FOR every performance, there should be an audience. The same applies to blogging. Without your audience, your blog won’t survive. So what do you do in order to increase your traffic? Simple –- by promoting your blog.

Your blog will only take off when you know and understand how to sell your ideas to your target audience. The key is in finding out which strategy works for you best.

Sounds easy, right? Yes, but take heed — so many bloggers tend to cut corners by resorting to sneaky promotional methods (eg. spamming) in the hopes of gaining overnight success, and they end up compromising their own credibility and integrity. Those tactics hardly ever work in the long run.

Although increasing your blog’s popularity and hits takes time, it is well worth the effort. There are several sure-fire and legit ways of doing this, and the following are only a few tried-and-true methods employed by professional bloggers. Best of all, these techniques are free and can be immediately implemented.

1. Blog Commenting

While posting links in your comments is frowned on these days, it’s still a favorite promotional tool. The key to making this work is to post relevant comments in blogs that you actually subscribe to. Find a topic that is in the same niche as your blog, and post your comments there. This way you will attract the attention of the blog’s readers AND owners. It also will lessen the chances of your comments being deleted. Trust me, I am one of those who actively deletes comments that sound spammy or even remotely off-topic.

2.Email Marketing

This is another fast method for driving traffic to your site. If you have an email list – and you should – you can regularly send out messages telling your recipients to check out your latest blog post. It’s that simple.

3. Social Communities

Plenty of bloggers swear by posting scheduled tweets on Twitter, creating Facebook fan pages, or posting links in LinkedIn. This is an extremely fast way to create a buzz and get both traffic and backlinks. Facebook fan pages also allows you the opportunity to interact directly with your fans and readers.

Aside from popular social networks, you can promote your blog in forums, blogging communities, and general directories. You can also post your own linked articles in a blog carnival. However, promoting your blog without any other active group participation is considered distasteful by many and could get you banned or even blacklisted as a spammer. One obvious example of doing this is posting your blog link in your forum signature.

The best way to go about this is to actively participate in group discussions on topics that are related to your blog. Build a community of like-minded people, and you don’t just get traffic, you may even establish yourself as an expert in your blog niche.

4. Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking sites are a tad different from social networks, in the sense that the former is used more often for link building. There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of bookmarking sites, including Del.i.ci.ous, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Digg, where readers sign up to bookmark links to their favorite sites.

The upside to promoting your blog in these sites is that your blog can quickly go viral and can receive a huge amount of traffic in record time; however, you don’t get much backlinks from bookmarking, so save this tactic for getting more hits and readers.

5. Direct Interaction

This is an oft-overlooked promotional tactic. With the sheer volume of bloggers cropping up, personal interactions with readers go down. Many blog readers find it flattering to be the subject of a blog author’s attention, and this ultimately helps create a buzz through their testimonials.

Frequent interaction with your readers also allows you to encourage them to keep on reading, participate in your contests, subscribe to RSS feeds, etc. As with real-life businesses, this kind of personalized service inspires loyalty and attracts new traffic.

These are only a few strategies for putting your blog out there. Remember that success isn’t instant, and you’ll have to deal with plenty of rejection as well. You will have to resist the urge to take underhanded shortcuts, but if you apply the aforementioned methods strategically and consistently, chances are your blog will eventually double or even triple its readership without sacrificing your reputation. Good luck!

Photo credits: dressful.com, tipsblogger.com

Carmela Maraan has written on various topics ranging from marketing, advertising, blogging, and creative writing to adult material. She is enthusiastic about expanding her repertoire as she views the world as one huge library. During her free time she is also a voracious reader, an irrepressible singer, and a mom who hardly sleeps.

Related posts:

1. Marketing the “You Know What” Out of Your Blog, Part 2

2. Marketing the “You Know What Out” of Your Blog, Part 3

3. Marketing the “You Know What” Out of Your Blog, Part 1

Customers are the life blood of any business. Yes, that’s right. It’s not the product, it’s not the innovations and it’s not even the technology or marketing.

Marketing and technology only comes after your customers. You see products of inferior quality sell well and products of outstanding quality sell less. It’s a bit of marketing along with your customers experience with you.

Do you know why many businesses launched by popular companies gain traction quickly as compared to start ups by people who are relatively unknown? It’s the brand value of the parent company.

Most successful companies utilize the power of their already successful product to draw in new customers to their new business. So how do you market your new business effectively to your old customers?

1. Remember the MOST Important Detail…

This is one of the most difficult things any hardcore businessmen can achieve.

The new generation of entrepreneurs is a bit different. However, most of the older generations who own a business are the same. They find it difficult to manage customer relationships once a sale has been made.

I’m not saying that you should forget your business and spend time on customer relationship alone. You must learn to go forward giving equal importance to both.

Finding the right balance is the key to happy customers and ultimately, a healthy bank balance.

2. Make Irresistible Offers

This one is a killer. Nothing beats an irresistible offer. Give them an offer which will invite them back to your store. Once they start frequently visiting your store, you won’t need offers to draw them in.

When you have an online business, offers could be exclusive discounts for your existing customers. You might consider giving away a free podcast or webinar as a thank you for being your customer.

3. Leverage Your Existing Business

This one should go without saying.

