What Is Networking?

Networking is a way of promoting your blog by building relationships with people within the blogging community. This can be achieved in a number of different ways:

Commenting On Other Blogs

Commenting on other peoples blogs is a brilliant way to promote your blog.  Not only will you get a link back to your blog (although most blogs have a nofollow HTML attribute on their comments), but by providing interesting and helpful comments people will become interested in you and will visit your blog.  However, do not comment spam.  If you do not have a useful comment to make, do not make one.

Answering Comments Left On Your Blog

This is a good way to interact with your blogs readers and to make them like you.  By making your comments back to them helpful and friendly, you can create a positive image of yourself and make people like you.  If people like you, they are more likely to return to your blog.

Emailing

Emailing other bloggers can be a good way of exchanging links to build your blogs Page Rank and to build relationships with other bloggers.  However, you should try not annoy the bloggers that you email and you should only exchange links with blogs that are related to your blogs niche.

Joining Communities

One of the best ways to promote your blog is joining communities like those in BlogCatalog.  Here you can join groups, create discussions and generally get your name out there.  If you do it right, it can be a good way to increase your blogs traffic.

Next Post: Social Bookmarking

Post every day!

What Is A Blog Directory?

A blog directory is simply a directory of blogs usually sorted into categories. They are generally free to submit to, however you normally have to provide a reciprocal link on your blog in return.

Why Submit To Blog Directories?

Although may not a very good source of traffic directly, they are a useful source of links to your blog. These links will help to increase your blogs page rank and help it to get listed higher in search engines. Some of them can also be used to find readers to your blog, which I will talk about in my next post.

Two Of The Best

There are absolutely thousands of blog directories out there, however I have found the two most important to be Technorati and BlogCatalog.

Technorati is possibly the biggest blog directory in the world claiming currently to track over 112.8 million blogs. All of these blogs are ranked according to how many other blogs are linked to them, or as Technorati calls it their “authority”. All the major blogs are listed here, so you should be too.

BlogCatalog is an absolutely brilliant blog directory, which is a little bit different to the others. Not only can you list all of your blogs there, you can join groups, create discussions and get involved in a vibrant community. If you use BlogCatalog wisely it can be used to build your blog brand and find readers for your blog.

Should I Submit To All the Blog Directories?

No. It certainly isn’t very wise to submit to all the blog directories. This is not just because it would take you a long time to do, but also because you have to have a reciprocal link to them in return (usually in the form of a small badge) that will clutter your sidebar and increase your blogs loading time, which may put off your current readers.

Summary

• Submitting to blog directories can be a good way to promote your blog.
• Submit your blog to Technorati and BlogCatalog.
• Do not submit to them all.
• Pick the directories that will suit your blog.

For a good list of blog directories see this article Full List Of Blog Directories.

Next Post: Networking

If you have decided that you want your blog to be available to the whole world firstly you need to submit it to search engines so that they can find it.

However, do not think that this will bring you traffic straight away. It can take a long time to get indexed highly in certain search engines depending on a number of factors including how many other sites link to your blog. Another point to consider is that in the long run search engine traffic might not be the main portion of your traffic, however it is a good source of traffic and therefore must be utilised.

The three main search engines that you should submit to are Google, Yahoo and MSN. There are of course many many other search engines, however they are unlikely to bring you much traffic, so for the moment I will not consider them. Other search engines also use the big threes data, for example by submitting to Yahoo, your site will also appear in AltaVista and AlltheWeb.

Submitting To Google

If you use blogger your blog and its sitemap will automatically be submitted to Google. You can check which pages of your blog are indexed in Google simply typing site:www.YOURBLOGSNAME.com into the search box. This trick also works for most other search engines.

If you use a different blog service to blogger you will have to submit your blog yourself. However, this is very simple. All you need to do is visit http://www.google.com/addurl/ and type in the URL of your blog.

You can also submit your sitemap by signing up for google webmasters http://www.google.com/webmasters/. This requires you to have a google account, which is free.

Submitting To Yahoo

To submit to Yahoo you need to have a yahoo email account, which is free to set up. You can then submit your site for free http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html.

You can also submit your sitemap using yahoo site explorer.

If you use blogger your blogs sitemap will be http://YOURBLOGSNAME.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss.

Submitting To MSN

To submit your blog to msn simply visit http://search.live.com/docs/submit.aspx and add your blogs URL.

You can also submit your blogs sitemap or feed if you have a windows live (hotmail) email account http://webmaster.live.com/.

Note: If you are a WordPress.org user there is a brilliant plugin called Google XML Sitemaps that will do it all for you:-).

Next Post: Blog Directories

This is the first in a series of five posts that I have written on blog promotion for beginners.

Introduction

Blog promotion is important if you actually want to people to read your blog. No matter how good the content or design of your blog is, if you do not tell people about it, it will not be read.

Should I Promote My Blog?

Firstly before your promote your blog you should consider whether it is worth promoting at all. Is your blog worth sharing with the whole world? Does it have good content? Good design? Is it different or better than other blogs already out there?

You might also consider whether to keep your blog a secret like an online dairy. If you use blogger you can do this by setting your blog to private in the basic settings by selecting “no” for adding your blog to listings and letting search engines find it, and then in the permissions section selecting only the blog author can read this blog.

If you decide that your blog is worth promoting and that you want to share it with the world, the next four posts will be useful to you.

Next Post: Submitting To Search Engines