How to promote a blog - a list of my actions

The second article is a continuation of my post How to start blogging, in which I told which way in blogging I went, how effective it is and how long it takes. Despite the fact that I do not consider my experience to be super successful, at the request of readers, I want to tell you what I have done all the time in terms of promotion. Basically, we will talk about the first year of the blog, since then I practically stopped doing this. Moreover, I warn you right away, I did not make an assessment of what helped me and what did not, since there were many actions and it was rather difficult to evaluate it. To be honest, it seems to me that apart from writing the content, everything else was nonsense. But first things first.

The content of the article

All parts of my little blogger FAQ:

I have written a number of blogging related articles. They do not pretend to be a complete manual, but beginners may find it useful. You can read it if you are interested.

0. I recommend the course «How to become a thousand-year blogger and earn»
one. How to start blogging
2. How to promote a blog - a list of my actions
3. How to make money blogging and traveling
4. An example of making money on our blog - Finstrip 2013, finstrip 2012, Finstrip 2011
five. Reader and Search Traffic, and Why Readers Don't Return
6. Some truth about travel blogging
7. Tips for securing your WordPress blog

How to promote a blog

Foreword

I will repeat a little, but I want to emphasize once again that if we are talking about an SOM (a site for people), then it is not even easy to achieve high traffic, at least without resorting to paid methods. Here the main role is played by exactly how interesting and useful to people what you write. That is, in short, you either do something original / useful and stand out from the crowd, or you are engaged in promotion (both paid and free). However, although I wrote that it is quite difficult to compete with forums in terms of information, there is a sense in writing informational posts (personal experience) in any case, since it is on blogs that the most relevant information from the primary source is. True, this already has less to do with earnings..

I will return to the topic of the article. There is no secret in my actions. Everything that you see on my list can be read on any seo blog, since I myself did not set up any experiments, and just did what the seo experts advise. Although, perhaps, he did it more than other bloggers, since at first I spent about 10-14 hours a day on a blog, and even now it takes 80% of my time. I also went through something that is familiar to all beginners - at first my blog was not particularly indexed by Yandex, the first few months I had a minimum traffic of several dozen people. And only six months later, he became in the region of several hundred, and only after 1.5 years it exceeded a thousand. Results of different periods: half a year, year, one and half year.

The higher the traffic, the more income?

Everyone knows that the higher the traffic, the higher the income when it comes to advertising. I wrote about the types of blog earnings (advertising and other options) in the article How to make money while traveling, but now I want to dwell on a couple of interesting points:

Target visitor

- If you sell a product or service on a blog, then it is not the number of people who came, but their quality that matters. Agree, it is one thing a person clicks on an advertisement and you will receive 3 rubles for this, and quite another if the target visitor comes and orders your product or service for 5,000 rubles. Accordingly, sometimes it is worth going in the direction of increasing targeted traffic (and actually in the direction of making money on services), and not just increasing traffic.

The envelope

An important point is the convertibility of your traffic into clicks, and therefore income. I know examples when sites with the same traffic have very different incomes, and all this happens precisely because of the content on the page and the site as a whole. Imagine that a person is looking for an electric shaver and gets on your review of a model of an electric shaver. What are the chances that he will click on an ad for a razor shop? They are very large. Or another example, a person came to an article about a national park in Thailand and sees an advertisement for tours to Thailand. What are the odds of a click? Much lower.

How to promote a blog - my actions

All these methods relate to increasing traffic and TIC / PR. The order is arbitrary, not chronological.

  • Using keywords in articles
  • Cross-posting to free blogging platforms
  • Commenting on LiveJournal and Frending
  • Commenting on interesting blogs
  • Commenting on dofollow blogs
  • For a year our blog has been a dofollow blog
  • Add to directories and run
  • Add articles to social bookmarks and runs on them
  • Registration on sites with a large TIC
  • Held a competition with cash prizes and participated
  • I bought an announcement in a paid mailing list
  • Opened faces on the blog
  • I bought a couple of dozen guards
  • I exchanged a dozen guards
  • Added Rss feed to Rss aggregators
  • Added several articles (announcements) to popular and unpopular sites and LJ communities
  • Announcements on social networks and Twitter
  • SMO - social media optimization
  • Email replies
  • Writing articles 2 a week, and when living in Thailand 3 a week
  • Constant updating of the blog
  • Re-linking articles with each other
  • Adding to Yandex.Catalog

It seems that I have not forgotten anything. Let's go over all the points in a little more detail. What is not clear, ask later in the comments.

Using keywords in articles

For me, this is the most effective way in terms of search traffic. Moreover, the more time you spend looking for a good key, the more chances that it will shoot. But we must remember that this method is most effective for sites for which a semantic core can be compiled. A blog with a bunch of topics, it is not.

You can also use not just a pair of keys, but also the so-called long tail requests (long tail). This means a large number of different phrases containing the main key and additional words. Thus, traffic is collected specifically for small requests..

Cross-posting to free blogging platforms

At first it is a good thing to improve the indexing of articles, but it is not worth spending a lot of time on it (there are special plugins for this). And since no one usually deals with these free blogs, there will be almost no exhaust. It is much more useful, for example, to keep LJ in parallel, make it popular and post announcements there on your main blog. For example, my LiveJournal is really not popular and I don't do it much.