You must make use of the credibility of your old business to draw in customers to your new business. It will be easier for you to target your old customers as you probably have a wealth of information about their buying habits already.

4. Get Old Customers Involved

I am not suggesting that you give them a job. Rather, get them involved in your business in a more creative way.

How about letting your most loyal customer cut the ribbons on the opening day of your new business?

It not only helps build loyalty and branding, but can also save on hiring celebrities to inaugurate your new business. The hype is forgotten when a celebrity is involved, but when you get a customer to do it for you, the good will remains as it shows you care for your customers.

If you have an online business, use your past client testimonials. Promote your customers by providing their success story. Give them a bit of the limelight.

5. Keep Your Old Business Involved Too!

Most people forget to inform their previous customers about their new business. How difficult will it be to send in a postcard to them or an invitation letter? If online, an email is even easier.

Personal invitations works best as people feel more compelled to respond to a personal invitation. I am not suggesting that you personally go and invite each and every one of them, but it will certainly feel more personal if they see that the newsletter/email has their name on it.

So, are you ready to invite old customers to your new business?

About the author: Adarsh Thampy is a 22 year SEO consultant. He started his online journey 6 years back and now helps people start their own online business. Download the free guide today and live your entrepreneurship dream.

Related posts:

1. Creating a Business Culture on Your Blog

2. 9 Ways to Treat Your Blog More Like a Brick-and-Mortar Business

3. Reaching New Customers By Expanding Your Vision

Do you want to know how we used the three things above to spike our traffic from 20 visits a day to over 2,000? It’s time you start thinking outside of the box when it comes to marketing and promoting your blog — way outside of the box.

Your Problem: No One Cares About You or Your Blog

(Except your mom — and she could be jiving too)

Q: What do you call a million people all shouting the same thing at once?
A: The Internet.

If you’ve ever tried to drive traffic to your blog, then you’ve probably felt like one of the million people all saying the same thing: “Hey — come listen to what I have to say!”

It might work. But one-in-a-million isn’t very good odds. So, even though you provide good content, you utilize every social media site around, and you get fresh ideas daily from sites like Blogussion, nobody really seems to care.

All of those things are good — and that’s exactly your problem. They’re just good. Good isn’t good enough. You are remarkable — and it’s about time you started acting like it.

Nobody cared about us either. Until…

It was the summer of 2010. My buddy (and budding business prodigy) Nick Tart and I had just finished interviewing 25 of the world’s most impressive young entrepreneurs — including Alex Fraiser himself — for a book. The only problem was that just a select few really cool people knew about it.

We had tried spreading the word with emails, articles, and comments — but we were only making ripples where we wanted to make waves. That’s when we had a kooky idea: make a stop-motion music video to promote our book.

I got to work writing music and mixing in audio chopped-up from the interviews. Nick Tart got busy buying Sharpies and making cut-outs of all 25 young entrepreneurs. Overall, we put in around 68 hours into the song/video and the results made it completely worthwhile.

They speak for themselves:

Quit Moping Around & Create Something Remarkable

But You Don’t Like Making Stop-Motion Videos…

Good for you. They’re a pain. To find your personal promotional perfection, don’t look around at what other people have done. Look at your own life. What do you like to do for fun? What creative things did you waste your time on as a kid?

In our case, those were silly stop-motion videos, but in yours it could be anything from finger paint to play-doh to wooden blocks. Simply create something that you would want to tell all of your friends about.

And don’t play the “I’m not creative” card. If you’re one of the left-brained among us, then you can still use your technical prowess to make something awesome, like a big row of dominoes that spells out your URL.

From Hobby to Purposeful Content

Of course, you can’t just make a video of your stamp collection and expect it to be a promotional boon for your blog. You have to redirect your hobby so that it fits your purpose like a glove. Recognize your assets and your message — then start thinking creatively from there.

In our case, we realized that the audio from the 25 young entrepreneurs we interviewed was one of our biggest assets. So, we decided to incorporate some of the best audio clips into a song. We also knew that more people would recognize these bloggers by their faces and accomplishments than by their voices — so we decided to incorporate a visual component too.

You can do the same thing to promote your blog. Think about the possible ways that your creative stream overlaps with your blog. Find an idea that’s unique and exhilarating and then go for it! A few nights of hard work and you’ll have your killer promotional content.

Let Your Content Roam Free, Like The Wild Buffalo

People are incredibly lazy (as a former lazy person myself, I can vouch for this). Even if you’ve created a mind-blowing song/dance/paint-by-numbers-drawing for your blog, nobody’s going to share it unless it’s really, really easy for them to do so.

Here are the three ways we made our video more viral than pink eye:

1. Facebook Comments
   This is a new tool that lets you put a snazzy little Facebook comment box underneath any scrap of content. It’s great because it encourages feedback, community, and it posts a link on the person’s wall.
2. Tweet Button
   Everyone tweets. Even your grandma. That means that one or two tweets about your promotion aren’t going to make a big dent in things. But if you can attract a whole flock of Twitterers with a sleek little ‘Retweet’ button, then you’re in business.
3. Posted on YouTube
   We uploaded our video onto YouTube so that people could easily embed it onto their websites and Facebook profiles. YouTube is also the second biggest search engine in the world and it’s especially popular with younger people — which happens to be our primary demographic.

