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Posts Tagged ‘promote’

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Everyone says that having a blog on your site is a great way of getting traffic to your website. So you installed a blog and started to post on a regular basis. Now, how exactly does it get all this great traffic?

There really isn’t anything magical about a blog where traffic is concerned. A blog is a content management system. You enter content and it creates pages. The pages on your blog aren’t any different from the pages on the rest of your website as far as search engines are concerned.

It’s a myth that search engines like blogs better than standard websites. A page is a page and content is content. What is different is the ease in which you can add new pages of content.

Where a blog does excel as a traffic generator is that it is not reliant on search engines for traffic. A blog doesn’t wait for a search engine to come read it. It has it’s own way of reaching out and telling others that there is something new and fresh to be read and that is the RSS feed.

By submitting your RSS feed to directories and making it available on the blog itself for individuals to subscribe to, you insure that new posts get noticed by a wide audience everything you add something new.

If you can take a day or two out to make the rounds off all of the RSS and Blog directories, you will be pleased with the results when your posts start to turn into instant traffic magnets.

You can promote your blog directly by adding it to your email and forum signatures. Mention it in the author bio of your web articles and publish the link on your main website. Take your RSS feed over to Feedburner.com and have it converted into a little animated billboard that you can publish wherever you want people to be able to read your most recent blog headines.

One way to attract blog traffic is to take some time to post comments on other people’s blogs. Don’t turn into a blog spammer by any means. Visit blogs that interest you and make appropriate and interesting comments, then include a link to your own blog as a courtesy.

Your blog will create additional traffic for you over time if you’ll provide the means for it to happen.

What are your thoughts on the subject? Please comment below.

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform. It lets you post up to 140 characters at a time. Some people post their status every 5 minutes (“Waiting for the bus”, “On the bus”, “Walking home”) and companies use Twitter to get the word out about new products, blog posts, and other random stuff.

Companies from all over the world have Twitter accounts and thousands of people following them. Some of these companies are Apple, Intel, H&R Block, and Zappos. Barack Obama has over 38k followers!

To leverage the Twitter potential you need to have people following you. That is, people that want to be updated on what you are up to.

Step 1: Importing Contacts

When you sign up for Twitter you will have a chance to import contacts from Gmail, Hotmail, and your own address book. Do it.

Step 2: Complete Your Profile

Make sure all your profile is complete and include a link to your website. Add “http” at the beginning of it to make it clickable. Personalize the colors and the sidebar on your profile page. Use keywords in your profile so others can find you.

Step 3: Understand the Dynamics of Twitter

Twitter is not a marketing tool; it’s a social tool. That means:

• Don’t spam
• Follow other users
• Be active in the community (comment and post frequently)
• Post useful information
• Don’t post every 10 minutes
• Engage in conversations. Retweet (reply to other tweets) often
• Don’t promote yourself. Share cool stuff. To give your company exposure, do it the smart way. Direct your followers to a blog post with useful information and have that post invite users to take action. Don’t try to take people from Twitter to your checkout page directly.

Step 4: Build Your Audience

There are several things that you can do to build your audience:

• Put a link to “Follow Me on Twitter” in your email signature, forums signature, website, and maybe even your business cards
• Invite people to follow you on Twitter at the end of each blog post you create
• Find Twitter users that you really look up to and see who is following them. Follow these people. Once they see you are following them, they will follow you.
• See who is following your friends and follow them. They will follow you too.
• Use Twitter directories to find members who are likely to follow you. My favorites are Just Tweet It and Twellow.
• Use the search feature to find profiles that you want to follow. You can use Twitter’s RSS feed to be notified every time a tweet is made containing a certain keyword.

Step 5: Watch Your Following/Followers Ratio

Try to have a balance between people you follow and people that follow you. If 1,000 people follow you and you only follow 10 folks, you will be seen as selfish and snob. If 10 people follow you and you follow 1,000, you will be seen as a spammer.

Some tips that will help you keep both numbers balanced:

• Grow slow. Instead of adding 500 new friends in one day, add maybe 50 and wait for them to follow you. Then do another 50.
• Use a tool like Friend or Follow to see who is following you that you are not following and who you are following that is not following you. This tool is very useful to balance the number of following/followers.
• Avoid the “follow/no follow” tactic. Some people follow others so they follow them and then they stop following those folks. Avoid this practice if you don’t want to look like a spammer.

Step 6: Post Useful Tweets

Make it worthwhile to follow you. If you’ve found something that your audience might find useful, tweet it. You can use Twitter tools to automatically tweet your blog posts.

Share what you do but avoid “selling”. For example, if you are a web developer you can tweet “we just finished designing the website for ABC Widgets” but avoid something like “Custom Web Design from $899″. 

Step 7: Learn from the Experts

Find 10-20 users with over 300 followers and see what they are doing right. Get ideas and implement them.

Any ideas? Please comment below.