Blogging

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...keep coming back to stay informed, and while they’re there they will be primed to take on board your subtle marketing message.

Once the blog is up and running, you are going to have to help people find it. Yes, Google will sooner or later kick in to give you a hand. But that takes months of good copy and links coming into your site. It’s much easier to be bullish and go out and grab those visitors for yourself. The easiest way is to use a social networking site like Twitter to warm up a...

...pool of potential visitors. Sign up, find a group of other people blogging and talking about the same kind of subjects as you and follow them. In time, you will build your own network of followers — and don’t be afraid to go on to their blogs, post your comments or ask for them to link to your site. You should always keep an eye out for opportunities to comment on articles and new, making sure again to link back to your site. Once you’ve begun to generate traffic you can rely on the snowball effect to help the blog’s popularity grow, but give the process a helping hand by using applications like StumbleUpon, Digg and Del.icio.us. All of these are ways for visitors to recommend your blog to other users of the application, and in time they’ll be your blog’s best friend — a digital word of mouth approach to publicising your work. Personally, I use the AddThis[/b] social bookmarking widget to manage and bring all these applications together.

All that remains is to attempt to gauge the relative success of your blog. Technorati will give you a snapshot of your blog’s “authority” — in other words... continued on page four >

 

 

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