101 Ways to Promote a New Blog

Nick

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This is a guest post by David Turnbull. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Promoting a new blog can be quite daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. As you might expect, breaking down blog promotion into small, actionable tasks eliminates the mental road block you’ve probably experienced when trying to wrap you head around how to get people’s attention. You don’t have to do everything in this list, and some items will have a greater effect then others, but every tactic will at least drive some traffic, and any traffic is better than no traffic.

Content
1. Write a list of over 100+ resources or ideas.
2. Write the definitive guide to something. Spend time making this awesome.
3. Release a manifesto.
4. Release 2 manifestos.
5. Interview cool people. People like talking about cool people.
6. After your articles are indexed in search engines, break them up into smaller articles and submit them to ezinearticles.com (and other article directories).
7. Or just pay someone to submit the articles for you.
8. Write a list of all the cool blogs and people in your niche.
9. Check out the most popular content on high trafficked blogs. Create similar content but applied to your own niche.

Facebook

10. Start a page.
11. Make that page awesome.
12. Start a group.
13. Make that group awesome.
14. Create a Facebook app for your blog.

Fundamentals
15. Wait. After you’ve taken action it can take a short while for traffic to arrive.
16. Be patient. Some bloggers may seem like overnight successes, but if you look back in their archives, they’ve been creating content for a long time.
17. Motivate yourself.
18. Read The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.
19. Have an interesting story and overall purpose.
20. Embrace the Law of Reciprocity. Everything you give will come back exponentially.
21. Make blogging easier.
22. Take action every day. Just get one important thing done every day and eventually you’ll start getting traffic. The more you do each day the faster your blog gets traction.
23. Find people with blogs at a similar level to yours and help each other out.
24. Turn off your computer, do some cool stuff, turn on your computer again and blog about it.
25. Understand the importance of context.
26. Be consistent. You don’t need to blog every day but try to stick to at least some sort of schedule.
27. Make it a numbers game. Decide upon a definite plan of action (eg. 20 blog comments per day, 1 guest post per week etc) and stick with that.

Online Video
28. Create videos and distribute them through tubemogul.com
29. Or for wider video distribution trafficgeyser.com may work for you (expensive though).
30. Respond to YouTube videos with your content.
31. Include your full blog address at the TOP of your video descriptions.
32. Take your time with devising video titles and tags.
33. Convert your video to multiple formats, with slight editing changes, and upload it to video sites multiple times, targeting different keywords. The content remains the same but you can test what videos and titles work the best.
34. Buy the accounts of popular YouTubers and then add your blog address to the descriptions of their videos.
35. Start the first live show in your niche (Ustream, Justin.tv and LiveStream are popular choices). Make sure you record the shows too so they can be distributed as a podcast later on.

Other Blogs
36. Be the first commenter on the posts of popular blogs. But still provide value.
37. If you can’t be the first then comment anyway. But try to be the first.
38. Stumble and Digg cool blog posts you find and let the blogger know via a comment. If you have something worthy on your blog, they’ll probably reciprocate.
39. Use google.com/blogsearch to find fresh blog posts and then leave intelligent comments.
40. Link to blogs of a similar size. They’ll notice and then good stuff may happen.
41. Write a guest post for a large blog. You may not always get published, but when you do the traffic spike will be significant.
42. Write a guest post for a small blog. You’re more likely to get published and build relationships with the next wave of A-List bloggers.
43. Write some more guest posts. Can’t hurt, that’s for sure.
44. Join a blog network.

Paid
45. Start a StumbleUpon Ads campaign.
46. Get reviewed.
47. Buy some ad space.
48. Send out a press release.

People
49. Attend relevant meetups.
50. Tell your friends and family about your blog. Have them tell everyone they know.

Podcasting

51. Start a podcast and submit it to the iTunes directory.
52. Convert audio files to video files (just use Windows Movie Maker or iMovie) and send them out via tubemogul.com
53. Submit it to some other podcast directories.

Search engine optimization
54. Write linkbait.
55. Have any video or audio content transcribed and posted to your blog.
56. Register your domain name for 10 years.
57. Take advantage of sites scraping your blog’s feed by interlinking posts. Simple way to get deep inbound links.
58. Use Thesis.