Here’s the video that helped us go viral:

There are very few reasons not to be remarkable.

If you can think of a few good reasons to be average, then ignore everything you just read. Otherwise, get out there and start transforming something you’re passionate about into a perfectly mind-blowing promotional campaign for your newly-remarkable blog.

Ready to jump in with DIY marketing? Or are you convinced that your hobby is too weird, dorky, or illegal to be transformed into eye-catching promotional content? Hop on down and join the brain-storming in the comment box below.

Photo by Fergus Ray Murray

Related posts:

1. Stop Blogging About Blogging Already

2. Build Your Community, Stop Begging for One

3. 5 Ways To Build An Epic Blogger Brand

Twitter is a tool that is becoming more and more widely used by bloggers, journalists, businesses, and the general public. It’s free to use, easy to get started, simple, but still highly underestimated and used. Let’s look at how we can use the best of Twitter for having conversations and gathering information all in real time.

Twitter is an experimental tool. It’s your experimental tool

Why is Twitter so underestimated and used? Why do I even say this? Let’s look at the different groups of people that use it that I previously mentioned. We bloggers mainly have used it to connect and socialize with other bloggers and make people aware of our own content. Link love! Journalists or news agencies simply publish their feed. Lots of link love! Businesses are slowly utilizing it to talk to their customers and competition. Finally, the general public is gathering information from the top Twitter accounts, news agencies, and just having conversations with their other friends that actually have Twitter.

After looking at the most dominate forms of using Twitter we can agree that it’s mostly used for spreading links, gathering links, connecting with people, and socializing with people by very many approaches.

Who are you?

In order to use a tool that has the potential to help out people in so many ways, we have to know who we actually are.

Simply put, “who are you?”

But knowing that this is far from simple, what do you feel defines you? I ask, because this question can also be “what is your passion”, and in order to use something like Twitter should establish this first.

For instance, if you are into knowing the latest news and staying updated you will use the best of Twitter than if you were someone who gets their information by talking with people and holding conversations. Or for that matter you could be both. You just have to know who you are.

Twitter is used both for conversations and information and I’ll be looking at the same four features of Twitter to help both out.

Conversations

Conversations are that social connection we have and can hold with one another. We all know that social media has increased this opportunity and frequency. Twitter is certainly a tool to take advantage and utilize for your benefit all while conversing.

Lists

You’ve heard of having groups. Well lists are just like groups and allow you to have conversations with people related to a certain topic, interest, or belief, etc. Many times when you have many followers or people you want to follow you forget who all would talk about what/who. Lists help you out with this potential dilemma. Oh, and if you wish to make a list private, meaning a group just for your use like the “connect” list I have (shown to the right) for people I want to connect with more.
It’s up to you.

Replying

Casual talk is on the rise. Just start a reply. It’s simple as that

Replying is when we decide to talk back, respond, or offer additional input to whatever they have tweeted out.
Say you see someone discussing or talking about a certain thing that interests you, you have the opportunity to respond to them at anytime with extreme ease. Think of it has a geeky (but the next) way of emailing or contacting someone and just to have a very casual talk.

Casual talk has a new meaning and new home, called Twitter. All you have to do is reply to them and all of your followers can see you actually conversing with people. Transparency is at an all time high.

Search

So many are unaware of how to start conversations with people using Twitter if they don’t really know who is all on that would be of interest to them.

Easy solution. Use search.twitter.com and search for a keyword that would be of interest to you to start a casual conversation with that person related to that keyword happy tweet. This is again how people can find you too (keep that in mind). You just never know when someone on Twitter might talk with you.

Third-Party Clients

Third-Party clients are things that allow you to use the basic functions of Twitter, but add more ease and function. Some examples are Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, Tweetie, and Brizzly.

All of the ways to use Twitter for conversations I have already stated can all be more ease of use to you and strive for more conversations with people on Twitter through these third-party clients.

Conversations are for starters, but we can get more. Actual beneficial information.

Information

All of the above features I went though (all four) you can use to help you obtain useful and beneficial information for yourself, your followers, and even your blog community.

Let’s go through them quickly:

• Lists: Use lists to categorize the type of information you are in need or want of. i.e. Social Media, Blogging Tips, World News, Gadgets, etc.
• Replying: Respond to people related to each of the lists you have made to gain more information or ask any questions you may have about what they have published, reported, wrote, or commented on.
• Search: Looking for something. Think of this as a real-time Google Search, but keep the search entry short.
• Third-Party Clients:Gain and retain the most information at your finger tips. Here is where you have to dig into each specific client to see which one better suits your needs.

I’ve looked at four features of Twitter for conversations that also help with gathering information, but recognize how you can begin to start using Twitter in different ways.

Yes, there is so many ways to use Twitter. You just have to find the best ways that fit your way of connecting, holding conversations, or finding information. Remember Twitter is your experimental tool .
The video from Chris Brogan (to the right) even has more ways to use the best of Twitter.

I’m sure that you all have your one twitter tip. Well, how are you using Twitter to benefit you the best?

