How to Promote Your Weblog for Free

There are millions of bloggers who spend lots of time on their blogs everyday. Most of them are really good and can write very well but they give up after a while.

Why? Because of the lack of traffic.

Traffic is the most valuable thing over the internet and even the best and most beautiful websites and weblogs are useless without traffic. In addition to the writing skills, a good blogger should also be able to promote his/her blog and drive traffic to it. It is easy to do this if you are willing to spend thousands of dollars on pay per click search engines like Google AdWords, but this is not the best or the wisest way to get traffic. It really does not make sense to drive traffic to your weblog through pay per click or other paid advertising methods.

A good weblog should be able to attract an increasing and reasonable amount of free targeted traffic from different resources. A weblog is different from a static website and new information and articles are posted on it everyday, so in addition to passive visitors, a good weblog should also have an increasing and reasonable number of subscriber who visit regularly.

How is it possible?

If you are good in writing about the topic that your weblog is focused on, you will have no problem promoting your weblog or in making it popular. Below I am listing the most important methods of promoting a weblog. If you really want a popular weblog, you should spend a certain amount of time regularly on the methods below. By following these methods you will enjoy the free traffic your weblog will attract.

1. Quality content:

Content is most important in blogging. You should be able to write quality and valuable articles that people love to read. Your posts should make an impact on the readers life and business, maybe you can teach them something new or make them laugh and enjoy what they are reading. If this happens they will bookmark your blog and drop by when you post a new article otherwise you are wasting your time.

Do not post something on your blog just to pretend that you have updated it. Quality is more important than quantity. So don’t update your blog with several small and useless posts everyday. If you are not a fast writer, it is OK. Just update your blog once or twice every week but the don’t let the quality of the posts be sacrificed for quantity.

So if you want a popular weblog, the first and most important step is having a good and quality content.

2. Unique content:

This could be discussed in quality content but I prefer to have a separate item for this as it is very important. Your weblog should have a unique and distinct content. This means you should not post articles from other weblogs on your own weblog as these articles may have already been posted on several other weblogs or article directories.

Weblogs that have duplicated content do not have any chance of being ranked on search engines. Fortunately search engines, especially Google is so refined to know if your content is original, so if any other website/weblog posts the same content as yours it will not be credited to them. This is a big help to prevent content stealing.

If you are not a writer and you are unable to write for your own blog, the only other option you have is to hire someone to write for you. Posting other weblogs/websites content or copying articles from article directories and posting them on your blog is not called blogging and it will not make you a blogger.

3. Search Engine Optimization:

If your weblog has a quality and unique content, you are far ahead of thousands of other bloggers and you just need to optimize your blog for search engines. Search engine optimization is a knowledge that needs several articles to discuss. I only mention some of the most important things that you have to consider for optimization:

• Title
  Try to have a good title for your weblog home page and have the main keywords/phrases in it. Also try to have good titles for your posts and include the related keyword/phrase in them because they also act as the title of the page that the article will be posted on.

  Each page should have a unique title. Avoid having the same title repeated on several pages.

• Description
  The rules that you have to consider for the title are also true for the description tag. Description can be bigger than title but do not make it too big and do not repeat the keywords/phrases in it. Just have the main keywords/phrases once inside the meaningful sentences and not phrases.
• URL of the pages
  Try to have static URLs for the posts’ pages. Fortunately, in some weblog platforms like WordPress, it is very easy to have static URLs for the posts’ pages. Static URLs look better and you can have keywords/phrases in them which is good for search engine ranking.
• Having the related keywords/phrases in the home page and posts body
  Searchers find your weblog through the keywords/phrases that are used in your weblog home page or posts. So try to have them in the home page and also the posts but do not overload your weblog pages with several keywords.
• Write for people not for search engines
  It has become too hard and somehow impossible to cheat search engines specially Google. Google can easily distinguish a page that is created for being ranked in search engines or for people and weblog users. Do not make your weblog posts and pages for search engines by over-optimization and repeating keywords, otherwise your weblog will be penalized or even banned.
• Improve your weblog link popularity
  You can improve your weblog link popularity by participating in blog carnivals, guest blogging, submitting your posts to social bookmarking websites, blog and RSS directories and link exchanging. Also having good quality content causes other bloggers and webmasters to link to your weblog.

4. Join community and social bookmarking sites

There are some community and social bookmarking sites that bloggers should join. MyBlogLog, MySpace, Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icou.us and BlogCatalog are the main and most important sites. After joining, try to be an active member of these sites but be careful to follow their rules. You will find a lot of friends among other bloggers and a lot of traffic will be driven to your weblog. The number of subscribers will grow and your blog will become popular after a while.

5. Establish friendship with other bloggers

Other bloggers, specially those who are interested in the same topic are the main visitors, readers and subscribers of your blog. They find your blog through blog search engines, community and social bookmarking sites like MyBlogLog.

Blogging is all about communication and establishing close relation with the users. If you are not good in communication, you will not be a good blogger because people will not like you or your blog. Blogs are not like the old fashion websites where visitors could leave no trace or comment, most visitors were just one time visitors and would never be back. You should encourage people to come back regularly and subscribe for your feed or bookmark your blog. Other bloggers are the main visitors who will drop by regularly if they find you and your blog useful.

How can you make them interested?

- If they asked any question or posted any comment, try to answer in the best way both through email and the comment form of the related post.

- Link to their blogs in your posts. This will cause them to link to your blog too.

- Make a list of the best 100 blogs related to your blog topic and try to visit them regularly and post comments on their posts. Then they will do the same for you. This will also attract their users to your blog and it will make your weblog popular. I am not saying that you steal their users, you just introduce yourself to them. Users visit several websites and weblogs everyday and your blog can be one of them.

- Run a weekly blog carnival on your blog and email the bloggers when their articles are accepted in your carnival, ask them to post their comments and link to the carnival.

- Bloggers are interested in knowing other bloggers. So when they find a blog, they look for the about us page to know more about the blogger. I have seen many blogs that have none or a very poor about us page. This is too bad. How can people trust you when they know nothing about you? Try to have a good about us page with one of your best photos. Also make it easy to contact you.

- Write guest posts for other blogs and ask them to write guest posts for you.

6. Participate in forums

To any topic that your blog is about, you need to find the top 20 or 50 (or more if you have time) related forums and participate in them as an active member. You need to post comments and answers to others threads and post new threads whenever you have time. Have a signature with your blog URL at the bottom of each of your posts. After a while you will be known as an expert in the related topic and people will visit your weblog and subscribe for the feed or bookmark it.

Bottom line:

There are a lot of other free methods to drive traffic to your websites and make it popular but the above methods are among the most important and effective ones. Please note that having a popular weblog can not be achieved overnight. It needs hard work and patience. It takes time and you should focus on the above methods for few months to see some significant results.

Some other articles to read more:

21 Ways to Drive Free Traffic to Your Sites
7 Common Things Between a Good Website and an Active Volcano!
Viral Marketing Strategies – Learn How to Spread the Words for Free!
How to Improve and Keep Your Google Rankings
92 Reasons Why Your Website Sucks But Others Websites Make Real Money

Vahid has been working as an internet marketer for many years. Visit his weblog at www.weboma.com.