Where do you promote your blog?

August 22, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 7 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blog Directories, Blogging, Business Networking, Forums, Promote Yourself, RSS Syndication, Social Networking, Squidoo Lenses, Twitter 

You’ve taken the time to research a topic for your new blog and decided there should be enough interest to make it worth the effort.

Then, you created the blog, chose a theme, modified the theme, selected plugins and widgets, and now you are ready to write great articles on all the topics you researched before starting.

Right?

Hopefully, that was your approach.

I think most bloggers throw up a blog and then look for something to write about. I know I did that on some of my first blogs.

I was a lot more focused and took more time to research what I was going to do before I started this blog.

Either way, now you have a blog, you’ve been writing on it for some time, and you want people to find you and read what you have to say.

Ideally, they’ll also post great comments so you and your readers can learn even more about the topic of the article.

So, where do you promote your blog?

There are lots of ways to promote your blog, and I’m sure you know of many that I’ve never used. I hope you’ll share them with us.

Let’s start with some that work well for me.

Create a lens about your blog on Squidoo

My main place to promote my blog is on Squidoo. For instance, I created a lens especially for this blog at 21st Century Affiliate Marketing.

Syndicate your RSS feed on your other blogs

I syndicate the RSS newsfeed from this blog on several other Squidoo lenses and some of my other blogs, such as you’ll see in the sidebar of my Marketing With Squidoo blog.

Create a community for your blog on MyBlogLog.com

I also registered this blog on MyBlogLog.com and created a community for it at 21st Century Affiliate Marketing.

There are several benefits of creating a community for your blog there. First, it syndicates your RSS feed as headlines on the page. Second, it makes it easy to increase your business networking as people join your community. Third, they offer widgets so you can see who has visited you lately. This makes it easy to visit their sites and/or make contact with them on other social networking services.

You can see this in action towards the bottom of the left column of this blog. Look at the Recent Visitors widget. If you hover your mouse over the visitor’s face, you should see a fly-out that lists the blogs and sites for which they have created communities on MyBloglog.com. It also makes it easy to join their communities and increase your business networking.

About half-way down every page on this blog, in the right column, you’ll see a section called “New with John Dilbeck.” In that section is a widget provided by MyBlogLog that shows my latest activities on this blog and other sites and blogs I author. It also shows what I’ve been doing on several networking services such as Twitter, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and others.

It has taken a long time to set all of this up, but now, whenever I do something on one of my blogs, websites, or forums, that action is recorded in the RSS feed and is automatically syndicated on multiple other sites. I get visitors from a wide variety of sites as a result.

You can see another example of this at work on my profile page at the Squidoo Marketing community I created. In the right column of the page (and every other page of the site), you’ll see the Recent Visitors widget for the MyBlogLog community I created for that social networking site. In the center column, you’ll see the wider widget from MyBlogLog that shows my activities on my sites and the social networking services I use regularly.

Syndicate your blog’s RSS feed as widely as you can

Syndicating the RSS feed from your blog on multiple sites is a good way to get your writing noticed by both new readers and the search engines.

Should you tweet your blog on Twitter?

I use a plugin called Twitter Tools to post an announcement about new blog postings to my twitter profile.

At first I was unsure about this and created a Squidoo lens called Should You Tweet Your Blog? to learn what other people think about the idea of automatically tweeting new blog posts. I’d welcome your opinions and feedback either on that lens or by leaving a comment here.

Link to your blog on forums and in comments on other blogs

I’ve talked about my blog on various forums and in comments on others’ blogs.

Be sure to add value when you post to the forums or comment on someone’s blog. As long as you’re adding to the conversation and helping others, the link to your blog will be welcome, or, at least, tolerated.

If you just jump in and write a post or comment about your blog that doesn’t add any value to the discussion, it will probably be deleted. At the very least, you’ll look like a spammer, and I know you don’t want to do that.

One good place to list your blog is in the thread started by Michael Galante on the ConquerYourNiche forum, Share your active blog here. I’ve found several blogs there that I’ll be reading and I’ve subscribed to a couple of their RSS feeds.

Another good place to link to your blog, especially if it is related to Internet marketing, is in the Members, show off your blogs! thread on Lynn Terry’s Self-Starters Weekly Tips forum.

(By the way, I’m one of the moderators of the SMO: Social Marketing & Social Media section of Lynn’s forum, and I invite you to come and share your knowledge and experiences about social networking with us.)

I have links to this blog in my signature file on a number of other forums where I’m active. Each post I make to those forums will link back to this blog.

Make good comments on other blogs

One way you can promote your blog is to make good comments on this one.

WordPress, by default, uses “nofollow” links so the search engines won’t follow links to the site you list when making your comment.

I’ve installed the DoFollow plugin so you’ll get some linklove when you post a good comment here. I also installed CommentLuv, which will try to find the last post you wrote on your blog and will link to it below your comment.

Additionally, SezWho is active on this blog and it will keep track of the comments you make on blogs with SezWho installed. It’s a pretty cool tool and I think we’ll be seeing more blogs using this nice tool as time goes by.

I hope you’ll make use of the rating feature SezWho provides to express your opinion of what I write and the comments others leave. By rating what we say, it will go into the multi-site comment aggregator that SezWho maintains and we can raise (or lower) our reputation based on the quality of our writing.