Related posts:

1. Are You an Effective Tweeter or Just Another Bird on the Wire?

2. Twitter – The Double-Edged Social Sword!

3. You Can Now Follow @Blogussion on Twitter!

The amount of bloggers that enter into the “blog about blogging” niche are growing everyday. All of us most likely have started blogging from reading other blogs that talk about blogging tips or heard it from someone related to this field. And most likely, we all have talked about some of the same subjects related to the topic of blogging. So, here I want to talk about why I want to have you think about and answer the call for stop blogging about blogging.

I am truly annoyed of anytime I come across a new site that talks about blogging tips. Why? Anyone can blog about blogging. We all have read blogs that talk about these tips and so we can just transform our take on things, insert our own voice, and attract the same community.

I am going to make five points to why you need to think about the idea of not blogging about blogging.

1. Misleading Rewards

While having a conversation with another blogger that has just recently formed themselves in the blogosphere, I asked why they started to blog about blogging. Their two main reasons were to help out people and that their community is strong. Let’s look more in-depth at these two reasons.

Helping Out People

Having a blog or really anything that has a mission or vision behind it is out to help people. Most of us in this world strive to help people out. I feel loved to know that so many people are willing to do this, but I know you can help out bloggers other than just offering tips directly related to blogging. It is misleading to say that you are helping out people when you see comments. Going further…

A Strong Community

Ever noticed seeing some of the very same people who visit your blogging tips & advice blog are from many of the other same blogs out there?

When I first started a blog about blogging tips I cannot tell you how grateful I was to see so much initial support. Whether it be comments, retweets, guest posts, or networking off the blog I felt I had a strong community.

I realized though that in the end this community was just bloggers striving for traffic to their blog and I really was not helping out people. Additionally, you will find this sort of community to not make you money.

2. We Can Always Learn From Current Blogs

Earlier I hit on the fact that there are so many blogs that offer blogging tips and advice like: Blogussion, ProBlogger, SiteSketch101, WeBlogBetter, Robb Sutton, and Fuel Your Blogging. There are already 6 right there. But, there are so many more and I know that these blogs you see here have attracted already strong communities so you can expect them to be around for a while.

You can always learn from these current blogs about blogging and stop producing the same sort of content. We have enough resources if we ever need help while being a blogger. Trust me.

3. You Can Blog About Anything

The power of social media and networking is still very much under-rated and not used to its full potential by many people.

Being a blogger means to publish content and strive for attention and participation

We can all do anything we want to do and accomplish it now with even more help with the web.

Blogging does not always mean blogging about blogging. If you can wrap your brain around that and strive to blog about something you love, something you want to learn more about, or something that you feel is an area that needs to be understood better I assure that you will be helping out many. These are all reasons to blog and why the world needs you.

4. Establishing Your True Self

We all need to make our true selves be known to the world! When this is achieved and worked at, people will know you by what you do. Everyone will.

Do you want to be known as a blogger that blogs about blogging? We both know that there is something else that defines you. Heck, the person I look up to for inspiration is Gary Vaynerchuk. He started a video blog just talking about wine. That’s it.

He put in the time and energy to build his very own and original community. But, everyone knows him as the wine guy. First you have to find out your passion and many of the blogs I mentioned above provide tips.

You need to wait for the passion to find you though, so some reflection won’t hurt.

The point is that building a personal brand for yourself is more important than ever and you hurt yourself by going the “easy” route of starting a site or blog by providing tips on what you JUST did.

5. Originality and Desire is Going to Win

I know I probably have you going down many different mind trails right now. That’s good!

Anything other than providing blogging advice is a good start. Do realize though that if you feel you are still honed on providing blogging tips and advice you need to bring out your originality and desire. Do this and you will win and be successful, but realize too that you need to do this with anything in life. Example being is that Blogussion is known by higher up bloggers for being that next generation blog.

What’s your distention? What are you going to blog about? Bring out that energy and desire!

Related posts:

1. The 2 (and a half) Golden Rules of Blogging

2. Build Your Community, Stop Begging for One

3. 5 Things You Can Stop Worrying About Right Now

One of the best ways to market your blog and attract heaps of visitors is through social media. Obviously this is like picking up a gun and firing off a round of buckshot as there are so many options for you to choose from. But social media packs a powerful punch, so it behooves you to pick your poison sooner rather than later, and start building your networks.

In case you missed them, here are parts one and two of this three day series.

In my case, my main choices when it comes to social media are Twitter, StumbleUpon, and Facebook respectively. Occasionally I utilize YouTube and LinkedIn as well as a few others, but primarily the first three are my focus.

What Your Main Objectives Are

When you are marketing on social media you need a plan. Remember back in part 1 when I told you about working with goals? Well, that goes especially big for marketing through social media.

• Build your network: Low numbers equals low traffic. It’s not going to do as much good having 10 people in your network when you could have 100. In this case you should think “The more the merrier!”
• Build relationships: It doesn’t matter how big or small your network is; if you don’t foster a relationship with those followers it’s a wasted effort.
• Create brand awareness: That means be a regular on the scene and make folks see you. Create a “social media” schedule as well if need be. A half hour a day can do wonders.
• Provide excellent value: Call attention to helpful information (yes, it can be from your blog). Help other people in your network. Pay attention to them and what they’re doing. Make them feel noticed and appreciated and in turn they’ll notice and appreciate you.

