How to Promote Your Blog Over Instant Messaging
How to Promote Your Blog Over Instant Messaging

How to Promote Your Blog Over Instant Messaging

by Alex · 23 comments

Every­body on the inter­net instant mes­sages. Whether you have a Skype account or an MSN pass­port, you most likely talk to peo­ple via chat. How­ever, few peo­ple real­ize how effec­tive instant mes­sag­ing clients can be for pro­mot­ing your blog.

Your friends, fam­ily, and online con­tacts are ripe for the pick­ing when it comes to build­ing loyal blog read­ers. Because you talk on a reg­u­lar basis, you’ve already built up their loy­alty and trust, and chances are, they’re eager or at least inter­ested to see what you’re work­ing on. This is the secret to pro­mot­ing your blog with­out actu­ally advertising.

Ask About Projects — Dis­cuss Your Achievements

When talk­ing online, ask your friends about their recent projects, and how they’re going. Lis­ten instinc­tively, and offer up some insight. Then talk about your recent achieve­ments with your blog, and ask for feed­back. Your friends and fam­ily will prob­a­bly visit your blog, and might even get hooked on it while tak­ing a look around.

Hook Them In

Noth­ing else works per­fectly but flat­tery, take it from me. Always talk about their web­site first and tell them how great of a job you think they have done. In the end, some­how get them to ask you what your blog is. I feel you shouldn’t be direct all of the time. You can use phrases like:

  • “You have a nice blog, the _______ is way nicer than it is at my blog!” — Point out some­thing you think their blog is bet­ter in, and tell them that they have it bet­ter than you. This should hope­fully spark their inter­est to see the thing they are bet­ter at, because it is an ego booster.
  • “Wow! That _____ is nice. How did you do that? I want to do it on my blog.” — You don’t even have to be really inter­ested, but just ask hem what they did to do some­thing you like. Maybe you really want it on your blog too, and that’s great you found a new idea.

Just make them feel like they have done a great job, build up their ego a lit­tle bit, and I am sure they will ask for the link to your blog.

Give Them a Sneak Peak of Your New Stuff

Friends are always beg­ging one another for favors and free­bies, and that includes sneak peaks at devel­op­ing web­sites. While you might be tempted to keep things under wraps, show­ing off your online con­tacts will help you get feed­back and build antic­i­pa­tion for your blog. Offer­ing up the occa­sional “sneak peak” to your online bud­dies is a great way to get peo­ple talk­ing about your projects.

Before the new design here was launched, I did this method myself and I let a few of my con­tacts on MSN see a close to com­pleted draft of it. I received some insanely help­ful feed­back, I was let it on bugs, and best of all: I made a few peo­ple feel special.

The last rea­son is not a joke, I believe I did make the few peo­ple I showed the sneak peak to spe­cial. I cre­ated trust between us by show­ing THEM some­thing that would have a huge impact on my blog. The results?

  • I got a lot of feed­back on the design, and that helped me crush bugs and improve the design.
  • I rewarded those who have been loyal to me and my blog by mak­ing them feel immensely important.
  • I cre­ated friends that I still talk to every­day. They’re not just read­ers to me, their my new pals.

Ask for Help with an Idea

Sim­i­lar to dis­cussing achieve­ments, ask­ing for help when you’re stuck on an idea or task is a great way to pro­mote as well. When your online con­tact is scour­ing your blog try­ing to help you, they may actu­ally read the con­tent out of curios­ity, and become inter­ested. In addi­tion, your friends will see the help they gave you as an invest­ment, and will visit your blog reg­u­larly to make sure every­thing is run­ning smoothly.

There are two cer­tain approaches you can go with here:

Be Bla­tant and Dish out your link (WRONG)

You can click on someone’s name, type your mes­sage and include the URL all in one mes­sage. I believe that to be the aggres­sive approach to this. Here is my message:

Hey, my header doesn’t align right in IE7, can you help? http://www.blogussion.com/

There are mul­ti­ple rea­sons why i would not go this direction:

  1. You seem like and look like one of those spam­mers who give you viruses when you click the link.
  2. Rather than help­less, you seem like you are try­ing to force them to help you.
  3. It looks like you assume that they can help you, or assume that they already said “Yes, I can help you.”

The next approach I rec­om­mend you go with to look better.

Slow­ing Down Your Approach (RIGHT)

This time instead of just giv­ing out the link, I will show you ways how to work towards it. Here is an image I made for this:

Slowing Down Your Approach and Creating Trust

Slow­ing Down Your Approach and Cre­at­ing Trust

MSN is a great way to pro­mote your blog to inter­ested poten­tial read­ers. As long as you keep form spam­ming your con­tacts, and be sure to act appre­cia­tively, there’s no bet­ter audi­ence than one that con­sists of your friends.

Image by Lee Hyunh

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Article by Alex

I'm the 17 year old blogger & designer behind Blogussion. I live in New Jersey (but root for the New England Patriots), and am a Junior in High School. You can check out my rarely updated personal(ish) blog, Asnio, or connect with me on Twitter.

