7 fundamental ways to promote your blog successfully

by Lili Petkova | Nov 15, 2012

Or, what are the basic things you should include in your blog promotion strategy

Blogs can provide an excellent ROI – but only if you invest a lot of your time in them. As we agreed, writing great content is just not enough. Promoting your blog is essential, so we’ve gone through 6 basic strategies that will help you in your blog promotion (part 1 and part 2). And the last, but not least, 7^th fundamental way to promote your blog is:

7. Blog directories

Blog directories are online directories which link to other blogs and categorize them by different criteria. They’ll bring more traffic to your blog, so don’t leave them out when putting together your promotion strategy. Blog directories also help for inbound links creation and for SEO to make your blog more visible to search engines. Listing in blog directories isn’t in vain – still, maximizing their potential requires some effort. Many blog directories have developed into communities in their mission to deliver quality leads. Interacting with other members in these communities requires you to follow the same rules as for Social media and Networking, and it has the same benefits.

There are a lot of blog directories out there where you can share your blog so that users who are looking for specific content can find you. Check the top blog directories in your niche and submit your website there. Well, relevance is important, but it’s not always easy, or even possible, to find such blog directories. SEO experts recommend using popular and highly authoritative directories regardless of the topics that you cover in your blog.

I’ve selected the top 3 blog directories based on their popularity – include them in your blog promotion strategy and you’ll see the results. They’re easy to use, free and highly trusted. I advise you to use them all – not only to submit your blog, but also when looking for relevant content and other blogs for commenting on or for guest blogging. Go through the pros and cons, from the user’s point of view, of every major feature. You can decide which one you can use for your research, but still – why not use them all for this purpose, too?

Technorati

Technorati is the first, the biggest, and maybe the most popular blog search engine. It indexes more than a million blogs a day in real time and uses open source software, which makes it an active software developer community.

Pros:

• The site is the definitive source for top stories and opinions related to the following topics – news, sports, lifestyle, business, and technology. It tracks the authority and influence of blogs, as well as the popularity of bloggers and blogs.
• The blog submissions are reviewed – you should copy and paste a unique code into one of your blog posts. This way the ownership of your blog is verified.
• Technorati’s search may be the most advanced search – you can search in tags, for exact phrases, for posts or blogs, by desired author or by posts linking to somewhere.

Cons:

• If your blog doesn’t have anything to do with the above mentioned topics, especially with technology, Technorati definitely is not your place for finding similar blogs and blog writers.

Google Blog Search

Blog Search is the Google tool focused on blog searching. It helps users to find any topics they want in different blogs – and not only in English, but in any language that Google is available in.

Pros:

• The results are not only Blogger blogs, but every blog on the web which publishes a site feed – RSS or Atom (of course, if it’s listed in this directory). Blog Search updates are much faster than standard web searches because site feeds are regularly checked for new content. If you don’t find your blog in Blog Search, enter your web or feed address in https://blogsearch.google.com/ping and Google will index it.
• Blog Search has all the same positive points as Google search – you can search by date or by relevance, you can set date range or you can set advanced operators such as phrase control, searching in blog titles, URLs, or posts from a specific author.

Cons:

• Some people find this directory one of the useless Google tools, or regard it as the same as Google. As a result they don’t search particularly in Google Blog Search, they just search in Google.

BlogCatalog.com

BlogCatalog is a very effective blog directory – it can bring you a lot of traffic, so don’t miss it.

Pros:

• There’s ownership verification – usually by placing some buttons in your blog.
• The design is really user-friendly and most of the popularity of this directory can be attributed to its design. And the fast listing, of course.
• If you want to invest some money in your blog popularisation, here you can pay for a featured position on the home page or on your category page.

Cons:

• You need to create an account to submit a blog – if this can be considered as a con at all.

Other blog directories, which are worth posting your blog to, are:

• Blog Lines
• Blogarama
• Bloggernity
• Best of the Web Blog Search
• Bloggeries
• OnToplist.com
• Blogoola
• Blogtoplist
• Blog digger
• Icerocket

If you want to find out more, you can check this list of blog directories.

We’ve looked through the 7 fundamental ways to promote your blog successfully. Use them all, in the best way you can – and you’ll find your blog becoming more and more popular. But don’t forget to use the tools for blog promotion that you already have. Tell your friends and family about your blog. Ask them to tell everyone they know about them. Creating the viral effect for some of your posts can always use some help from those closest to you!