Useful Tools to Help you Leverage Social Media

Some people prefer to do it their selves, and some like a little help through tools. However you choose to get your marketing done through social media is up to you, and there is nothing wrong with using a few tools.

I actually use a few tools myself to help me with my marketing and they really have simplified the experience.

• Seesmic

  Great for Twitter account management, especially if you have more than one Twitter account. You can monitor and respond to all three from the same interface. When you get a tweet and go to respond, it has a “smart” feature that automatically chooses the account the tweet was sent to.

• Su.Pr

  A StumbleUpon URL shortener that allows you to track how many clicks you get from Twitter and Facebook on a link. It also allows you to stumble those links for extra StumbleUpon traffic. Just be sure that in between links you stumble, you also stumble other blogs and content as well. Otherwise you’ll end up pissing off the StumbleUpon community.

• Ping.Fm

  Allows you to send your blog posts to all the social networking and social bookmarking sites that you’d like, all at once. There is also a plugin you can use if your blog is WordPress called Shorten2Ping that will send each new post you publish straight to Ping.Fm, which then sends it out to all your networks.

Give SEO a Little Kiss

While I don’t give a huge amount of focus and time to SEO, there are a few key things you should make a priority. These simple tweaks will increase your search traffic, which is really some of the best kind of traffic you can go for as a blogger.

These people are searching for information, and if they land on your blog it’s because you can provide it and Google recognized that pertinent little fact. That’s a good thing and search traffic has a higher likelihood of converting to subscribers or customers.

Simple SEO Tweaks to Improve Your Search Ranking

As hard as SEO is to master, there are some pretty basic things you can do to make an impact in the search engines that just aren’t hard at all to figure out.

• General keyword research: You don’t have to dig too deep unless you want to, just do some general research and find some good keywords related to your niche that you can target. It’s OK if they’re competitive but I wouldn’t go for the ones that are ridiculously competitive. Then make sure to use them in your blog posts on a regular basis.
• Keywords in your title tags: Google likes it when you include relevant keywords in your title tags. You can use the All In One SEO plugin if you need a bit of help in that department. It makes things super easy.
• Anchor links: Google gives relevance to anchor links, so use some of those keywords throughout your posts, and convert them to Google friendly anchor links to other relevant blogs or posts.
• Inbound link building: This is done by using article directories, guest posting, using social media sites, and creating killer content that people just can’t help but talk about and link to on their own blogs and social profiles. You can also submit your URL to directories and submit your RSS feed to directories as well. Also things like press releases can help with inbound links.

And there you have it: my little secret sauce to help you market the you know what out of your blog. No, it’s not new or unheard of. Nor is it by any means a comprehensive list of marketing tactics.

There are literally thousands of ways to market and drive traffic to a blog, but they are simply too numerous to cover here. But this handful of methods is simple and effective, and that’s what counts.

And if you couple then with a solid marketing schedule that you stick to, as well as a solid marketing plan, I foresee quite a bit of bloggy growth in your future!

So let’s talk about you… do you use social media to promote your blog successfully? What about SEO? Is it working for you? Drop a comment in the box below and let us know if you’re struggling with anything.

Related posts:

1. Marketing the “You Know What” Out of Your Blog, Part 2

2. Blogging With a Battle Plan: My 3 Phase Marketing Plan

3. The Field of Dreams Myth

In this post we’ll talk the first two actual methods of promoting your blog that I love to use. Obviously this list could likely go on forever, but in the interests of saving us both a bit of time, I’ll just focus on the things I know work very well. You can insert other methods you run across elsewhere at your leisure.

This is part 2 of a 3 part series. Here is where you can find out why a marketing plan is important, in case you missed it.

Guest Posting

Just like what I am doing here, (courtesy of Alex) you can guest post on other folks’ blogs. There are of course some guidelines to follow if you want to get the most bang for your blogging buck.

You’ll want to choose blogs that are fairly well trafficked themselves.

Sure, it’s nice to guest post for your friends who may not have much traffic or readership. Unfortunately, it’s not going to help you grow your own blog too much.

However, if you’ve time to spare and that’s your thing, go for it. Just make sure you also include several blogs on your itinerary that can help you in your growth efforts.

You’ll want to pitch those blogs appropriately.

Simply popping of an email saying “Hey! Can I like… guest post for you or something?” and not including anything else relevant in your proposal likely won’t get you very far. Bloggers want to know who the heck you are, what you’ve done, and what you can offer them.

Especially when you’re hitting up blogs who may have a pretty high profile in the blogosphere. They will simply hit the delete button and ignore you. At the very least they’ll respond with a negative and your efforts at guest posting will fall flat.

You’ll want to create your very best content.

Hopefully that really goes without saying, but seriously… don’t give a blog that is willing to feature you anything less than your best stuff. I know it’s tempting to use your best stuff on your own blog, but really… you’ll get a lot more mileage from it elsewhere, at least when you’re first starting out.

Throwing together crappy content just to get a link on a high traffic blog is a quick road to getting the snub. They definitely won’t have you back a second time, and if it’s poorly written they probably won’t even post it at all.

