Many bloggers focus on content alone and just expect visitors to come to their blogs automatically. That is too passive, no one will know about your blog if you do not get out there and tell people about it. You must promote your blog.I have already written about how I promote my blog via Twitter, how I get blog traffic from StumbleUpon and how I write comments on other blogs to get traffic. It is important for a blogger to experiment with the different platforms to find where the target audience is and what works best.
On the search for new promotional platforms
I still experiment with different platforms. Just recently I joined Bloggersbase, which is a new network for bloggers. Bloggers are my blog’s target audience, so it is perfect group for my blog. I haven’t received many clicks from Bloggersbase yet, but it seems to be a great place for emerging bloggers to be discovered and to get an audience. Even though I am new to the network I was able to get some 300 page views on average per article I have published there.
Bloggersbase makes it easy to publish articles automatically from your RSS feed, so you can easily publish posts you’ve already used on your personal blog. Also an email is sent out to all your friends when you publish a new article as default.
Experience from BloggersBase
I saw that David Leonhardt of http://www.seo-writer.com/ was a prominent user of Bloggersbase and as he is a reader of HowToMakeMyBlog.com he told me the following about his experience with BloggersBase:
I’ve seen only a few hits from BloggersBase on my SEO blog, although I am not tracking traffic headed elsewhere (I have posted articles on other topics, too).I just noticed they are now NoFollowing the external links…this was not the case at start-up. But there is some interesting networking going on. My avatar post hit 28 Diggs last week. Yesterday, the BloggersBase version was submitted by someone and has hit 53 Diggs. Too bad we can’t combine them.If you blog regularly and network well, and your blogs are top-notch, you can make an extra $40 a week from BloggersBase. But it’s a competition, so there is certainly no guarantee. However, if you just adapt a post from your own blog, there is little extra writing to do, and it is another place to get your content out. If you go more networking there than I do, it could help build relationships and drive pretty high-quality traffic (interested, committed readers) to a blog.
Get out there and find what works best for your blog
Do not be passive! If you want your blog to grow, if you want to increase your readership and your authority, get out there, find your target audience and help them out solving their problems.
Be it Twitter, StumbleUpon, BloggersBase or any other social networking site. Your audience will be somewhere and will like an expert to help them out with their questions and problems.
Find and help people one by one and soon your blog readership will grow. At one point you might not even need to promote your blog, as the readership will be so large that it will help spread the word about your blog for you.