There are many ways you can use to promote your blog, These are the 10 methods that I use to increase traffic to my blog.

1) Technorati & Del.icio.us - Social bookmarking is getting popular now and more and more people tag their posts and publish in the sites like Technorati, delicious, diggs, flur, yahoo and many more. There is a plugin allow you to submit your post to these 2 social bookmarking sites. You can use the simpletag plus plugin for Wordpress to perform this task.

2) Directory - Submit to as many directory sites as possible in order to get more exposure and linking. You can use manual submission and automatic submission. For new blogs, I suggest you do manual submission until Google, Yahoo and MSN index your site. One of the directory I submit is Easy Wordpress Blog Directory. You can do the search in Google on other directory available for submission.

3) RSS feed - There are 2 ways to promote your RSS feed.
i) Display your rss feed icon prominently in your blog so that people can grab your feed and read from the feed readers. I use Feedburner to burn my feed and allow people to grab my feed easily. Encourage them use your feeds. Nowadays, more and more free readers offer you to sync the blog contents and read from your PC/Notebook without visit the sites.
ii) Submit your rss feed to RSS feed directory. There are plenty of rss feed directories are out there accepting feed. Do a search in Google to find out what are the RSS feed directory you can submit. You can also install RSS auto submit plugin for Wordpress which did automatic feed submission.

4) Comments on other bloggers - Bloggers are not alone, you need to socialise with other bloggers as well, just like you need to meet friends after work. Do visit their blogs and comments on their postings, put some encourage words, feedbacks, suggestions. It will not just helping the bloggers, it also provide a backlink to your site as well.

5) Ping - Wordpress blog build in with the ping service. All you need to do is, update your ping list as much as possible in order to get more ping service receive your update. You can read more blog post on how to ping automatically.

6) Freebie - Offer something (usually ebooks, audio, video even pyhsical books) very good and yet people can’t believe that it is FREE. One of the good example is our friend, Andrew offered Robert Allen book in his blog in last 2 months by asking them to fill in the name and email. At the same time, you can also ask them to opt-in to collect their name and database. Check out on my blog on how to offer freebie and get their name opt-in.

7) Use autoresponder. Aweber has build-in feature which help you boardcast your blog post in autoresponder email with your prefer settings. You can send out broadcast email to update your readers on every new blog post or two.

Contents - The most important part, you need to provide good and unique contents. Without good contents, readers will not come back to read your post more often.

9) Promote offline - A lot of people overlook on the offline promotion. This is as vital as online promotion. One thing I learn from my previous job is, you can’t depends solely on one advertising method. Always try mix and match, get the best way to promote yourself. Print out your blog name and website address on your name card, talk about that to your friends. Sell yourself and website together, don’t tell everything you know to your friends, ask them to check out your blog.

10) Viral effects - Make your blog more viral, allow readers to print out your post, send email to their friends. Offer them downloadable ebooks & audio mp3 so that they enjoy to download and read / listen offline. Bear in mind, not all readers have fast internet connection.

[tag]increase blog traffic, promote blog, blog marketing[/tag]
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