Social networks
59. Join every social network you can.
60. Or, just join a couple and be really active.
61. Become active in relevant ning.com communities.
62. Convert blog posts to PDF files and submit them to Scribd — include your blog url in the description and document itself.
63. Add your Scribd documents to relevant groups.
64. Submit your best posts to blog carnivals.
65. Join relevant forums, add your blog address to your signature and start posting intelligently.
66. Sign up at ping.fm and use twitterfeed.com to auto post your latest blog content to a bunch of social networks.
67. Create lists on Amazon.com
68. Write reviews on Amazon.com
69. Better yet, create video reviews for Amazon.com
70. Answer relevant questions on Yahoo Answers, leaving your website as the source.
71. Or on Mahalo Answers.
72. Or even through LinkedIn Answers.
73. Start your own Slinkset, and feed your RSS feed into it automatically.
74. Submit your site to alltop.com
75. Write an article aimed at Digg (okay, that article won’t help much).
76. Also, befriend one of the many Digg powerusers.
77. Create a new thread on a forum and write up a really great guide with no self promotion. Simple way to be seen as an authority figure and to elicit comments on your writing (don’t forget that signature link though!).
78. Submit your content to dofollow social bookmarking sites.
79. Or have Bookmarking Demon do it for you (certainly a bend in ethics though).

StumbleUpon
80. Become an active stumbler to understand what stumblers like.
81. Friend people who stumble your content (they may just want to stumble more in the future)..
82. Have other people initially submit content (or “Discover” it as it’s known).
83. Place a Stumble button in your post template.

Su.pr
84. Sign up at su.pr and use it for all your short url needs.
85. Post content to your Facebook and Twitter stream.
86. Install the WordPress plugin to automate the process.
87. Identify the times that result in the most clicks and schedule tweets for them.
88. Setup your blog as a promoted website.

Twitter
89. Include hash tags (#tagname) in your tweets.
90. Search for your niche and answer any questions people have.
91. Place a Retweet button in your post template.
92. Follow relevant, popular, and interesting people.
93. Send @replies to relevant, popular and interesting people.
94. Tweet links to your content at multiple times during the day.
95. Love a product from a company that’s on Twitter? Review it and they may just notice and tweet about the review. It’s happened to me.
96. Sponsor some tweets.
97. Find cool people in your niche who live nearby and organize a tweet up (a meet up where you invite anyone on Twitter).

WordPress
98. Install All In One SEO Pack.
99. Automatically ping lots of ping services.
100. Create a theme, include a link to your blog in the footer, and then release it for free.
101. Create a plugin and release it for free. Add a link to your blog within the admin area. If it’s a good plugin people will love you for it.

David Turnbull is a Buddhist blogger, Apple fan boy, lousy musician, designer, book worm, simplicity freak and dedicated computer geek. You can visit his blog on davidturnbull.com.

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83 Responses to “101 Ways to Promote a New Blog”

  • Blog Synergy – Guest Bloggers Heaven

    A fantastic list, although I’d recommend guest blogging at any stage when growing your site, as it gets your site known in the community. You also get a chance to write about something you wouldn’t normally write about on your blog by broadening your subject matter.

    Dan

  • Jeff Sabo

    These are all incredible ways to help promote a blog! Getting the word out about a blog is key and having different strategies to do so is also a big part to being a successful blogger!

    With different types of social media out there on the Internet, utilizing those sites can be very key in promoting a blog. Being a blogger myself, I do send post links through Facebook and Twitter as a way get the word out about my blog. After doing the blog for about a month, I was a bit surprised when a couple of my friends told me they started bookmarking my blog and read it on a daily basis! I don’t think that would have happened if I didn’t utilize social media as part of my plan.

  • CNET Infosystem

    Nice 101 Ways to Promote a New Blog i really try to on my personal blog if i hope its promoted after using all this way if have any problem i will contact you bye leave reply thank for this tips.

  • BlogrPro

    Well, Blog carnivals site is not updated for more than 2 years and I wonder why the link appears here!

