The A-B-C's of Blog Marketing

I often talk about marketing your website but a blog is also website and can also be marketing.  Most blogger would like to have more people reading their blog, after all is that not the point of a blog?  To have people read it?

To get more people to your blog you need to do some form of marketing.  This does not have to be anything fancy; there are many simple things that you can do to get your blog noticed. 

Here are some steps that you can take no matter what kind of blog that you have created.

The first step is to know your software that you are using.  Common blog software such as WordPress and Moveable Type have many plug-ins which can simply be installed to help with SEO, keywords and other marketing need. Even if there is not a plug in for these necessary steps many of them can be done manually.

If you are using a plug-in you must USE IT!  Having the plug-in is not enough; you must put in your keywords and adjust things with each post.   I have had friends install plug-in and then proceed to not use them properly.  Like all things in life you need to take that extra step and time to get your SEO plug-in to work.

Your blog should have the ability to us RSS subscription options, social bookmark links.  This way once someone has found your blog they can share it with other.  Unlike the SEO plug-in this is very straight forward and can be done once and then adjusted just from time to time.

Make sure that your keywords are always part of everything that you write.  You want to have people and search engines to focus on you primary interest so keep using those keywords.

On a similar note, if you area doing a blog for business keep it business related and focused.  You should not mix your business with too much from your personal life.  It looks unprofessional.  If you want to keep your family and friends up-to-date with what you are doing then start a separate blog or use a social website.  You customers should not have to wade through post after post on how cute your cat was today before they get to your business information.  

When you are done writing up your blog be sure to tag it correctly.  The tags are like keywords or meta tags which help search engines, RSS feeds, and other software help sort you and place you for people to find your blog. 

Whenever you do post a new article for your blog you should also send out a ping.  This is software that sends out a little message using your title and tags that let people know that you have a new post.  WordPress, it has built-in function called “ping” which sends a note to many search engines and tagging services.

http://bpinger.com/
http://pingomatic.com/
http://www.pingmyblog.com/

These are just short list of website that does the pinging for you.

Follow these instructions and you will find yourself getting more readers and followers.