I decided to start a new series of posts about blog promotion. I noticed that my blog attracts only a few visitors. That’s made me ask myself what have I done wrong? Or what I have not done and I should do?

I know one thing was missing from this blog. Quality content. I started the blog several months ago because I thought it would be nice to play around a little bit, to see what a blog means and I was interested to learn new stuff about SEO. Now that I played enough with it I want to be more serious(but not too serious). I discovered a lot of things reading the forums, blogs and experimenting, and I’m prepared to discover new things which I’m going to share here. I’m not a SEO expert(yet), but I’ll try to discover the best techniques for having a successful blog and share them with you.

But before starting you have to think again if you are ready to learn new things, write quality content, and promote the blog and if you have the time for it. I’m not going to say that you need 1 or 10 hours daily or to make some recipes on how to have a successful blog in 61 steps. It’s up to you how much time you want to spend and this will help you have a successful blog sooner or later.

The most difficult part when you have a blog is to attract more and more visitors. Depending on how many visitors you have, you need to choose between different approaches for promoting it. If you have a blog with just a few visitors daily or if you don’t have any other visitor except yourself then you have to adopt specific techniques for promotion. If you already established a well-known blog you need to use other techniques. One thing you have to remember: in order to be successful any blog needs quality content. Quality content means unique content, useful and informative, easy to read and digest.

Before starting discovering the techniques to use for growing blogs we should take a look on the path every successful blog takes. We’ll start form point zero: the blog is started without content and visitors. First of all you need content, so you start to write it. Second of all you need visitors. We just identified the main ingredients of a successful blog: content and visitors. And we need a link between them: promotion through different channels. By promotion we should understand the way we can reach new potential visitors through various distribution channels.

As I said, for each blog you start, add content and identify channels through you can make it available to potential visitors. In order to make it a truly successful blog you have to reach the phase when content promotes your blog. Forget for the moment all the crappy techniques you can read in so many places about doing link building by yourself. Forget about directory submission, about submitting your link to 100 social bookmarking sites, about flooding blogs with comments and the list goes on. All you have to keep in mind is the golden rule: Once you reach a certain exposure your blog will promote itself through it’s content which is so unique, and hard to find that everyone will want to bookmark and share it.

The first stage is to reach a critical mass of visitors that when you add useful content will share it bringing you new visitors. It’s all about transforming your visitors in promoters of your blog. In order to reach that stage you have to: 1. write quality content, 2. have some relevant visitors to your niche who might find information on your blog useful. Those methods includes:

• relevant blog comments
• forums promotion through relevant posts and signatures, without spamming
• enroll with your blog to blog directories and blog communities like myboglog and blogcatalog

Using only the above mentioned techniques does not guarantees success. There is something more to understand. Think to your blog as a site competing with other sites. Your competing with large content sites like about.com, answers.com or online stores like amazon.com having a lot of content. They develop a lot of internal linking and have the sites super optimized for search engines. As a solitaire blogger you’ll never be able to compete with such abominations. Unless your not a solitaire blogger. I think this is the main reason for which only bloggers being very social can reach the top.

What being social means? Its hard to describe but easy to understand. Being a social blogger means to develop relations with other bloggers. Not because you have to but because you like what they write, it means writing about what trey write about, being generous with outgoing links, linking to what you like, without expecting them to link back.

You have to use blog comments like a social person, not like a spammer. Make your voice heard to bloggers you like by commenting on their blogs. They might read your blog and link back to you. Be active on forums and provide useful information to to other users. Again, be social, not spammer. When relevant and useful you can post a link of your blog. Enter to blog communities and make your voice known. Find other bloggers you like and develop relations to them.

I think this is the the recipe to bring the success:

1. write a critical mass of quality content
2. after the blog is started promote through various channels to reach new visitors, being social, without spamming.
3. establish a critical mass of relevant visitors who will promote your quality content by sharing and bookmarking it because is unique, useful and informative, easy to read and digest.

Those should be the goals and in the same time the means to achieve them. Let’s call it strategy and now we have to identify the tactics and techniques to action. As you noticed I didn’t mention seo techniques(the standard manipulation techniques of of the content, backlinks internal linking and so on), because those are not so important as the utility the blog brings to its readers.

This post is just the beginning of Blog Promotion series. All the techniques that will be described in the series will be applied on this blog. The effects and efficiency of the techniques can be measured in real time. When this post was published for the first time there were only 10 subscribers on this blog and less that 100 visitors daily. Further more the extension of the domain is .info. It is considered a SEO handicap by some folks. I consider it the opportunity to prove that it doesn’t really matter.

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