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Jake| Web Journey June 25, 2009 at 9:38 am

Nice article. I have never seen anyone post about this topic before. I should definitely consider using it.
Jake| Web Journey´s last blog ..10 Commandments For Bloggers and Webmasters

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Alex July 5, 2009 at 1:43 pm

Thanks Jake, glad you saw something new!
Alex´s last blog ..Big Changes Coming to Asnio + My Week Long Absence

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Havoc Marketing June 25, 2009 at 12:10 pm

Hi Alex,

That’s a new approach. I never thought of using instant chat to promote my blog. I use Google Talk more than any other instant messaging softwares. I’ll give it a try and see what happens. Thanks for the post.

Mani Raj
Havoc Marketing

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Alex July 5, 2009 at 1:43 pm

Nowadays everything has to be used as a marketing tool! :p
Alex´s last blog ..Big Changes Coming to Asnio + My Week Long Absence

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Country Music June 25, 2009 at 2:17 pm

I’ve actually never heard about promoting a blog through instant messaging. The big hype has been the social networking sites like Myspace, Facebook and Twitter. It seems like your idea would be somewhat time consuming… but it just might work. I’ll have to try it out sometime.

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Alex July 5, 2009 at 1:45 pm

Really, any kind of promoting will be time consuming. But I have to disagree with you about instant messaging marketing taking too long. Actually, I think it’s the quickest way to go.

Chances are you have friends who have similar blogs to yours, and if you ever do talk with them over MSN or something, you just post the link when appropriate. Spamming, as I said, isn’t something I would do though.
Alex´s last blog ..Big Changes Coming to Asnio + My Week Long Absence

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The Bad Blogger June 26, 2009 at 12:37 am

Woo… that’s a great way to communicate and draw potential readers in, seriously I never thought of using MSN to do anything with my blog…. Anyway I like your blog design, it looks clean and unique…

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Alex July 5, 2009 at 1:46 pm

Yeah, it’s surprising that we use something every day and miss out on the true potential of it!

I appreciate the comments on the blog design here, it means a lot!
Alex´s last blog ..Big Changes Coming to Asnio + My Week Long Absence

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Corey Freeman @ Blogger Bear June 26, 2009 at 9:49 pm

I actually use this method all of the time. I talked to a bunch of people online, and once you build up friends, it’s a great way to launch new projects.
Corey Freeman @ Blogger Bear´s last blog ..Getting Traffic to Blogs Without Spending a Dime – I

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Alex July 5, 2009 at 1:47 pm

Me too, I have never changed my MSN address and I literally have over 500 contacts on my list. Not all of them are active and not all of them talk to me still, but I still have quite a large list!
Alex´s last blog ..Big Changes Coming to Asnio + My Week Long Absence

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Nicolas Prudhon June 27, 2009 at 5:51 am

Hi Alex,

I’m not really for engaging people through messenger to get more traffic… but if it was to be done, your method is fair enough.

The first one will definitely not work with me as I would tag you as a spammer and block you from ever contacting me again.
Nicolas Prudhon´s last blog ..Day 19: 21DSM – Outrank Your Competition

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Alex July 5, 2009 at 1:49 pm

Ha, there’s no fooling you. :P

I guess some people are different, and it’s understandable to think so. I get a lot of spammers on my MSN nowadays and I think it’s reasonable to consider that approach as a spam method from one point of view.
Alex´s last blog ..Big Changes Coming to Asnio + My Week Long Absence

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Dean Saliba June 27, 2009 at 6:11 am

Oh I so agree with this post.

I use Yahoo and MSN and I post the link to my blogs in my screen name.

I have been ‘buddies’ with people who abuse this though and have had to block a few for sending me the link to their new site every five minutes.

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Alex July 5, 2009 at 1:50 pm

It’s ridiculous how many people take advantage of an IM client. I follow my own advice, and I wish more people on my contact list would do the same!

I think from now on whenever I get a spammer I am going to refer them to this article. :P
Alex´s last blog ..Big Changes Coming to Asnio + My Week Long Absence

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Jeet June 27, 2009 at 7:18 am

@Alex: Super, I almost never promote my blog on messenger. At max I will set my latest post URL in my status and friends will automatically visit, but these are definitely good ways to make them your ‘readers’.

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Alex July 5, 2009 at 1:51 pm

I used to just throw the URL in as my status, and I was surprised how many people saw it.

I can’t believe I forgot to add that into this article! That’s what I do the most too!
Alex´s last blog ..Big Changes Coming to Asnio + My Week Long Absence

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Atul June 29, 2009 at 11:37 pm

I do use Instant messaging yahoo to promote my blog

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Alex July 4, 2009 at 7:16 am

My friends are always asking questions about things that are already on my blog, so I just point them that way.
Alex´s last blog ..Weekend Round-Up 7/04

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Alex July 5, 2009 at 1:53 pm

Sounds fair enough Alex, it’s smart and effective!
Alex´s last blog ..Big Changes Coming to Asnio + My Week Long Absence

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Karolyn October 8, 2009 at 9:27 pm

Very interesting article! Thanks for this great tip/idea on how to promote your blog. I would have never thought to promote my blog using IM!
Karolyn´s last blog ..Technorati – Blog- New Cool Features

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Ravi singh October 29, 2009 at 9:02 am

Hi,

Blog promotion is indeed most important topic in internet marketing.
Thanks nice review..what I generally use most to promote is my blog is article writing,social bookmarking and forums.
Getting more backlinks means you will get better ranking in google.

http://webmasterdailytips.com/2009/10/how-to-promote-your-blog/

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