4 Old School Ways to Promote a Brand New Blog

Starting a brand new blog can be a daunting task.

It is filled with things like:

• Discovering your passion
• Researching a niche
• Designing the site
• Writing content
• Finding your voice
• Implementing Search Engine Optimization
• Promotion

That’s a lot to think about and do.

Here’s a tip right off the bat. All of the topics I just listed have been written about here at For Blogger By Bloggers. Most of them can be found in the Blogging Tips Category and you can search the site for the rest. Use the experience of the bloggers here to help you get started.

Today I want to help you with your promotion of your brand new blog. In order to ensure that this is not another overwhelming task in the midst of everything else you are doing on your blog, I will keep it simple with these four tips:

4 Old School Ways to Promote a Brand New Blog

So you have researched your niche, set up your blog site and you are beginning to write your content. It’s now time to do the work of getting that content seen. That’s blog promotion. It’s about getting eyeballs on what you write. It’s driving traffic in the form of readers.

Let’s think of your blog as a hub. It is the center of a wagon wheel. All the spokes go out from this hub. The majority of what I will suggest today will be things you will do out on the spokes, away from your hub.

With that image in mind, here we go:

1. Set up a Social Media Presence

Because of the huge number of social media platforms out there, this could get very confusing really quick. Do not think that you have to be on every place in order to do promotion of your blog. I see to many new bloggers go out an set up an account on a dozens social media sites and think they can manage them all.

Your Social Media presence is about quality, not quantity.

I recommend you set up and begin to use an account at two places, Facebook and Twitter. In the beginning of your promotional activities, these two sites will be sufficient.

Facebook and Twitter are two long standing platforms that have great success. Many bloggers use them to build relationships with their readers away from their blog. Developing these relationships lends naturally to driving traffic to you blog and your content. They might be considered “old school” platforms, but in their case, old school works!

Once again, do not try to be everywhere. Shoot for Facebook and Twitter. Build a presence with them. Later on you may consider other options.

2. Participate in Blog Commenting

As a new blogger you have probably already been reading and commenting on other blogs. It’s how many of us got the spark of the idea that we want to start blogging.

If you haven’t been active in blog commenting yet, use Google Blog Search to find good blogs and fresh blog posts where you can leave quality comments. This builds a relationship with that blogger and his or her community. It has always been my experience that the comments will be reciprocated back to your site.

This is another “old school”, but tried and true way to promote you and your blog.

3. Use a Content Feeder

While I have instructed that you should not be on every social media platform, you can take advantage of technology that helps spread your message to multiple site without the need of you actually being there. That technology is what I call a content feeder.

My favorite is ping.fm which allows you to update various social networks quickly and efficiently. Yes, you will have to have an account at those various networks, but you can pick and choose which ones you like and simply send your updates for others to consider.

I get traffic each month to my personal blog from social networks that Ping.Fm has posted to. Networks that I rarely access while  spending my time on Twitter and Facebook.

4. Use Video on Your Blog

Video is one of the hottest mediums right now in the blogosphere. Google loves YouTube (they should since they own it) and massive amounts of traffic is being pushed out from this video sharing site.

Include video that you have uploaded to YouTube on your site. Make it a part of your blog post on a regular basis (always include text in your post with the video so Goggle spiders can crawl that information.

This is a growing trend within the blogging community. It is a trend you will want to ride.

I love seeing new bloggers promoting their content. They have an excitement about them that I remember. It’s fun to watch!

Use these tips and, as always, thank you for being a part of the For Bloggers By Bloggers community.

Your Turn:

What other ways to promote do you recommend to new bloggers? What has worked for you? Let’s get talking!