Blog Promotion Tools

Posted on: May 18th, 2009 by Lauren Candito
The bloggosphere is buzzing with promotion and activity. It´s a great feeling to be part of it … and not lose your shirt for various referral and linking fees. In the spirit of Monkey Fool, I will show you a few more blog promotion tools that will not cost you anything… almost.

1. LinkReferral

It´s a hugely popular linking system, which lists registered members links according to subject categories. Each member has a chance to be reviewed and visited by others by providing a few reviews (and visits) in exchange. The system is simple and effective, especially if you are on tight budget. However, it´s not completely fair. For a fee of USD 35/month, you will be placed on top of all referred links – hence, gaining substantial traffic without having to spend time referring and visiting other sites.

2. Link Back Link

It´s a simple blog which promises to provide a link to your site in exchange for a backlink. It does not cost anything, plus the link comes with a brief review of your site.

3. Blogorator

It´s a little script that you can install in your sidebar. Visitors get a chance to rate your site. With higher ratings you get more visibility on blogorator. The tool seems not to have the same popularity as technorati (#1 for blogging promotion) or even zimbio, both reviewed earlier. However, due to its addictive and easy use, I predict that Blogorator has a nice future ahead.

I might add a few more free blog promotion tools to this blog in the future. If you are fond of some other alternatives, such as Blogrolling, leave a comment so that we could discuss it.

Do You Know Your Customers?

Posted on: May 13th, 2009 by Lauren Candito

As an increasing number of businesses venture out into the realm of social media, an increasing number of platform options are begin developed for these businesses to choose from.  But with all of the options, how do you choose.  The key to this dilemma is fairly simple.  If you truly understand your target market, you can develop a tailored social media campaign around your user, thus choosing only the platforms that your users frequent.

The key to developing this tailored strategy is as I said earlier, “understanding your target market,” a concept that most companies think they know, but are often mistaken.  See if you can answer the following questions about your target market:

  1. Who is your target audience?  Are the males or females or both?  What age range do the fall into?
  2. What generation category do they fall under?  Millenials receive marketing messages a lot differently that Baby Boomers, and Gen Xers.
  3. What does your target market like to do in their spare time?  Where do they spend their time on and off line?
  4. When they are online, what websites or types of websites do they frequent?
  5. What types of messaging do they respond the best to?  How do they preferred to be communicated with?
  6. Why do they purchase your product/service?  What value can it bring to their life?
  7. Why don’t they purchase your product/service?  Who do they go to instead?

If you can answer all of the questions above, then you are ready to begin to create a custom social media campaign for your business.  If you cannot answer one or more, of the questions above, you need to go back to the basics, and gather the appropriate amount of information needed to understand your target market.  Build our a demographic profile for each target market you chase after, and really try to understand who they are, and what they want from a company.

Once you fully understand your target market, use the answers to the questions above to guide you to the right social platform.  For example, if you are a company that targets college females, aged 18 to 25, then you want to look at platforms that speak to that demographic (i.e. facebook, twitter).

Lastly, the only way that you are going to learn about the platforms at your disposal, and which ones will fit your audience best, is to take the time to check out each platform on your own, research their demographic audience, and get to know their users.  Knowing and understanding the different platform options is just as important a knowing your audience, because if you don’t understand the platform you are using, all of your messaging could get lost in all of the “clutter” online.

New Tool to Push Your Blog to Multiple Search Engines

Posted on: May 8th, 2009 by Lauren Candito

I have recently found a great new tool that allows wordpress users to “ping” multiple search engines with updates about their blog/site, called Ping-o-Matic! “Pinging” these services notifies them that there has been an update to the blog that “pinged”. How each service handles the ping is different. Some simply create a list a recently updated blogs, others create connections between blogs.

Using ping-o-matic is simple. WordPress users automatically use ping-o-matic (ping-o-matic was created by two of the WordPress developers). On the Options/Writing tab on the Admin Screen, there is a field at the bottom labeled: Update Services. Inside this box the following URL is listed: http://rpc.pingomatic.com/. Keep that URL there and every time a new post is entered, all the above services will be notified.

The sites pinged by ping-o-matic include:

Weblogs.com
Blo.gs
Technorati
Feed Burner
Syndic8
NewsGator
Feedster
My Yahoo!
PubSub.com
Blogdigger
BlogRolling
BlogStreet
Moreover
Weblogalot
Audio.Weblogs
RubHub
A2B GeoLocation
BlogShares

Enjoy!!

How to Get More Readers For Your Blog

Posted on: May 5th, 2009 by Lauren Candito

Blog Marketing: How to Get More Readers For Your Blog

Just as a website won’t do you any good with visitors, a blog won’t do you any good without readers. However, getting blog readers is often easier than getting website visitors. There are several ways to go about this.

First, make sure that each time you make a blog entry, you ping the blog. You can do this by going to Ping-O-Matic. Also, make sure that your blog has RSS capabilities. This will allow readers to load your blog in their newsreader, and it will also allow them to syndicate what you write on their own websites, which gives you more exposure.

Read and contribute to other blogs! This is vital if you want to succeed with blogging. Blogging itself is a community, no matter what the topic is. For instance, if you have a blog about cats, you should visit other people’s cat blogs. Read the posts, and when you can, add a comment that is relevant to the post, and link to one of your blog posts that is also relevant. Avoid blog spamming!

Alternately, you should quote other people’s blogs and provide Trackback links in your own blog posts. Those Trackbacks will appear on the other person’s blog, leading back to your own blog.

List your blog in the search engines! You should only need to do this once, as spiders will then crawl your blog regularly and will find and index your blog entries. Even though you will be pinging the blog directories, you should also visit the directories initially to get your blog listed there as well.

Look for sites that allow you to add a link to your website, and list your blog and your website. Look specifically for sites that relate to your topic. A reciprocal link may be required, but you can easily do this with software that is provided by your hosting company.

You can do everything that we have been talking about here manually. But there are some good software programs on the market that will do all this automatically for you. Once you get the hang about blogging you will set up multiple blogs and this will take a lot of your time. Therefore do a search on Google for “blogging”, “blogging software”, etc.

Finally, put the link to your blog in your signature file. When you post to newsgroups and forums, and when you send email, make sure that you include that signature file!

Just remember, it is easier to promote a website than it is to promote a product, and it is easier to promote a blog than it is to promote a website. For this reason, make blogging a priority, and you will be astounded at the results.