Once you have started writing good posts for your blog – now it is time to promote your blog, now it is time to reach the audience. So how do you do that???

Basically there are various ways to do that –

Effectively use the technology:

  • Create RSS/Atom feed:

Make sure you have RSS or Atom feed available on your blog so that the readers coming to your site can subscribe to your blog. Once subscribed, the readers will get your latest content automatically as soon as you update your blog.
Blogger, WordPress, Vox and almost all platforms provide this as an inbuilt facility to bloggers.
The best way to create an RSS feed is to register your blog to FeedBurner (now acquired by Google) or FeedDirect. These are the most widely used services for feeds.
FeedBurner Feed will be like: http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogofknowledge
FeedDirect Feed will be like: http://manage.feeddirect.com/feeds/show/bok

  • Use Ping Machines:

There are lots of web-site, search engines and ping (Packet Internet Groper) machines or basically there is hell lot of jargons for this work. These sites or engines do the promotion task for your blog automatically once you have submitted your blog to them. As and when you write a new post, your blog automatically sends a message to these sites and your content is available for the world. There are 100s of such sites, but a few free services are listed here :
Technorati http://www.technorati.com
Weblogs http://www.weblogs.com
Ping-O-Matic http://www.pingomatic.com
Blog Street http://www.blogstreet.com
Blogrolling http://www.blogrolling.com
Feedster http://www.feedster.com
Blogdigger http://www.blogdigger.com
Blogshare http://www.blogshare.com

Get your blog listed in Google, Yahoo and Live at the following URLs:
Google: http://google.com/addurl.html
Yahoo: http://publisher.yahoo.com/rss_guide/submit.php
Live or MSN: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

  • Add permalinks:

Permalinks or trackbacks are nothing but the pages of your blog consisting of just one post and its comments with a special URL which leads to only that post. The blogs which use permalinks generally gets good traffic as against without permalinks. Generally permalinks are automatically created by the blogging software by taking piece of your post title. For example, my previous post has a permalink as: http://bokinfo.blogspot.com/2007/09/blogger-series-post-5-how-to-write-good.html

Manually create the Buzz :

  • Link and comment:

The more you link to other blogs or web-site, the more traffic it drives to your own blog. Trackbacks and permalinks are supposed to serve this purpose very well. Whenever you leave comment on anybody’s blog, you leave a link to your site there may be with a relevant post on your own blog. The visitor coming to the original blog might visit your blog also. That’s traffic. The key to successful blogging is to link, link and again link. But don’t abuse it. Leave comments only if you have something extra to add to the original blog post or to appreciate the publisher but not just a trackback. You can even link to your old posts for reference.

  • Use Networking:

Use the networking sites like Facebook, linkedin, orkut, del.icio.us, furl, digg, StumbleUpon and many others which keep your blog rolling. Send mails to your family and friends about your blog with a link. They might refer your blog to others as well. That’s traffic.

  • Create a Blogroll:

Create a blogroll of the web-sites or blogs you frequently visit or you want to recommend to your readers. Use www.blogrolling.com for this if you want and put a widget on your blog sidebar. This will make you show up in the traffic of the blogs you link to and may get noticed by other bloggers.

  • Write good content and post frequently:

Finally as I mentioned in my previous post, write good content. No matter how much you link to create buzz for your blog, if your blog doesn’t have much of good content, the readers will fly off. The key is to always have something interesting for your readers. At the same time you have to make sure that you keep posting frequently. There is no hard and fast rule for that frequency, once in a week is a quite decent but depends on the type of content you write.

Enjoy in the blogosphere and keep reading Blog of Knowledge for more good stuff…

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