there simply just isn’t enough time.  Small businesses usually have  the owner running everything, and that is likely where you will be at.  So now you are starting to wonder – How do I market my blog/site?

Well, first and foremost, there is no reason to waste time and money marketing your site if the content on the site is not good quality.  You need to first provide a reason for any visitor to want to come to your site and to want to come back.  Once you have some good content, then you can start doing some marketing as well as continuing to add content.

Here is a list of ideas that we will walk through together in later posts:

1.  Read and comment on other blogs that have similar subjects as yours
2.  Join Blogging networks – MyBlogLog (you can see the little pictures on the right side of my site, that is from MyBlogLog)
3.  Join Forums for your niche – AND PARTICIPATE
4.  Join Clubs in your niche – AND PARTICIPATE
5.  Get Podcasts from sites in your niche
6.  Join Digg, Stumble-Upon, Reddit, Alltop….  There is a list of most of these services in the “Share This” icon at the bottom of this post.  Join them ALL.
7.  Create a Facebook page
8.  Create a MySpace page
9.  Create a Ning group or join an existing one – AND PARTICIPATE
10.   Start on Twitter – you can follow me on Twitter @JohnnyOptimist

Obviously that is not an exhaustive list, but it gives us a place to start.  The best part about all of those above is that they are monetarily Free.  They only cost time unless you pay someone to go do them for you.  Some of them will be simple, and you may already do others, but the theme here is to make yourself known, put yourself out there and participate in communities that are interested in the same things you are writing about.  These are groups begging for more content. 

If you spend a couple hours in a day, you can go through the Wall Street Journal, CNET, and other sites and read the articles that interest you.  Come back the next day and odds are there is only one maybe two more articles that interest you, come back the next day and you will feel like everything is old news and you will be wanting new info / new content.  That is the way a lot of people feel.  Some days I feel I am way behind on reading, but I go in to the sites I like and within about 2 hours I have caught up for the week.  Don’t get me wrong, they provide a lot of fresh content daily, but most of it I am not really interested in.  I get political news from other sources, and you can’t blink without getting bombarded with the latest headline.  It is the actual information articles that interest me – like How to Market your Blog, or What is Twitter, or a new service that has launched like BloggersBase.  The same ‘ol stories do not interest me like “Twitter is selling to ….”  even though every report before it said neither side is interested in it.  

Hopefully in that last paragraph I showed you why people would want you to come and join their group, why they would want to come visit your site and read your new fresh content. 

Are there any questions so far?  I will go through each of those above one by one in the coming posts, since this is really Blogging 101 and many of you might not know how to do things.  So sit tight and learn from the Blogmaster General.

Ben

Blogmaster General – teaching you to blog like nobody’s business.