Commenting on LiveJournal and Frending

This is a continuation of the previous paragraph, which can be distinguished as a separate paragraph. It is very easy to make friends in LJ, because there are exactly those people who like to read. If you do this on purpose, you can gather a good audience, some of which will go to your blog. However, you will have to write whole posts there, not announcements, and run two projects in parallel, which is more labor-intensive.

Commenting on interesting blogs

At first, it allows you to bring the first readers to your blog, as well as to make new acquaintances in the blogosphere yourself. Truth takes a long time. Now, most often I just read and do not leave comments..

Commenting on dofollow blogs

This is a way to get free and open links to your blog. There are lists of such blogs on the Internet. Only, please do not spam! In addition, the moderation is tough on such blogs and comments about anything will not work..

For a year our blog has been a dofollow blog

The idea itself seemed very cool to me. A person comments on me, and I give him an open link for that. But we got so much spam and comments «Author, writing still!», that I had to close this shop. Even the limitation of 10 comments (dofollow after 10 left comments) did not save the situation - I received 10 meaningless comments left in a couple of minutes (you can watch the time in the admin panel) and after they were deleted, there were also angry letters to our address.

Add articles to social bookmarks and runs on them

IMHO, absolutely useless thing. I didn't notice the difference, and there was almost no traffic.

Add to directories and run

In order to have at least some kind of exhaust, you need a proven directory base, and it is also thematic, but it will be paid. I manually added to everything and ordered some kind of run for 10 bucks. Useless.

Registration on sites with a large TIC

I bought a paid base of sites from the TIC, registered my profiles there with links, but did not notice any changes. Either the base was so-so, or bullshit is all.

Held a competition with cash prizes and participated

This is a good thing. He drew attention to us, received a bunch of links (although it may have been possible to buy more guards), but there is one but. It must be carried out very competently, otherwise many may not like who they have chosen as winners. So it just happened with us. Not quite correctly composed description of the competition. And it also takes a lot of time to find participants and resources where you can announce the competition itself. Although, of course, if the competition is original, or the prizes are large, then yes, it will not be difficult to find participants. Spent personal 3000 rubles.

Ditto myself participated in the competition run by bloggers. The effect is much less, but the costs are also low.

I bought an announcement in a paid mailing list

Cost 3000 rubles.

I will not advertise this service especially, because the reviews about it are different. However, the attendance on the day of the mailing jumped one and a half times and I got about 250 new readers that day (the feedburner takes them into account in his statistics). UPDATE. The service is already gone :)

Opened faces on the blog

Many write impersonally, this is not true. There are too many such blogs with incomprehensible authors, and just such resources are made purely to earn money, which is repulsive. When we decided to open, began to post our photos, made a normal page Who we are, then the situation in terms of attendance and comments has improved.

I bought a couple of dozen guards

I tried myself in promotion and bought guards, bought a little, for several thousand. Some requests have advanced, some have not. It's a good thing, but it costs money, and you also need an analysis of keywords and promoted anchors, preferably constant. It would also be nice to have at least some semantic core..

I exchanged a dozen guards

At first, I changed a little, just so that the links would light up. But it is necessary to change competently, preferably crosswise and with sites of similar parameters. Now he has moved away from the practice of guards, both in terms of sale and in terms of exchange.

Added several articles (announcements) to popular and unpopular sites and LJ communities

If you constantly search for sites where you can post an article with a link for free, you can improve your performance, to a greater extent it concerns the promotion of anchors, and not a direct increase in traffic. But writing as well as finding such sites takes time. Nowadays most only place for money.

It is very good to post in popular LJ communities. But articles should be complete, not announcements. And also your blog in LJ should be at least something. The minimum option is the top post describing your concept and a link to your standalone blog. The action of the influx of people is one-time, but someone can then stay and read you.

Announcements on social networks and Twitter

A very useful thing, it is done automatically and easily. Many people find it easier to track new publications not through RSS, but through social networks.

SMO - social media optimization

Actually, these are blocks of buttons after each article, where you can like or share a link. It is done once, and the benefit will be during the entire life of the blog..

Email replies

At first I used this method to attract visitors and get a link to my blog. And also helping people. But you need to answer in full, and not just read the answer according to the link.

Writing articles 2 a week, and when living in Thailand 3 a week

The regularity of writing articles is important for normal indexing, as well as for readers to know that the blog is alive, and so that there are more articles on the blog. After all, the more content the better.

Constant updating of the blog

It makes sense to use your blog yourself and think about how to improve usability. If you don't like something, then most likely others will not like it either. I still do this and think about how to make everything more convenient and understandable.

Re-linking articles with each other

A very important point. This is a free promotion of your anchors, as well as an increase in the number of views, and therefore the time spent by the user on the blog. It is very convenient that while reading the article, you can immediately click on similar materials, or on specifying.

Plugins of similar articles do not replace linking - links must be in the text of the article itself. It makes sense even to go through old articles and add links.

Adding to Yandex.Catalog

This is the very last thing I did in terms of promotion. It was added for a fee, but I had bonuses in the Profit-partner that had accumulated over several years, and I paid only half, the rest with bonuses. In my opinion, this did not affect the attendance in any way, but the TIC has grown. Only there is no sense in it if you don't sell links ...

P.S. I apologize if I forgot something and for mistakes, we don't have much time here, besides, we are preparing for a trip to Thailand. Ask what is not clear in the comments. I want to dwell on one of the points (regarding content and writing articles) in more detail and put it in a separate article, I could not keep up with this, and there are so many letters already. So look forward to the final article soon..

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