IF you are new to blogging, then it will require quite a bit of effort from you to promote your blog and make it visible to your prospective readers. You might choose to keep writing with an expectation that your blog will be picked up some day by Google and it will start to flourish. But this is an option if you want to leave the fate of your blog to uncertainty. If you have decided otherwise and think that you want to promote your blog, then it is time to think of some advertising options to accomplish this.
Some of the ways mentioned here are forms of advertising that will volunteer an extremely small expense or, at times no cost at all.
To start off with, do not expect to get paid from day one. Start by sharing information for free. You will have to build a reputation for yourself because you are new to the blogosphere and people do not have a reason to trust you or, your advices. Focus on writing some quality posts for your blog. Write a few pillar articles so that your prospective readers know that you specialize in something. Content is king is the mantra in blogging. Good quality content along with a bit of promotion can do a world of good to you blogs.
Get involved in Article Marketing. Write some articles on a topic related to your blogs niche and submit them to article directories. Article directories let you add a byline in the form of a resource box at the end of the article. You can add a link back to your blog in the resource box so that people can get further information of what they have just read in the article. Article marketing can get you a considerable amount of traffic, if you do it right and consistently.
You might even want to submit your article to a few of the many article directories that you can find online. Also submit it to social bookmarking sites. Since social bookmarking is the buzz of the hour, you get a lot of traffic and free promotion for your blog. Social bookmarking triggers a conversation and this can further help your article be voted on, so that it gets even more popularity.
Online Forums and Bulletin boards are another simple way of gaining exposure. People visit these forums to get answers to their questions and if they find somebody who has the expertise and who can give them the right answer to their questions, they will want to know more about them. The links in your signatures on these forums that you write can guide them to your blogs and thus get free traffic. It is advisable that you participate in forums related to your niche, so that you are promoting your blog in your niche itself.
Get into some linking with other blogs. Bloggers are interested in associations, because these associations can help them get something in return as well. Such associations are formed by swapping links with other bloggers which in turn results in redirected visitors to your blog.
You might also want to participate in your blogging community by actively commenting on authority blogs. There are a lot of blogs that have the “Top Commentator” widget in their sidebars. This way you get a link back to your blog and also show the readers that you are an authority on the subject. One thing that you should keep in mind is to not spam these blogs by irrelevant commenting. If your comment in of value the readers of the blog will click through to your blogs to know more about you and further read about the topic. You may think that this is stealing of visitors. This is not so. This is an absolute ethical way of getting visitors from an established blog to yours.
You might also want to write a few guest posts for established blogs. This is one of the best ways to promote your blog because this is free traffic. Since the blog is an already established blog, it will have a large reader base and you can benefit from it.
You might want to pick a few or, all of the above methods to promote your blog. I suggest that you follow all these methods but allocate a specific time for each one of these. You will eventually find that you are getting a good amount of visitors without having to shell out a fortune in advertisements.
