Step 3: Promote yourself shamelessly
Yes, it’s finally time for step 3 of Becoming a serious blogger in three easy steps. This step is probably the hardest and I’m sure I’m not the best person to tell you how to Promote yourself shamelessly. Nevertheless, I will try. As far as I can tell, there are three different components that make up this step: search engine optimization, link building, and networking.
Search engine optimization
Affectionately known as SEO by those in “the biz”, this is the art of getting robots to notice you. OK, not robots like in Star Wars, but search engine crawlers. They basically come along, download most if not all of your blog, store it in their massive databases, and compare it to other sites they’re also storing. Nobody really knows exactly what will impress these robots, but a lot of people try to figure it out. They’re called SEO professionals and they seem to like wearing hats. There are white hats, black hats, gray hats, blue hats, and probably a few other colors I’m not aware of yet. It’s sort of like a Western. Anyway these hat people have written a lot of good stuff on this topic, so I’ll defer to them. Here are a few useful starting points: SEOmoz, SEO Book, and Performancing. Let me know if you need some more. There are plenty where those came from.
Link building
One thing the search engine crawlers seem to love is links. They spend a lot of time analyzing which sites link to you and what that means. This is the essence of Google’s PageRank in a nutshell. So establishing links to your blog from other sites can be a good pastime if you’d like to impress the robots. One technique that really doesn’t seem to work any more is commenting on blogs. This is because most blog software instructs search engine crawlers not to follow links in comments. The reason for this is to cut down on rampant blog comment spam. So more than likely you’ll have to figure out some other ways of building links to your blog. Some ideas include submitting it to directory sites, creating a plugin or theme with an embedded link back to your blog, and creating profiles on popular websites that link to you. Honestly I don’t know much more about this as you can see from my pedestrian PageRank of 3. Oh well.
Networking
The third component is broadly defined as networking and basically means making contact with other bloggers. This includes commenting on their blogs and sending them e-mails. While blog comments don’t seem to impress robots, they do catch the eye of human readers and those links to your site should generate some traffic (depending on which blogs you’re leaving comments on). You can also e-mail bloggers in your particular niche to let them know when you’ve written a post you think they might want to link to. Blogging is not an easy thing to do week after week so sometimes bloggers just want to link to stuff and call it good. You could even offer to write a guest post on their blog. I’ve inquired about this but haven’t heard anything back yet. The bottom line in all of this (in my humble opinion anyway) is that you want to build your subscriber list. The more people subscribe to your RSS (or Atom) feed, the more consistent your baseline traffic will be and the more your writing will be out there in front of people.
Final thoughts
As I said from the outset, I’m really not an expert with any of this and I’m following along right with you in dogfooding my own ideas. If you find that any of this actually works for you, please let me know. And in the meantime, hang in there and have fun.
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I totally agree with this. If you don't promote yourself, nobody is going to do it (they are all busy promoting themselves
)