Think of it like a job interview and always put your best foot forward. Blog owners will thank you and likely be happy to feature you again in the future.

Obviously this isn’t a comprehensive guide, but it’ll give you some key basics. And you can get more key basics straight from Alex himself.

The Unbeatable Benefits of Guest Blogging

Posting on others’ blogs is highly beneficial to your own blog. Many of the benefits below cannot be achieved if you do not get out there and post, so hopefully what I have listed below will get you a little motivated to get out there.

• Exposure to new audiences you wouldn’t otherwise get.
• Extra traffic that you can then (with your own great content) hopefully convert to subscribers.
• Link juice from obtaining a link from a blog higher up in the food chain than you.
• Experience writing for different audiences that allows you to cultivate your own “voice” even better.
• Amazing friends and new connections that can help you in your blogging journey.
• And then someday… the chance to pay it forward to another new blogger who needs a boost.

Blog Commenting

One of the best ways to get is to give. And in the blogosphere, one of the best ways to give is by participating in the community of a blog you love to read. You participate by leaving comments relevant to the post, and interacting with both the blogger and the other readers. AKA community.

What you DON’T want to do

• Don’t spam a blog with irrelevant comments just for the sake of a link.
• Don’t drop silly one-liners like “Great post!”
• Don’t leave comments with poor grammar and spelling.
• Don’t comment on blogs you don’t actually like to read.
• Don’t comment on a blog just because they commented on yours and you feel obligated.
• Don’t leave disrespectful or inflammatory comments.
• Don’t drop links in your comments except exactly where it says to input your link.
• Don’t comment on every single post on a blog. (Unless of course you really did enjoy every single post… but that’s not likely!)

What you DO want to do

• Do leave comments that are relevant and meaningful to the post.
• Do leave comments that are thoughtful and unique.
• Do read other folk’s comments to make sure you’re not just rehashing what’s already been said.
• Do participate in community with your comments… like answering questions of other commenter’s.
• Do subtly suggest your expertise and/or intelligence with your comments.
• Do make sure to leave a link to your site where appropriate. Keywords in the ‘name’ field are fine if you see it’s allowed.

So how about you? Is blog commenting and guest posting a part of your promotional arsenal? Or have you been a little nervous on putting yourself out there in the blogosphere to really start with these two methods?  Share your thoughts in the comments below, and we’ll see how we can help.

And there ends part 2 of our epic little saga. Don’t forget to check out part 3, where I talk about the final two promo methods I personally use.

Related posts:

1. Marketing the “You Know What” Out of Your Blog, Part 1

2. Blogging With a Battle Plan: My 3 Phase Marketing Plan

3. How to Achieve the Same Benefits of a Guest Post by Leaving a Blog Comment

Marketing a blog is pretty much like marketing anything else. It requires time and commitment. It also requires patience and consistency, and a willingness to use a bit of elbow grease.

The problem with most folks and seeing any kind of traction is that they give up too quickly. Often it’s just when a blogger is on the verge of a breakthrough that they quit. I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve read that say that same thing, over and over.

• I was getting these results, but it was too little so I quit.
• I was seeing this kind of traffic, but it was taking forever so I quit.
• I had a lot of visitors, but wasn’t making too many sales, so I quit.
• I only had about 50 subscribers, so I thought I sucked and decided to quit.

Often this is in the 4-6 month range of blogging, and then again around the one year mark. Bloggers feel they aren’t seeing the results they should be seeing, and give up; chalking all their hard work up as a lost cause.

And fact of the matter is, they were likely this close to having a major breakthrough.

Moral of these little stories? Don’t freakin’ quit!

Duh!

I mean sure, if you’re just blogging to make a buck and you feel the niche you have chosen isn’t viable, then it might be better to move in another direction. But hopefully you’re blogging for more than just a buck, and actually have a passion for the things you blog about.

And if that’s the case, why quit doing something you love? Especially when you could very well be one blog post away from blowing up into blogging stardom or something?

I repeat… DON’T QUIT. Got it?

Now with that little pep talk out of the way, let’s talk about ways you can market the you know what out of your blog to drive up traffic, subscribers, and customer/client numbers.

At the end of the day, not only will you be loving your blogger life (bless your blogging little heart) you’ll also NEVER want to quit again.

Now as I said before, marketing a blog is pretty much like marketing anything else. So here is your game plan:

Create a Dedicated Marketing Schedule

That means set aside specific blocks of time where you focus 100% on promoting your blog. This little schedule will look different for everyone, but the point is to map out something consistent that you can stick to.

That might mean setting aside 1 full day a week to focus on nothing but promotion. Or perhaps that means setting aside 1 hour each day to promote. Maybe you prefer to set aside a half day early in the week, and a half day later in the week.

Whatever.

As long as you lay out a consistent promoting schedule, I really don’t care when or how long you do it. Capische?

Create a Dedicated Marketing Plan

Sounds similar to the schedule I know, but keep reading because it has some big differences.

A schedule is just for when you’re going to do your promoting. The plan is actually how you plan on doing your promoting. See the difference?

