Here are some of the best tips for blog marketing:
- Domain is king: You need your own domain. While you can park your blog on existing services and sites such as Blogger or WordPress, the real rewards come in when you buy a domain name that relates to your main focus. And if you have an existing domain, you can also set up sub-domains for your blogs.
- Choose a niche: This is a very important step of the process. Don’t spread yourself too thin trying to cover a zillion topics.
- Customise your blog: Users and advertisers won’t come if your blog looks like every other one out there. Use the right themes and templates to personalise and customise your blog. Develop a brand for your blog.
- Keywords: To market your blog effectively, you need to shortlist the most appropriate keywords you can use for your articles and meta data. Don’t go overboard here: Choose only the ones most relevant to your subject. Use ‘long tail’ keywords. These might not be that common but are very effective in driving users to your blog.
- Enable Automatic Trackback and submit high quality backlinks. This will make your content far more accessible.
- Enable statistics: Create your Google Analytics account to help analyse your performance better.
- Comment on related blogs. Do comment on articles in other competing blogs. Also, don’t forget to respond to comments readers leave on your blog. This is a sure-shot way of increasing your user base.
- Be regular: Don’t neglect your blog. To effectively market your blog, it must be updated regularly. There is nothing advertisers and users hate more than out-of-date blogs the creator doesn’t bother to maintain.
- Enable sharing: Embed sharing facilities for Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, etc. Also, don’t forget to ask you friends to visit and share your blog.
- Join blog networks: There are many online blog networks. Some focus on geography, some in subject. Join the ones most appropriate for you.
- Be honest! Speak your mind. Don’t just repeat tame and tepid observations you see online. Originality and honesty will help market your blog better and draw in users and advertisers.
- Make subscribing easy: Add an RSS button at the top, and offer Google Reader and email subscription facilities.
- Choose the affiliate programmes that match your niche.
- Keep abreast of the latest developments in your niche: This will ensure that you have content ready as soon as it becomes popular. Keep watching Google’s trends!
- Solve problems. Mere information is not enough. Users love the blogs that help them solve problems. So, try and focus on the issues that come up the most in your chosen niche!
We hope this advice helps you market your blog better and gives you a boost in usage. These are some of the best tips for marketing your blog – try them out!
This guest post has been authored by Prashant Sharma, who runs What is Android blog and also happens to write on Price India blog