How to Begin Marketing Your Personal Blog

So you have a blog, you’ve made several updates, and yet your hits fail to climb. How do you fix this? It’s hard for people to find one blog out of thousands, especially a new one, and presuming your content is original and worth reading, how do you let people know it exists? The role of self-promotion and marketing in the world of blogging is an important one, and central to the success of any blog, be it new or old. This article will guide you through the basic steps necessary to properly market your blog without resorting to spamming websites and message boards with your URL.

When beginning a marketing strategy for your blog, the first thing you need to do is take into account both your target audience and your content. Let’s say that your blog is political in nature, devoted to commentary, rants and other musings concerning the current political landscape at home and abroad. One of your best bets is to visit like-minded sites, such as The Huffington Post, as well as smaller, more personal blogs, and commenting on their posts. The key is to provide insightful comments that genuinely contribute to the discussion. After some time, you can leave a signature including your URL, or simply e-mail the blogger in question and ask them to take a look at your website. This leads us to the next step in marketing, which is link exchanging.

After your blog has become established, or after it has several top quality posts, you can start asking likeminded blogs if they would consider a link exchange. In many niches, however, such as film blogging, many bloggers will pick up on other blogs and link without a request. Before you begin asking for links, however, start linking to other blogs you enjoy, as well as some top rated blogs. Odds are the owners will eventually discover they have been linked, and if they enjoy your content, they will provide for you a link to your site on their own without the need to ask for one.

After you’ve become established enough to where you can cut back on the linking, focusing on top quality content (although always necessary), should be your primary concern. By having a lot of quality posts (remember: quality over quantity), you open up a new world of online marketing found in social media websites such as Digg and Reddit. These sites allow you to submit news stories, blog posts, pictures and the like, where they are then upvoted or downvoted by the users. The most popular posts can make it to the front page, exposing your work to a whole new audience. The trick, however, is to only submit articles you yourself would want to read. Submitting any old article you write will likely earn yourself the reputation as a spammer, and that’s the last thing any blogger needs.

That’s all there is to it. Provided you keep churning out quality content, over time you will see your readership start to grow. Once this happens you can branch out into employing the use of ads to make a few extra dollars. More readers means more opportunities, so keep plugging away and with a bit of hard work and maybe even a little luck, your blog can become an internet sensation.