8 Simple Internet Marketing Strategies for Promoting Your Blog By Jinger Jarrett, Copyright 2013 If you want to build a business on the internet, a blog is essential. It's one of the best public relations tools you can create because it allows you to connect with your audience. What I like the most about it is that you can automate much of the promotion, and so you can spend your time connecting with your audience, as well as writing great content. When you build your blog, follow these strategies to start getting traffic quickly. 1. Generate a sitemap and submit to the major search engines. There are only two search engines to concern yourself with: Google and Bing. Bing drives the results for Yahoo, so this will give you about 80 percent coverage in the search engines. If you use a plugin like SEO by Yoast (it's what I use), then you can automatically generate a sitemap and then submit it. This is a one time task. After that, monitor your sitemap looking for broken links, as well as to find out how much of your content has been indexed. 2. Submit to blog and RSS directories. Robin Good offers an excellent list that is constantly updated. Submit your blog to all the sites on the lists so that blog readers can find your content. When you post to your blog, it will automatically update these sites and can drive traffic for you. 3. Comment on other blogs in your topic. Although blog comments don't carry as much weight as a linking strategy, don't ignore this. Blog commenting, like other forms of marketing, is about connecting with your audience. People buy. Search engines and directories don't. Although they can help you with traffic and sales, they aren't your sales. When you start blog commenting, provide good content here too. Others will read your comments, and they may just visit your blog. 4. Write guest blog posts. Guest blogging is one of the most effective ways to get the word out about your blog. You may consider doing a search in the search engines to find sites that accept blog posts. You'll want to search for guest blogging and your topic. Two sites that may also help you are My Blog Guest and Blog Synergy. Submit your unique content there and have it picked up by others blogs that want what you are writing about. 5. Use social bookmarking. This internet marketing technique will help you build high ranking backlinks, but it will also turn your content into mini news stories that are often read on these sites. It will help you get traffic and build your overall search engine marketing strategy too. Create a good description, title, and tags. Include your keywords in the title and tag so you get the best results. 6. Use a comprehensive ping list. A ping list is a list of sites that index blogs, and when you ping them, you are notifying them that your blog
has been updated so that they update your content. They may be search engines or RSS directories. You want to get the most coverage possible, and pinging your blog will will do the job for you. There are free services available for you to do this, but if you set up the ping list within your blog, these sites will be pinged automatically and automate this process for you. 7. Write good search engine optimized content. Before you write your content, make sure you do good keyword research. Find the right keywords for your blog and write good content around it. Don't forget your readers though. They are the ones who will be reading your content. The search engines will only be indexing it. Give them good content too so that they read it. You'll build a better relationship with your readers by doing this. 8. Use Facebook plugins to promote. Facebook offers lots of tools to help you promote your blog content. Since it's the most popular social site, you have more opportunities to connect with your audience and these plugins will help you. You are more likely to get likes and comments by using these tools too. Once you install the plugin, you can automate the entire process. Just make sure you monitor the comments so you can connect with your readers. Whether you own a new blog or an old blog, these strategies will help you get more traffic and sales if you apply them. Use them as a checklist to get you started in marketing your blog. Then you'll connect with your audience and automate your marketing too. Want to know more? Then sign up for my free internet marketing webinar where I explain each of these sites in more detail. For a free internet marketing plan evaluation, click here: Marketing Plan.