#31WBGB: Promote a Blog Post

This week, Tonia over at Tonia's Roots has challenged us with promoting a blog post. Here's what she says. My comments are in italics.

11 Ways to Promote a Blog Post

1. Pitch to other bloggers: ask another blogger to consider linking to your post. Tonia and several other bloggers have mentioned they aren't terribly comfortable with this one and neither am I.
2. Social Messaging: use Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks to promote your post. Darren says “the key is not to incessantly spam your followers and your friends with your link.” I already have a feed from my blog to Facebook. Right now that's the only social network I use.
3. Social Bookmarking: promote selective links on sites like Digg or StumbleUpon. While this interests me, it's not something I see myself doing at this time. Maybe down the road though. There's only so many hours in a day folks.
4. Internal Links: what posts within your own site can you link to a given post? Have you written on a topic before? Are you writing a series? Link them up. Another way to do this is to use automatic apps, like a related-post plug-in if you are on WordPress, or a widget like LinkWithin, which I believe works on both WordPress and Blogger. You can also add a section in your sidebar with “Latest posts,” “Popular posts,” “Featured posts,” etc. WordPress makes this very easy to do; I’m not sure about Blogger. This is something I have done on a number of occassions and will continue to do. It takes a little bit of extra time but it's a feature I use as a reader of blogs so I figure other's probably like to use it too.
5. Newsletters: shoot an email out to your newsletter list, if you have one. (Does anyone do a newsletter? I’d like to hear more about how often you do that, what kind of content you include, etc.) Newsletter??? I've wanted to do one for years but I keep finding myself saying, "There's only so many hours in a day."
6. Other Blog’s Comments Sections and Forums: leaving good-quality comments can help drive traffic to your site and leaving a link can be appropriate if it is germane to the discussion. (Just a note here, I use a plug-in called CommentLuv that automatically inserts a link to each commenter’s last post, if they’ve signed up for the service. And since, I’m signed up, my links are left on other bloggers’ sites, if they use CommentLuv.) Personally, I love commenting on other blogs. So much so, that I have to restrict my time allotment for this activity. I had never heard of CommentLuv but I LOVE the idea!
7. Email signatures: Darren suggests including links to recent posts, instead of just your blog’s front page URL. This had never occurred to me but I think it's an excellent idea. I do use my blog URLs in my email signature and often get comments from people, so I know they click on it.
8. Follow-up posts: write a new post that picks up where another left off, like a series, or adds new information to a previous post, then inter-link them. I've done several series  such as
• Using Land Records To Solve Genealogical Problems. I made one post to act as a compendium and then kept adding links as each installment was written and posted.
9. Advertise your post: You might consider a small ad campaign for a post you are particularly proud of, using AdWords, StumbleUpon, or similar services. This probably isn’t something most geneabloggers would consider, but it might be worthwhile for those who are professional genealogists. Not something that particularly interests me.
10. Pitch Mainstream Media: You might want to do this for a really interesting post. Again, I think this would be more suitable for the pros. Hmmm, I'll have to think about this one.
11. Article Marketing: Rewrite some key articles and submit them to article marketing sites. Not something that would have occurred to me but I could see myself doing it.

Action Item - Just as soon as I come up for air and catch my breath, I'm going to look into CommentLuv.


© 2011, copyright Michelle Goodrum