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5 Ways To Promote Your Liberal Blog
As I was writing this article, I found that I was able to list about 20 ideas without doing any research. There was enough substance in that list to write a few follow-ups to this post. As such, I’d like to thank Problogger.net and Performancing.com. I have learned alot from them. I haven’t put everything I’ve learned into practice, but I know I owe some of this blog’s success to the pros who generously share their knowledge.
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5 Ways To Promote Your Liberal Blog
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Participate in Carnivals – Blog carnivals are a group of blog posts, centered on a particular topic, and usually published on a regular basis. Get more information about carnivals here, and hang with your fellow libs at The Carnival of the Liberals.
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Cross post to sites like Daily Kos and Michigan Liberal – This is a great way to get some links, and more importantly, establish yourself as a blogger. I highly recommend Michigan Liberal, as it has a large audience of loyal readers, yet it still has the feel of a small community. If you’re new to blogging, this is a great place to get ideas and make friends.
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Make the blog rounds – Support your fellow bloggers by offering comments on their articles. No comment spamming (“visit my blog!â€) … that’s just rude. Blogs are popular because they are conversations … dialogue is what a blog is all about. And bloggers like feedback on their articles … do you like my blog? Do you agree? Do you know more about this than I do? Have you had a similar experience? Jump in, baby!
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Link to others – When you link to another blog, you will get noticed by the other blogger and hopefully, s/he’ll link back. On many blogs, your trackback will get listed in their comments section. I’ve never thought much of driving traffic by picking a fight with another blogger, but there are a lot of quality blogs out there … find some that you like and and say something nice about them. Comment on their articles. Flush out a topic that one of them introduced. Blogs are all about sharing ideas and traffic. (By the way, don’t assume that all of us on leftyblogs have the same audience. Some of us have a very specific niche that brings us readers who won’t normally visit other blogs.)
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Publish an RSS feed and participate in leftyblogs. One of my favorite things to do is make my way through the Michigan feed, post to post, site to site. This has been one of the most successful traffic drivers for my site. Publishing an RSS feed is a must if you want to promote your blog. Syndication allows your readers to get your content without coming to your site … MSN, Yahoo, and Google all allow users to personalize a page with custom RSS feeds. These services can deliver your posts alongside news headlines. You’re crazy not to allow your readers to do this.
Like I said earlier, there are plenty of other ideas. Include your URL in your email signature, forum posts, and mention your blog in conversations with other people. Be sure your site is pinging weblogs.com (or similar services). Offer a newsletter, and install tools like “E-Mail This Post”. Feel free to add your own ideas in the comments.
That’s it for this week, hope you enjoyed it! |
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Welcome Argus Readers
Thanks for the tips! I’m still getting started, so this is all very useful!
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Thanks for the tip on RSS feeds. I’m a nerd at this stuff so please excuse my ignorance, but if a person gets your comment by using your feed doesn’t that keep your traffic count down? Just wondering.
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@Nirmal, thanks! You might enjoy problogger.net and performancing.com, if you are looking for more tips. Problogger is a nicer community, in my humble opinion.
@Kathy, I had mixed feelings about RSS too until a few months ago when I started using bloglines to keep track of all of the blogs that I read. Now I am reading more posts on each blog than I ever did before. I think you have to look at RSS as a way of picking up more readers, as opposed to more site traffic. In some situations RSS will only push out your headline & a sentence or 2 … so the reader has to go to your site to get the rest. In other situations, like in bloglines, the reader can read the entire post without going to your site. But the reader might not have ever read your post if it hadn’t been delivered to her newsreader.
In the end, RSS should get you more readers, even if not all readers come to your site. So unless you are really making money off of advertising on your site, I think it’s worth letting some traffic take place off-site.
I am by no means a guru though … still learning.
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Thanks for the advice. I’ll have to consider adding a feed to my blog, especially since I’m not worried about making money off ads. I just care about Michigan and our country and the direction we’ve been headed the last decade or so. If I can convince one person to change their vote, then I’ll be happy.
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