So you need to create a dedicated marketing plan that maps out exactly the processes you intend to use to promote your blog. We’ll talk more about a few exact methods you can use in a bit, but for now just know that you need a plan.

Ideally you will choose just a handful of promotional methods to focus on, at least at first. The reasoning behind this is too many irons in the fire means you become less effective at what you’re trying to accomplish.

So focus on just a handful of methods to start, and then you can always rotate your marketing plan on a weekly or monthly schedule, whichever appeals to you the most.

And don’t forget that you need to have goals you want your marketing plan to meet. Those goals may be more subscribers, more RSS readers, more customers or clients, or whatever. There is no plan without goals in mind.

Remember that all the traffic in the world doesn’t mean a thing if they’re not doing what you want them to do.

And there you have it… part 1 of this epic little saga. How about you? Think a marketing plan and a marketing schedule are important aspects to marketing your blog? Have questions? Drop your thoughts in the comments below.

Related posts:

1. Marketing Personalization: It’s Not About the Numbers

2. Blogging With a Battle Plan: My 3 Phase Marketing Plan

3. Email Marketing: The Killer Monetization Method You Haven’t Tried Yet

A personal brand is often overlooked by many bloggers trying to create a powerful business look for themselves. But, the way you advertise yourself, meaning getting a little personal, is more important than many people think it to be. How does telling people simple details about your life help you?

It all goes back to your personal brand. Some people know me as the kid who runs Blogussion, and others know me as that obnoxious Patriots fan from New Jersey. No, announcing my favorite sports team to the world isn’t necessarily helping my business, but it is making me look more personable and more of a human being rather than a blogging machine.

Your personal brand is extremely important, and is just as important as your businesses brand. It may be even more important in some cases.

Take a quote from Gary Vaynerchuk, the author of the book Crush it!, which really taught me the importance of personal branding:

I think that it is important to build a personal brand because it’s the only thing you’re going to have. Your reputation online, and in the new business world is pretty much the game, so you’ve got to be a good person. You can’t hide anything, and more importantly, you’ve got to be out there at some level.

Now, Gary is probably the most personable successful entrepreneurs on the web. He replies to as many emails from his readers as he can, connects on social media websites, makes videos and really gives us major insight into his life. My only peeve is he’s a Jets fan, but what are you going to do?

Gary’s personal brand is so strong, it was the way I discovered him. I didn’t find him through his primary business, Wine Library, but I found him over at his more personal video blog where I just thought he was some cool entrepreneur talking business. I had no idea about Wine Library until I did a little digging.

By reading Gary’s book, I learned about these great tools and networks you can use to find what other people are saying about you, your blog and pretty much anything else about your personal brand.

It’s important to know what people are saying about you so you know what kind of a job you are doing. If people don’t like you, they’ll have a lot of bad things to say. If they like you, then you’re doing a good job. But you’ll never know until you try out these great networks.

Google’s BlogSearch

Find & Spread Your Brand

This free tool by Google is an excellent way to find blogs in your own niche and connect with them. You will find blogs of all different sizes, with different communities, and it’s up to you to take advantage of these findings.

This is a small-scale way of promoting your brand, but nevertheless, an important on. Once you find these blogs, visit them and leave a comment or two on their blog. Talk to other people who have commented on an article and just try to leave a mark in what you say. The smaller the bloggers, the better the chance you have of them visiting your blog and them leaving a comment.

Generally, the following happens when I do this method:

• I get a little traffic to my site from the comment link.
• The owner of the blog will leave a comment on Blogussion, and maybe we’ll even become friends later on.

That sounds like a good deal to me for just leaving one comment on someone else’s blog. Do this on a larger scale, and you will see results with Google’s BlogSearch.

Twitter Search

Find & Spread Your Brand

First of all, if you don’t use Twitter you’re missing out on a huge opportunity and need to signup for an account now. If you’re using Twitter already and not monitoring your brand, you’re also missing a giant opportunity.

All of the people who read and share your content through Twitter almost always has something else to say about your brand and blog. Twitter offers a very comprehensive search system and can find any tweets that mention a keyword of your choice.

Use this tool excessively and effectively. Search for your name, your blog(s) name, anything that relates to you directly. You can find a good deal of feedback from your readers that they don’t always send directly to you.

Ping.Fm

Spread Your Personal Brand

Ping.fm is an incredible tool. It’s hard to balance all of your social network/media accounts and keep everyone up-to-date with your content. That’s where Ping.fm comes in – it acts as a tool for updating all of your social network accounts in one shot.

So if you have a Twitter account, a profile on Facebook and a Delicious account, you can use Ping.fm to update them all and share your content throughout your whole social media collection simply.

This message will be displayed on the social media profiles I choose.

How do you find & spread brand awareness?
Creating a personal brand for yourself is one of the most fun things to do when it comes to building an audience. I have shared with you the tools I use, now I am curious to see what you do. How do you make sure you’re building your brand the right way, and what do you do to actually build it?

Related posts:

1. Are You an Effective Tweeter or Just Another Bird on the Wire?

2. 5 Common Uses for Social Networking and the effect on your target audience

3. Pingoat, gone to the slaughter house?

When I began my blog about blogging, I decided to not make the same mistakes I had in creating previous blogs. I decided to have a concrete marketing plan, one that I would stick to no matter what. After all, most Internet marketing plans are not flawed intrinsically but flawed in the way they are carried out.