Now, I welcome substantive comments that are on-topic and I look forward to talking about affiliate marketing with you in any discussions that develop here.

However, I’ll delete your comment if it doesn’t contain anything worthwhile or is off-topic. So, don’t bother leaving a comment that says something like, “you have a good point,” or “that’s great.” I’ll delete ‘em in a heartbeat.

Don’t spam something I write with an off-topic comment full of advertising. Poof! Gone.

But, if you write something about the topic that adds to our understanding of your viewpoint or which offers links to on-topic resources, then I welcome what you have to say.

Do you comment on blogs?

My friend Mitch posted an interesting article called Why Don’t More People Comment On Blogs? on his blog a few days ago.

Do you have any thoughts on that subject?

In Summary

I mainly use Squidoo lenses, Twitter, a community on MyBlogLog, sig files on other forums, and comments on blogs to promote this blog.

How do you promote your blog?

Act on your dream!

JD

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BlogCatalog accepted 21st Century Affiliate Marketing

August 1, 2008 by John Dilbeck · Comments Off
Filed under: Blog Directories, Blogging, Customer Service, Musings 

This morning, I reapplied to BlogCatalog to include this blog in its directory. This time whoever reviewed the application approved it.

Here’s the message I received:


Your blog (21st Century Affiliate Marketing) has been reviewed and your updates have been approved.

If you would like to make any changes to your blog listing, you can do so at anytime by logging into your Blog Catalog Account at ( URL removed ).

If you have any
questions/comments/suggestions/ideas
please feel free to contact us.

Thanks,
BlogCatalog

I’m not going to lie to you. I liked this letter much better than the previous one and I am happy that this blog is now listed in their directory.

Still, I have no idea why I had to go through this process. No specific reasons for either decision were given.

It leaves me wondering what and why, but it’s time to move along.

When you get the results you want, it’s time to be grateful, thank them, shut up, and move along.

Thank you, BlogCatalog, for accepting my blog and listing it in your directory.

Here’s the BlogCatalog page for 21st Century Affiliate Marketing.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Why did BlogCatalog decline my blog?

August 1, 2008 by John Dilbeck · Comments Off
Filed under: Blog Directories, Blogging, Customer Service, Musings 

Yesterday morning, I spent some time sprucing up this blog and added it to my blogs on BlogCatalog.

While there, I joined SezWho, added BlogCatalog widgets and links, and – as far as I can see – did everything required to be accepted into their catalog.

I wonder why they declined to add 21st Century Affiliate Marketing to their blog directory.

I received the following email:


Dear John Dilbeck,

Thank you for submitting your blog 21st Century Affiliate Marketing
(http://21stCenturyAffiliateMarketing.com)
to BlogCatalog.

Unfortunately upon reviewing your blog we are unable to grant it access to the directory.

The most common reasons for not getting into Blog Catalog are:

  • We could not verify ownership of your blog.
  • A link back, widget or meta-tag is required to verify site ownership. visit:

    http://www.blogcatalog.com/buttons.php

    for more information.

  • The URL you submitted is not a blog.
  • The URL you submitted is solely for commercial purposes, or is suspected to be spam.
  • Your blog is brand new and/or doesn’t have enough content to make it truly valuable.
  • If this is the case, please resubmit after you have made more postings.
  • Your blog contains pornographic material.
  • At the time of review your blog was unavailable or there was a typo in your submission URL.
  • Please make sure the URL submitted is correct and accessible

If you believe this to be a mistake, you can login to Blog Catalog and change anything which may have caused it to get declined. After updating your blog, it will be put back into the submission queue.

If you have any
questions/comments/suggestions/ideas
please feel free to contact us.

Thanks,
BlogCatalog

I’m sure they could verify ownership of the blog. My name and photos are all over it.

I have links and widgets installed that link to BlogCatalog.

The URL I submitted is definitely a blog.

The URL I submitted is used for commercial purposes, but not solely. It definitely is not spam.

The blog is relatively new, but I think it already has content to make it valuable.

I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t contain pornographic material. I may not be able to define pornography, but I can recognize it when I see it.

Perhaps the blog was unavailable. I don’t know. It’s available now.

The submission URL is correct. I’ve tested it.

So, I have no idea why BlogCatalog declined to add 21st Century Affiliate Marketing to its directory.

Maybe someone will take a moment and explain the decision.

This brings up a wider consideration, and that’s poor customer service.

I would think that a specific reason easily could be given for declining a blog submission. That way, we wouldn’t be left guessing and wasting time addressing something that could have been specifically addressed.

I had no problem getting it accepted into BlogCatalog’s competitors’ directories, including MyBlogLog.com.

Now, it’s not going to distress me if they don’t accept this blog in their directory. I still like BlogCatalog and I’ll continue using some of their widgets on my site – although I may drop the one that shows a big fat zero ranking in the bottom left corner of every page.

I’m going to resubmit the blog to BlogCatalog this morning and then I’ll move on, whether it is accepted or not.

I’m really disappointed in how they handled this and the lack of any specificity in their reply to my submission. I know they could have done better. I think this reflects poorly on them, but I’m just one blogger out of many thousands of members of their service.

Perhaps I just don’t deserve better treatment?

Act on your dream!

JD

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