Creative Business Online

Learning how to promote a blog will determine whether or not you’ll find success. You could set up a blog that looks great, has wonderful content, and is monetized perfectly. But unless you promote it, people won’t know it’s there. If you want to maximize your traffic and your earnings, you’ll need to get the word out.

Article Marketing

The formula is simple. Write articles of around 350-500 words and submit them to places like goarticles.com and ezinearticles.com. At the end of the article, put the link to your blog. If you write a great article and people read it and like it, they’ll click on the link for more great content.

Social Networking

You can build up a reputation on sites like myspace.com, facebook.com, and linkedin.com. You can put a link to your blog in your profile. That way, people can find your site if they like what you have to say on the site.

Forum Marketing

The best way to use forums to market your website is to build up a reputation of being a good contributor to the site. Then, add your website to the signature. Wait until you have around 50 posts and that you like the forum community and then add your link to the signature. And, always make sure you follow the rules on the forum and don’t SPAM.

Social Bookmarking

Stumbleupon has been invaluable to my site. I get a fair amount of traffic after I stumble my best posts. I don’t stumble everything, only the ones that seem to have a great headline and useful site content. Posts like “this is what I did today” I don’t stumble. I’ll more than likely stumble this one.

Microblogging Platforms

I personally live this. I use twitter, but I also know that people use plurk and there may be some others. As soon as I make a post, I announce it on twitter. I get a handful of readers a day from this but as my friends list increases, so do my amount of hits.

Pay Per Click Advertising

This is something I have not tried but I know that some people have found this to be helpful. I may try this in the future but until then, I have no idea how to do it.

Lenses and Hubs

I use hubpages and squidoo all the time. I create a lens or a hub, add a link to my blog, and also add the RSS feed close to the end. I get a fair amount of clicks a day using this method for generating traffic. The key is to provide good content on the lenses and hubs that relates to the subject of the blog.

Great Content is Key

My advice to you would be to choose one or two methods and focus on those until you start seeing results. But remember this - no amount of promotion can help you if you’re not providing good content. If you provide information that people enjoy reading, you’ll have more repeat visitors and get free press as people talk about your posts. This happens to me - I’ve had people feature my blog on roundup type posts after posting an article that they liked.