How to Use Social Networking to Promote Your Blog

Need to generate traffic to your blog? Here are some ways to use social media tools to bring more readers to your website.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• a blog
• Facebook account
• twitter account
• other industry networking account- LinkedIn, etc.
• some time

1. Use Facebook. Facebook.com is the number one social networking site on the internet; people spend 3x more time there than on Google.com. If you have a blog and you do not have a Facebook account, you need to get one. Connecting with friends, family members, readers and other colleagues is a crucial step in promoting your blog. Set a goal of adding 5 new friends a day.

2. Get a twitter.com account if you do not already have one. Twitter is like Facebook if you subtracted everything but the status updates, and many bloggers and readers prefer the faster pace, and lack of applications, games, quizzes etc at twitter versus Facebook. The golden rule of twitter is: follow, and you will be followed back. Find other blogs or businesses similar to what you do, as well as blogs you love to read, and follow them. The more followers you have, the better you can promote your blog.

3. Many blogs find over 2/3 of their blog traffic comes directly from social networking sites like Facebook and twitter. By sending out a link or a tweet, you are inviting people to come read your blog, which is how you get traffic that will land you a higher Google Page Rank and technorati score. Send out multiple links and tweets for each blog post you write- many people simply jump to a site when the link/tweet rolls by their home page.

4. On Facebook, get the "Networked Blogs" application. Many of Facebook's 300 million readers 'browse' for blogs to read using this application, because they can search by topic. You will be able to choose three categories under which to list your blog. Find the three that suit your blog best.

5. Comment on other blogs! Visits to your blog come mostly from other places, with direct traffic from your url being one of the smallest percentages of your readership. Go to blogs you like, read them, and leave comments. Each of these comments links back to your blog, potentially bringing you traffic and increasing your blog's visibility for search engines.

Tips & Warnings

• "Re-tweet" blog links of your followers and those you follow- it will increase the chance they'll retweet your posts, bringing you traffic.
• Look at other social media sites like digg.com and stumbleupon.com to promote your individual blog posts.
• Consider joining industry-specific blog networking groups.

Resources

• Author's humor blog pajamasandcoffee.com

[deestew]

on 9/30/2009 Really great info. I am researching prior to launching my new blog. Thank you very much!