Step 3:  Promoting Your Site via Social Media and Online Communities    

Now that you have your blog up and running and have established a few weeks worth of good, solid content, you can start promoting your blog and driving traffic.  This is where you can finally use your blog as a vehicle to promote your business.  

Most blogs have prominent spaces in the sidebar or side column for advertising. Use these spaces to advertise your own web business (rather than using 3rd party advertisers) by displaying graphics that link to your online store, text links in various strategic places (here’s a great article on how to successfully incorporate text links into your blog).  As you drive more and more traffic to your blog, you will increase the chances that people will link on these links and graphics and ultimately make purchases at your online business.  

Engage in Related Online Communities

It is extremely important, and I cannot stress this enough, to engage in related online communities.  If your blog is about photography, find other photography blogs and subscribe to them.  Interact with other readers on those blogs by leaving comments (with a link-back to your own blog, of course) and that will encourage other readers to come visit your site as well.  Make sure your comments are relevant to the writer’s content and can’t be mistaken as SPAM.

You will also want to create a blogroll on your blog.  A blogroll is a common blogging term which refers to a list of links to other blogs or sites that come recommended by a particular author.  You will need to spend some time reaching out to other related blogs and ask them to do a “link-exchange”:  this simply means you will put a link to their site on your blog and vice versa.  This is one of the most simple yet powerful methods of bringing more traffic to your site.  If you can get blogs that generate a lot of traffic on the regular to link to your site, it will not only drive more traffic back to your site, but it will also help increase your Google page rank.  

You will also want to submit your blog to blog categories.   Gaining exposure for your blog is critical to building a following, readership, and revenue. Besides the basic SEO steps of adding compelling and keyword friendly titles, URL structure and descriptions (along with the basic Wordpress SEO plugins) basic link building for blogs begins with listing them in blog directories.

Promote your Articles via Social Media

Social Media is the latest craze of the internet these days.  You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who is not on one of the popular social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.  Chances are you probably already have a Facebook page or a Twitter page that is connected to hundreds of family, friends, co-workers and other people you have been networking with over the years.  Now it’s time to put those sites into good practice by promoting your new blog and all its interesting content.
 
First, make sure you put a link to your blog on any and all of your social media profiles. You would be surprised how many bloggers don’t include a link to their blog on their Facebook or LinkedIn page. You will also want to do your heavy promoting during the peak hours that people use these sites – work hours.

Here are some ways you can use social media, blog promotion and book-marking sites to get your content noticed.

RSS
* RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, and is sometimes just called a feed, is a way for one website to send out it’s content in a way that other websites and programs can easily read. Most people are actually already using feeds, they’re just not aware of it.
*Make sure people are able to easily subscribe to your RSS feed.  You should have a prominently displayed graphic right on your homepage.
* You can also set-up an email subscription service through Google’s FeedBurner application where people can receive your blog articles in email form every time your blog is updated.

Facebook
* Create a fan page for your blog – attract fans by updating it with articles, short posts and pictures. You can create a feed that imports notes automatically every time your blog is updated so that you don’t have to do it manually, saving you valuable time.
* Create and join groups around your blog’s topic
* Use the Networked Blog application to create a community for your blog followers

LinkedIn
* Create or join groups around your blog’s topic
* Browse discussion boards and Q&A for conversations already happening around your subject matter
*Add the blog link application so your posts are prominently displayed on your profile

Twitter
* Be sure to use top keywords related to your blog entry in your Tweet so people using Twitter search can find it
* Re-share other people’s articles and don’t just shamelessly promote your own content.  Sharing is caring and the more you share, the more other users will be willing to share your own content.

Ping.fm
* Simplify promotion of new content bv using Ping.fm to update your status on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, instant messenger accounts and other networks. This is better than setting up feeds to auto-post when you blog because you can customize the updates, rather than having them default post with your blog entry title.

Google profile
Set up a Google profile, a relatively new feature to Google. It will come up on the front page of Google search results for your name and allows you to list all your social profiles, including your blog

Social bookmarking
* Make sure you have AddThis, Socialable or some other widget which includes all of the social bookmarking sites so visitors to your blog can easily save to their favorite and re-share.
* List links only to the sites you want or expect to be able to rank highly on.
* Bookmark your own best posts, and ask others to do the same.

Interact with other blogs
* Find blogs on similar topics and subscribe to them in an RSS reader to make them easy to keep up with. Comment on their blogs and link back to them in your own relevant posts. This will drive traffic to your site and encourage them to comment on your site as well.
* Find blogs on similar topic matter, or topics that you are interested in writing about that may not fit with your blog’s niche, and offer to guest post. For the time and content that you’ve given to the owner of the blog, you get traffic, establish expertise to a new audience and gain inbound links

Blog promotion sites
* Technorati, BlogCatalog, MyBlogLog are sites specifically focused on helping bloggers promote their blogs. Use these sites to form groups with people who are interested in your blog’s subject matter.

Step 4:  Have fun!

This should go without saying, but as business professionals, we can get too caught up with the professional side and spend less time showing our human side. People buy from and interact with people they find interesting and a blog is an excellent medium to let others get to know you in a more informal way.

Missed the first two parts?  Check out Part 1 and Part 2.