Today, I’d like to reveal some of the key concepts of my particular marketing campaign and where I am in that plan. I can honestly say that after 3 months I am right where I intended to be, no where near the top of my niche but slowly gaining ground.

Below is a brief overview of my plan. I’m giving away just enough information as to not show my hand to any would-be copycats.

The Battle Plan

Phase 1: Foundational Content Building

Since I’ve started my blog about blogging in February, I’ve written over 70 posts, which amounts to something like 3 to 5 posts per week. Some weeks, the information just flies out of my brain like a jet stream of free-flowing consciousness. Other weeks, I just can’t get motivated and need to rely on things like Alex’s official “Get Your Ass in Gear or Bad Things Will Happen” list, which is really all the inspiration I need sometimes.

The importance of having a vast archive of information is essential to any blog marketing campaign. Not because people like to crawl your archives (you are the only person who does that) but because your archives serve as a catalyst for permanent, ever-flowing search engine traffic.

Once you have a substantial archive of original information, you can afford credibility from Google. I’ve developed websites for years and, in accordance with what the gurus say, Google uses original content quantity as a primary factor in determining rankings. That means that if you set out to target an individual keyword for Google traffic, you are much more likely to be successful if your landing page is found on a site with a vast number of other pages.

This may seem obvious but many web entrepreneurs set out to sell a product online through a single page site (sometimes called a mini or micro site) and driving traffic solely on the merit of strong link building campaigns.

Mini-sites can be great for selling products through referral and affiliate traffic (traffic from other sites) or for social media campaigns (e.g.: Matt Inman’s army of comic mini sites including Things Bears Love) but are comparatively less effective than content rich sites for attracting organic search engine traffic. Because of the nature of blogging, my guess is that most bloggers are looking to get traffic by building content-rich sites.

The definition of a content-rich site

At what point is a blog considered content-rich in the eyes of search engines? That’s a matter that is very much up for debate among web developers. Some gurus say 100 pages is enough. I’ve decided half that number, primarily because a majority of my first few dozen posts are long (over 600 words).

Phase 2: Short-tail Keyword Targeting

After about 50 posts or so, I decided to move into phase two and target short-tail keywords (logical search terms) to establish credibility with Google and get that initial flow of traffic. I use all ree methods of link-building which includes but is not limited to: commenting on do-follow blogs, link exchanges and article marketing.

Manual link-building is a tedious task and the fruits of your labor are not seen until many months later, if ever seen at all. The best and most powerful links are natural links or those that come from other websites voluntarily. Ironically, you can’t get natural links until you first have unnatural links – or links created as a direct result of your efforts.

If you think people like Chris Brogan still spend time manually building links by submitting to article directories, commenting on other blogs and asking for reciprocal links, think again.

Chris Brogan has put his time into manual link building, and is now enjoying the benefits of a constant stream of natural links. All Brogan has to do is provide the content. Now, the quantity of natural links Brogan receives is only variable to the quality of his content. That’s where I want to be in three years. First I’ve got to put my hard time in.

You can replace the name “Chris Brogan” with the name of any big-time blogger. All big-time bloggers have one thing in common: they worked extremely hard to get to where they are now. If you thought Internet marketing was going to be easy money, get out now.

So far, I’ve successfully targeted two major keywords in my niche and ranked 1st in Google for both of them. Along with passively targeted long-tail keyword traffic, the two targeted short-tail keywords have given me roughly 200 daily visitors and an Alexa ranking close to 200K. That’s quite an achievement for me. Soon I will be moving on to phase three, which I will briefly explain below.

Phase 3: Extroverted Marketing

The two previous phases in my plan were somewhat introverted. I needed to build an enormous stockpile of content for MY site. I needed to build links to MY site. Phase three involves something a bit counter-intuitive: building quality content for OTHER PEOPLE’S sites.

Rather than only offering something of value on my own site, I will soon focus my marketing efforts on bringing value to other sites in my niche. On the Internet, very few things are accomplished alone; through the use of guest blogging, I can grow my blog by providing a service to other bloggers.

Guest posting is not for everyone. It requires strong copyediting skills and a tenacity that will not dimmer when posts are rejected or never looked at. Writing is my forte so I am very excited to soon be moving into phase 3 of my plan.

There is a large base of make money on the Internet, blog tips and SEO blogs authored by non-English speakers that have found enormous success by relying on marketing tactics that require no writing ability whatsoever. This is because search engines don’t know the difference between good copy and bad. People do know the difference. If you plan on guest posting you really ought to learn how to use a semi-colon first.

That’s MY Plan…

Now that I have given a brief outline of my blog marketing plan and where I am in it, I’d like to hear what some of the Blogussion readers have as a plan and where they are in it.

Do you even have a marketing plan? Do you consider yourself on track with it? What parts of your marketing campaign need to be amended?

Related posts:

1. Blog Optimization Series: Search Engine Marketing (2/3)

2. The Field of Dreams Myth

3. Blog Optimization Series: Search Engine Optimzation (1/3)