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2009/12/23 11:15 AM 

Our second edition of the Blog Paragraph Collaboration project. Some great articles here. Our topic for this post was Blog Promotion or Promoting your blog. We got another grand response. Thanks to everyone. Here once again are the fantastic paragraphs from a wonderful group of bloggers.

BTW, don’t be shy to visit their blogs as well. You will not be disappointed.

Chris Hinton

Website: Geek Speaks

I'm a bit shy of promoting my work, and perhaps that's why I'm a big fan of word-of-mouth. I used to maintain a site very specifically targeted about books published by The Salvation Army, and found the best way to promote it was to hand out business cards at Salvation Army events. That built up a small but very loyal readership who would spread the news about the site for me; their personal recommendation did far more than anything I could do! I now write about subjects that are a lot less specialised and find that the best way to get the word out quickly is through social media like Twitter or Facebook. Again, though, there are a few people who I've built up close relationships with and when they find something on my site they like they'll pass that information on to people they know and have a similarly good relationship with. While it's important to create content that people will find organically through search engines, it's the personal recommendation of friends that has the most value. I'd never suggest that you artificially build up a relationship with someone just to get them to promote your site, but if you know someone who's interested in what you're writing why not ask them to tell a few of their friends about it?

Kevin Tea

Website: Web 2 and more

It was earlier in the week when allegedly the Iranians took down Twitter that I started to wonder about my dependence on the service to promote my blogs. Looking at the alternatives I also use Facebook and Pimp My Blog. I have been looking at Blog Engage but at first sight it seems that getting a decent level of publicity requires a disproportionate amount of effort, but I may be doing it a disservice and will look deeper. The blog is fed out through Feedburner, too.

MK Akan 

Website: Fast Clickng

It is very tempting to just jump in and spit out 10 great ways of promoting your blog for this collaboration (well, I will still do so but not before I share something that I think is even more important-understanding the strategies and principles to use in blog/website promotions ). “Look for or go to where a lot of people are already going or will be going then do something noticeable there that will send traffic to your blog” This is the basic principle that should guide you in promoting your blog. To make it more effective, do these noticeable things in places that will bring in targeted traffic (this means traffic that are or will be interested in your blog or niche)

Now here is my “10 ways” list.

1. Create a twitter account for your blog ,tweet your post, add a re-tweet (www.tweetmeme.com) plug-in button to your blog post
2. Create a YouTube channel for your blog, make videos for YouTube, use it respond to videos on YouTube, always link it to your blog
3. Visit and join in the conversation on related and popular blog/websites(make comment, guest post, collaborate etc)
4. Head to www.ning.com look for a community related to your blog topic or niche , join in and become part of the community
5. Make great posts on popular, fast growing forums related in content to your blog niche
6. Join in blog post collaborations. like this one
7. Use social bookmarking services (try semi-automated ones like www.socialposter.com or www.socialmarker.com )
8. Write articles and post on article directories like www.ezinearticle.com , www.goarticles.com and many more online
9. Join blog directories like www.blogcatalog.com , www.technorati.com , www.afrigator.com and many others on the web
10. Set up a FaceBook fan page for your blog ,invite your friends ,post links to your blog
11. Search engines are top places to promote and get traffic to your blog – remember SEO , add targeted keywords to your blog description ,blog post titles and blog post content

A greatly promoted average blog may grow faster than an averagely promoted great blog.

Michael Fletcher

Website: Monetize Your Life

Blog promotion is to blogging as aiming is to shooting, the last thing you do but bloody important. Great content is critical without it you may as well be firing daisies at your target, but assuming you’re loading up with the right ammo nothing beats a shooter who hits his target. It took me a long time to realise this lesson. We need to continuously remind ourselves that writing and promoting go hand in hand. We can’t expect our victims… erm readers to go looking for our bullets of wisdom. With that in mind write and promote, write and promote and make sure to not limit yourself to much. Much like a sharp shooter you’ll need to temper your aim based on what you’re shooting and how far you’re reaching. When it comes to blog promotion the one size fits all approach just doesn’t work, find out where your readers are already and target them there. More importantly tailor your blog promotion strategy to your content. If you’re writing about gardening, hit the forums, target top gardening bloggers with personalised emails and tweets think out the box and you’ll stay ahead of the competition. It’s your responsibility to give each post your best shot.

Adama J. Adama

Website: Genius Planet Nigeria

We are right in the middle of Social Media Revolution. We have past the era of blog promotion to the era of self-promotion through personal branding. What matters now is how to organise, package and sell yourself( ideas, skills, experiences, talents...) to the worldwide web. At the heart of this is blogging.  I use to miss it as a Blogger that blogging is an independent business in my quest to become a successful internet entrepreneur. Now i know better, principally, all I'm doing online is summarised as "Personal Branding through Social Networking"

That means that Blogging is a part of social networking. I use the following tools to promote myself online:

1. Gravatar
2. RSS Feed
3. Blogger profile
4. Google profile
5. Commenting on 25 A-list blogs in my niche
6. Google Reader helps me to stay upto date in my industry by the Blogs I'm following
7. Backtype.com using Disqus to broadcast my  comments  and to track my brand in my niche.
8. Feedburner Email Subscription to update my followers with latest post
9. Integrated and manage all my social networks ( Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Ping.fm) using the award winning professional twitter client - Hootsuite.com.
10. I broadcast one message to all my social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Friendfeed, Identi.ca, Jaiku, Blogger, and Wordpress) at ones using ping.fm. After all, I'm more a Microblogger than a Killer article writer.
11. All my social networks have a link to my blog   Genius Planet Nigeria  just like all my blog has a link to all my social networks. At the end of the day, they all ( blog and social networks) sing one song:

Conclusion.

With the booming of Real-Time search, all traffics now leads to my blog.

Well done to our Blog Paragraph Contributors this week. What a grand set of tips we have here. Hopefully you will take them to heart and apply them to your own blog.

Remember you can win a weeks worth of free ad space just for commenting. The best comments during the week will get a weeks free advertising space. Check out: Win free advertising for your blog

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