Yesterday I posted about choosing the right platform for your blog & your budget.  So assuming you have made that choice what other tools do you need to help you launch your blogging efforts?

The first thing you will want to do is actually get your work read. So promotional tools are the thing you are looking for.  Some of these will be built into your blogging platform, depending on which route you go.  Wordpress has some great SEO plugins that will help you ensure that your blog gets ranked within the search engines.

But don’t leave it all to SEO, there are other tools that will help you get the word out about your blog. Firstly, make it easy for people to get your content. Adding an RSS feed will ensure that you get a broader distribution not just readers subscribing (don’t forget to add the email option as well). Services like FeedBurner are very useful for this.

Don’t forget to use tools like Delicious to occassionally boost your page views - though don’t over do this, you don’t want to appear as a complete self promoter.

Popularity: 4% [?]

About a couple months ago, I posted up a poll asking you and other readers what your site’s leading source of traffic is. The poll has been running for a while now, but I forgot to put it up on the sidebar for a few weeks. 101 votes should be enough to get significant numbers and results. So here it is below.

Out of this 101, 36% of you said that your main source of traffic came from search engines and I would guess that it was mostly from Google. Meanwhile, referral traffic came in second with 29% of all votes. Just to reiterate, this category of refferal traffic is composed of traffic you get from other sites that include other blogs, StumbleUpon, social media, forums, etc. Oh, and as you can see, nobody that participated in this poll uses PPC marketing to promote their blog (or other type of sites). Then there are those who polled “Other”. Not exactly sure what that would be, but I guess that’s my mistake for putting it up as an option.

What Some Of You Said

Here’s what a few of you said from the original post.

Wayne Liew -

Since I enjoyed bloghopping, my traffic will be largely from other blogs resulting from the links of my comments and also my MyBlogLog avatar.

Blacksky -

I really try to have the more sources possible… from search engine to social bookmarking but google search engine seems the one that give me the highest conversion . and yahoo search engine is almost at 100% of conversion… pretty sad that nobody use it. Mybloglog is good to spread the word.

Doctorfox -

I get a few from Google and Stumble upon, but the most comes from the Software industry where people want to download my software for free. Also I think there should be a difference between regular traffic and targeted traffic.

So What Can This Poll Teach Us?

Well, here’s the thing. I did expect the search engine category to top other sources of traffic in this survey, but it’s not the one I wanted to see. Instead, I would have loved to see the referral category to top all the rest. Why? Well, if you were one of those people who polled for referral traffic, I would like to let you know that you are a very good internet marketer. Being a good internet marketer shows that your site can live without Google and other search engines. To those that did poll for search engines as their leading source of traffic, I’m afraid to say that you will have a hard time having a successful online business whether it’s your blog or any other type of site. Just imagine that Google never existed. You’re site’s income would never exist too.

Popularity: 10% [?]

While watching TV today, something occurred to me: if companies are paying millions of dollars to expose their products in commercials, then that must mean they’re making lots of money in return. That’s when this simple idea popped up in my head. What if you can do that with your blog or any type of website? I know that it already is possible and (some) bloggers already do it, but its effect is something that they haven’t really experienced.

This trick can really make you a famous blogger in no time. But there’s a catch: you will need some money to get started. This is something for bloggers and other webmasters with money that they are willing to invest. So how does it work? Simple: purchase blog reviews from top-bloggers…

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 41% [?]

What do you get when you combine blogging, social-networking, Digg, self-promotion, and traffic? Blogging Zoom! If you haven’t heard about this yet, you are surely missing out on a lot of traffic!

There really isn’t much to talk about Blogging Zoom since I’ve basically explained it all above. Created by Courtney from CourtneyTuttle.com, it’s a social-networking site that looks (sort of) and feels like Digg, but the main purpose is for you to bring your own blog some traffic. Just like Digg, contents are submitted and can be rated by its users. The top rated articles are shown on the sidebar on the “Top Today” section. Even if your articles don’t make it to the Top, they can always be discovered from different sections of the site like the Categories section or the most recent published posts. So if you’re always hearing from people and social-networking sites not to “submit your own content”, Blogging Zoom actually encourages you to do so.

Blogging Zoom has only been up for less than 2 weeks, but its traffic is zooming higher and higher each and every day. Just take a look at Courtney’s screenshot that compares both his sites’ Alexa rankings. Every since Blogging Zoom has been released, it had brought bloggers a lot of traffic for their blogs, as well as traffic for the site itself. What does it mean when Blogging Zoom has an explosion of traffic? More traffic for your blog, dummy!

Overall, I really like the idea of this really cool service. Not only can you get traffic for your blog and meet new bloggers, but Blogging Zoom brings together the posts from the best undiscovered blogs or the “most obscure blogs” all in one place. After submitting 11 of my posts from Slyvisions, I have gotten many Zooms from each of them. What article did I get the most Zooms on so far? My post on 10 Things To Do When You Have Nothing To Blog About!

If you have not started with it yet, go head over there and submit your posts! Just don’t submit everything all at one time.

Popularity: 8% [?]