Promoting Your Blog Through Social Media and Networking

Promoting yourself, your business or your blog on social networking can be extremely profitable if done right.

Before you can find your customers on a social networking site, you have to be involved in that social networking site. Which means establishing a page on Facebook, My Space, You Tube, Twitter etc.  Adding a photo so people get a sense of who you are. Just basically introducing yourself, your interest and your business.

For example, every time you write a new post, post the link on facebook.  This way it will come up on your friends' "news feed" and there is a very good chance someone will click on your blog from there! 

Now having "friends or followers"

• Let the networking site go through your email list and see who else that you know or have had communication with also has a page on the site. You can then decide if you want to link up with that person.

• Put an announcement on your website with your social network site information and ask people to join you.

• Join groups that have been established on the site that are relevant to your business interests.

Why you "Need" Friends: 

• Your email list will generate a list of people you already know that you can link up with.

• The site announcement gives people the opportunity to be part of your list.

• People who have joined a group have announced their interest in speaking with other people about the subject of the group.

• Use a search query that searches the interests people have identified in their profiles.

Give your social media creativity a try. It will help you build knowledge of your market and who is out there, it will give you closer connections with potential customers, and hopefully higher sales or hits as a reward for all of your hard work!

Promoting Your Blog in Blog Directories

A great way to promote your blog is by listing it on a bunch of different blog directories.  While some directories charge a small fee, there are many that are free.  Here are just a few free ones that I have listed mine on:

http://blogtoplist.com/

This is a blog directory that is sorted by the score each blog has received during the week. 100 unique visitors will generate the same amount of score as 1 unique vote. To get a vote your blog needs to send the vistior to them through the voting button and then the visitor needs to click on the button to vote for the blog. The tracking button tracks the blogs visitors and give the blog score without requiring the visitor to interfare. You can use both methods to get a good rank in the directory. The score is updated every 15 minutes and resets back to zero each monday. 

http://www.blogged.com/

Blogged is a place where you can get reactions to major news events. No more tired old newspapers! With Blogged, you can actually interact with other people.  You can start a profile and a network of friends and it is an opportunity to share your blog with like-minded individuals. 

http://www.bloghub.com/

Bloghub.com is an online directory and community where members from around the world gather and exchange ideas. It is free to add your site to their blog directory, and to search for blog templates, blog skins, create blog or chat on their online Blogger forum.

http://www.blogcatalog.com/  and http://www.globeofblogs.com/ are also very similar. For a list of the top 50 go to: http://www.avangate.com/articles/blog-directories-95.htm

http://www.blogpulse.com/  is a great site because BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs. BlogPulse applies machine-learning and natural-language processing techniques to discover trends in the highly dynamic world of blogs.  This is IMPORTANT because as a blogger you want to write about popular topics.  Popular topics are topics that people WANT to read about and therefore will WANT to read your blog =)

Whenever it comes to listing on a directory, most of them will ask or require a recipricol link.  Most will provide you with an html code that you can insert into your blog and a small little advertisement will be present.  To add the html code to your blog, just choose where you want your html text widget to go, add the code and save!  The recipricol link is actually a way for them to rank how well your blog is doing and the more people you refer to them, the more they will promote your blog on their site and refer to you.  It's a win win situation.