MavenBlog: Marketing Strategies

Many people new to blogging feel that once they have joined a blog platform, thought of a subject for their blog and created some great content for their blog, the visitors will just start rolling in. New bloggers often get discouraged when they aren’t getting the high volume of traffic they envisioned within a week or two of creating their blog.

Marketing and promotion is absolutely essential if you want your blog to get a high volume of visitors. Regardless of how good your content is, it won’t sell itself (at least in the beginning). Certainly, good quality content will assist you in the long term, giving your blog repeat visitors and links, but without a good marketing strategy, it will take much, much longer.

Once you realise the necessity of marketing and promotion, the first step is to find tools which will help you evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. A basic site counter is an effective tool for this, and there are many sites which will let you add this tool to your blog for free. There are many other much more advanced tools (many free ones) which can assist you in more detailed analysis of your visitors and can greatly assist your marketing efforts.

After you have added the tools which will allow you to track and analyze the effectiveness of you marketing strategies, you should include most of, if not all of the following tips to really jump start your marketing and promotion efforts…..

1) Add your blog to as many search engines as you can think of (if not, at least the big ones)
2) Submit your site to blog directories, this can be done manually or by using a ping service
3) Add as many links to your blog as possible, this can also improve you search engine ranking
4) Link your blog to other, perhaps more popular blogs. This can be done with your blog roll
5) Pay Per Click advertising
6) Post regularly, keep your site fresh and interesting to your readers and improve SEO
7) Quality control. Make your site attractive and appealing
8) Syndicate site via RSS, this will notify your readers of any changes made to your blog
9) Join a blog ring
10) Regularly read and comment on other similar blogs
11) If you have other blogs, newsletters or websites online, have a link back to your blog
12) Write articles, and post them on free article sites with links back to your blog
13) Make your site as interactive as possible, prompt feedback from readers or include polls.

This is certainly not an exhaustive list; however the above tips provide a well rounded and effective strategy for your marketing efforts.