  • make money online ebook

    This is indeed a great list of ideas for promoting a new blog, sometimes we get so caught up on pinging technorati or commenting on blogs we forget there are other ways of marketing our sites. I especially like the idea of creating themes for bloggers. It can be a really good way of getting a backlink and also doing something that other bloggers will thank you for. There can never be enough themes for bloggers because we all have different ideas of what we like.

  • munawar am

    Complete Ways.
    Need more time to complete the action almost 101 days or more

  • Gastrogossip

    What an awesome post, loads of great suggestions. Thanks for sharing. Will definitely try some out for my blog 😉

  • g3niuz

    this article is really great…

    was a pleasure to read ;D

  • Reg

    Thank you very much. Very helpful for a new blog like mine.

  • Oliver

    An excellent and very useful list, which will be very useful for me as I’m fairly new to blogging. I will have to bookmark this list for reference. Thanks for compiling such a comprehensive list.

  • Robert Phillips

    David I like your post “101 Ways to Promote a New Blog”. The list which you mentioned here in the post is really incredible. Although, I know some the tactics to promote a new blog but, there are some important tactics which you mentioned that I have never seen anywhere in the internet. I am in process of making a new blog; I will implement your ideas once it is finished. Anyway thank you very much.

  • Paula from Affiliate Blog Online

    I love #22…without action you will never make a sucess of your blog. It is the key to everything in blogging.

  • Sandy Jones

    All I can say is wow. I will start my first blog boot camp on Sunday with Hollis Gillespie in Atlanta, and I will definitely bring this list to her attention. So much to learn…so it is time to do it! Such a comprehensive list is fabulous, and so well organized.

    Thank you for all of your good advice and I’ll let you know how it goes. Will sign up for your daily dose of wisdom.

  • Ahmad Barirani

    Excellent article. Thanks for the wonderful work. This would be a great checklist of things to do for bloggers.

  • GetFreePublicity

    Since I am relatively new to blogging this list will be a great help. I found it very interesting and informative.

  • Website protection

    I don’t own a blog but website.I think i could use 90% of your tips on my website also.Although its for promoting blogs there are some pretty interesting things i can apply to my daily routine for for my website
    thanks 😀

  • Tinh

    Excellent list, I have just tried several of them and hope to get positive result soon

  • Traffic-Bug.com

    Comprehensive post! You could also plug in the url of your blog and blog posts and have it social bookmarked via traffic bug.

  • Weightlosswise

    wow ! more than 4 cool methods to for promoting blog. Though i think facebook promotion method is not for all types of blogs and it rarely works with all.

  • Anne Lyken-Garner

    Very useful article. I hope you don’t mind me putting up a link to it on my newest writing blog. This will be helpful to my readers.

  • John Samuel

    A great collection. I will try to test some of these.

  • Haresh

    Any ‘All In One SEO Pack’ for Blogspot?

  • GoBusiness101

    Wow! you said everything. I do agree that you have to wait patiently. Look at my site, its now gaining more traffic than the usual! tanx!

  • elmot

    There are no more reasons for people of not having the tools and tips on making a new blog boost up the rankings, performance and popularity with these long list.

  • David Turnbull

    Thanks for all the comments guys. Glad you liked the article.

  • Keith Davis

    Only 101?
    Tons of ideas, although it may take me some time to work my way through them all.

    Good idea to group the suggestions under different headings, makes it easy to pickl and mix.

    Lots of social networking… I really have to make an effort to get into it! This post might be the one that makes me get started.

  • David Walker

    Excellent list David, thank you. It’s great for beginners and those of us who have been around for a few years but need a little reminding to tweak here and there. There’s so much to do to promote a blog that it can be overwhelming at times; that your 101 ways is in list form makes it easier to follow and implement.
    I’ll bookmark and use it as a reference.

  • KiksMedia

    Has anyone used bookmarkingdemon.com

  • George Passwater

    Thanks for posting this great list.

    There are many on here that I know and some I wasn’t looking at yet. I will keep this list handy. Great stuff!

  • nethall.gr

    Cool article, really usefull!

Comments are closed.