What we need after creating a beautiful and elegant blog? If it personal or niche based blogs all of us like to reach our blog to million readers. Leave that million instead most of us target 100 visitors per day for the first month. When I created my first blog I didn't anything to promote it, hoping many people will come to visit my blog after just creating it. After spending a month in that blog I deleted it because of maximum 5 to 10 visitors per day.
After that bad experience in blogging I didn't do nothing for a month. But during this period I did some research about blogging and how to promote a blog. Most of this time I spend reading hundreds of blogs. Today I am going to help you to promote your blog during beginning stages to get some descent traffic. Offline promotion methods have its own power, but best method to target a huge number of visitors is online promotion.
It is just a beginner's guide than an expert advice. So feel free to add your own feed back as comments.
Create a Unique Blog
If you already created a blog you can skip this step and can directly start reading from my tips. Here we are explaining the best way to get started online. There are plenty of ways to start your first website/blog, you can make use any of these free blog sites to create your first blog. I always recommend to create self hosted WordPress blog instead of relying on free blog sites. In both cases try to make a unique blog in design and lay out. That is an added advantage to get some real attention about your new blog. Here it is a collection premium WordPress templates that might help you to create a unique blog design.
Write on A regular Basis
Blogging is some what creating great contents that aims for a targeted audience. Great content will always work as the best way to promote your own blog. So Write great content and write often, it should help your blog to grow faster. Writing regularly should bring back your blog visitors expecting some fresh contents. Building a reader base is very essential for the faster growth of your website. Writing more often should have more chances to index your new posts much faster by search engines.
Here I am not writing that much regularly. But I am updating this site on average of 15 posts per month which is known to be ideal. So prepare a master plan while writing, scheduling and posting time.
Search Engine Submissions
Search engine submissions should be done after posting your one or two posts. If you are creating a free blog in blogger Google search engine submissions are not required. When we create a new blog in blogger, it will automatically add your site to web master tools. Now a days Google search engine submissions can only done through webmaster tools. If you not yet done that do it now by visiting Google Webmaster tools. Google is the biggest search engine with more than 3 billion searches per day.
Many other small search engines are also using Google results to display their search results. So submitting your site to Google will always produce some good number of visitors from search engines.
Don't forget search engines those are occupying in 2nd and third place, ie Yahoo and Bing. Both these are capable of bringing a lot visitors to your blog. We can do both these submission at a glance. Recently Yahoo! Search has merged Site Explorer into Bing Webmaster Tools. So we only need to submit our site to Bing to get traffic from these two search engines. Visit Bing web master tools to submit your site.
SEO
SEO is search engine optimization. Submitting a site to Google or other search engines will not help to bring plenty of visitors. There you might need to learn some SEO techniques and methods,but never over optimize your site for search engines, it should give a negative impact. I sorted out three SEO articles in past that might help you to learn SEO basics.
Search Engines Optimization for blogger blogs: Blogger SEO . A simple guide to optimize your WordPress site to search engines: WordPress SEO . Goes through any of these tutorials to learn basics about SEO.
Keyword Research
Do proper keyword research before writing any blog post. That might help to reach a targeted visitors those who are looking for the same information searching in search engines. I didn't find any other tools better than AdWords Keyword Tool for keyword research. Optimize your blog posts targeting that keyword should help to get more readers from search engines.
Social Book marking Sites
Social bookmaking sites like Digg, Reddit can be utilized to promote your blog. Here is the complete list of top 10 social book marking sites. All these sites are capable of building back links along with some quality visitors.
Images
There are plenty of advantages if we are using proper images in blog posts. SEO advantages and better user experience may come along with proper image optimization. Relevant images with proper title tags and alt text should bring a lot of traffic from Google Image search. Images will speak a lot more than writing thousands of words. So try to add proper images which explain what you are saying to your audience.
Tumblr as Effective way to promote your blog
Tumblr is a micro blogging site where we can create free blogs. Here it is a simple tip to drive a lot of traffic to website from tumblr. This tiny trick using tumblr should help your blog to reach initial traffic needs.
Use Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is one of the trending method to drive huge readers with in a small span of time. The way you are writing it and landing pages that you are using as back links have great importance while guest posting. Along with guest blogging submit articles to directories like ezinearticles etc. Article directories are great resources for getting free back links along with promoting your blog to a large audience.
Leaving an option for Guest blogging in your blog will also act as an effective method to promote your blog. Those writers may become a long-term reader of your blog.
Effective Use of Social Media
Like social bookmarking sites we can also use social media sites to promote your blog. You should target top three social media sites, ie Facebook, Twitter and Google +. Along with some free traffic social media sites will help us to reach more audience. Start working to get more likes for your Facebook page, increasing twitter followers and more Google + followers. Each of this fans and followers might promote your blog to get some free traffic from social media sites.
Discussions Around your Blog
We all know the importance of a discussion. Always try to create a discussion around each blog post in your blog. Either you can start it from your own blog or leaving a comment in other blogs with similar content. Facebook comment for WordPress blogs is also an easy method to create great conversations around your blog.
Leave options for Subscribing to your blog
It is a must have for any blog. Subscription options in your blog should act as long-term method for promoting your blog/website. Google+, facebook, Twitter and Feed Subscription option is a must have for any blog. Here I am concluding my thoughts about best ways to promote your blog to get some free traffic. There are plenty of other ways to promote your blog online and offline. But in my opinion working on these points must improve number of visitors to your blog.
Ahsan
ramnadh