How do I promote my blog?

Many make the mistake of believing that once they create a blog, people will immediately flock to it. There are millions out there so why would they visit your blog?

Here are some ways you can promote your blog

1. Create great content â€“ everything starts with great content. Think 'Linkbait" -- or writing about stuff that would be so great that people will want to link to you. It can be a news hook where you write about something that is contrary to what everyone else is saying; resource hook where you have the only information available or humor hook.

2. Update the content regularly â€“ make your visitors come back again and again to your blog by providing daily updates (even multiple posts per day!)

3. Submit your blog to blog directories such as

BlogHop http://www.bloghop.com/account/index.htm
Blogarama http://www.blogarama.com/index.php?show=add
Contents Matter http://www.bloghq.com/create.php
PubSub http://www.pubsub.com/add_feed.php
BlogSearchEngine http://www.blogsearchengine.com/submit/
EatonWeb http://portal.eatonweb.com/add.php
RDFTicker http://www.anse.de/rdfticker/addchannel.php
Blogdigger http://www.blogdigger.com/add.jsp
Bloogz http://www.bloogz.com/man_en/add_your_url.php
BLOGâ€™z http://www.sarthak.net/blogz/add.php
Columbia Newsblaster mailto: blaster@cs.columbia.edu
RocketInfo http://reader.rocketinfo.com/desktop/AddRSSFeed.jsp
HeadlineSpot http://www.headlinespot.com/site/suggest.htm
KIOSKEN http://www.esperanto.se/kiosk/engindex.html
CRAYON http://www.crayon.net/using/suggest.html
Kmax Bloglinks http://www.kmax.ws/featured.htm
BLOGCATALOG http://www.blogcatalog.com/blogs/submit_blog.html
BalticBlogs http://directory.balticblog.com/addblog.php
Blogion http://blogion.com/?p=submit

4. Network with other bloggers â€“ comment on their blogs, read and link to other blogs and request them to link back to you

5. Email other bloggers â€“ pitch your post to other bloggers and hope that they will link or mention your blog

6. Use techniques to showcase your blog â€“ examples include meme games such as the Daily Meme http://thedailymeme.com/ or carnivals http://blogcarnival.com/bc/

7. You can try pay per click programs such as Google Adwords http://www.google.com/adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com... â€“ though the key is to carefully track your ROI and which keywords actually perform well

8. Make sure your blog is indexable by the search engines - and make sure that your titles have great keywords that your target audience are most likely to use

9. Send out press releases. While outfits charge as much as $650 per release, there are free press release submission places on the Web. Press releases allow you to (a) attract media attention; (b) get more back links to your website without sending each website an email request; and (c) get more visibility especially if your press release gets in Google News or Yahoo News.

http://www.prleap.com/sign_up.html
http://i-newswire.com/
http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/ http://www.pressbox.co.uk/cgi-bin/links/
http://www.pr.com/press-releases
http://www.prfree.com/
http://www.clickpress.com/releases/index http://www.theopenpress.com/
http://www.przoom.com/
http://www.prweb.com
http://www.newswiretoday.com/
http://www.free-press-release.com/

10. Submit articles with your blog posts. Write articles and submit them to websites accepting author submissions. You get exposure for your business; establishes you as an authority in your field, and allows you to get backlinks for your website. If 50 websites publish your article and it contains a link back to your website, then you easily get 50 links from a single article. The more links you have, the greater your chances for increasing your search engine rankings.