Having a blog is great, but only if someone other than you and a few of your family members reads it. So how do you get other people to read your blog?  You have to promote it and you have to do so in a variety of ways. Essentially you are going to become a marketing and PR department for your blogging business.

There are many ways to promote your blog, these are amongst the most successful:

• Social Media - Use syndicating tools to cross post your blog posts to sites like Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Friend Feed, Twitter etc. Make sure that people know you are blogger by including a link to your blog in your profile page.
• Search Engines - Use the plugins/Widgets that are available to help ensure that your posts are optimized for search engines, you want to be on page one of the results for your particular niche, this takes time and effort and monitoring. It isn’t something that just happens.
• Blog Comments - Make good use of other blogs in your niche and leave comments, meaningful comments on others posts. Don’t just leave the “nice post” type of comment and hope other readers will follow a link to your blog. Engage in conversation.
• Forums - Similar in approach to blog comments, this is a longer term activity, it is important that you build trust and authority within the forum community before you start to promote links to your blog.

Promoting your blog is an essential activity and it is very time consuming but it is the life blood of any successful blogging enterprise.

Next: Global or Local?

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That title just sounds wrong doesn’t it? I mean how can not writing on your blog help your blog? Well of course if you completely abandon it then it won’t and that’s not want I am suggesting. However, taking time out from blogging to be active elsewhere on the web is a good thing.

If your only web presence is your blog, you can quickly become irrelevant and forgotten.  Finding time to be on all the other platforms, like Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook etc and to write good quality blogs is a huge challenge for anyone.

Something has to give, so why not your blog?  Some bloggers feel that to miss their appointed cycle, be that daily, three times a week, every other day or whatever it is, will lead to a mass exodus of readers. Why?  If you have regular readers then they are probably already subscribed through RSS, so they don’t visit your blog on a regular basis anyway as they have the content delivered directly to them.

If they are new readers, they don’t have a sense of your routine anyway and your material is fresh to them.  Taking time away from your blog, reading other blogs, finding new sources and most importantly connecting with other people who in turn can help you promote your blog is a great way to both drive new traffic and to become re-energized about your blog.

So go ahead, take the day off, do something else that will eventually give your blog a boost.

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