Getting Readers for My Blog

So now we have our blog/site, we can put video and presentations into articles and monitor where our readers come from and what they look at.

All we need now is some readers   Just publishing our stuff isn’t going bring them.  We need to promote our blog so people interested in what we’ve written can find it.

Probably the first thing we need to do is set up Feedburner to collect new entries from our blog (via the RSS feed) and distribute them out to the web.  There’s all sorts of clever stuff about the service including the reporting it provides, but that’s too much for this post.

Unless we’re using Blogger we probably need to tell Mr Google the article exists.  The best way to do this is use Google’s Webmaster Tools.  Setting up an account and submitting a sitemap lets Google know it’s there and asks it to index the pages for the search engine.

I don’t know this for a fact, but using Google Analytics to monitor the site does ensure Google has a record of the type of traffic it gets and a way of measuring quality, so adding an Analytics should help.

Having done these, we’re probably well set up to be included in Google’s Blog Search and indexed for it’s organic search.

But there’s now a plethora of “sharing” sites which are building their own copies of the web.  Joining these sites and submitting our own content achieves two goals a) it’s now available for people who are searching that site and b) it tells Google there’s activity around our article.

These are some of the sites you might want to consider:

• Digg
• Diggo
• Delicious
• Stumbleupon
• Twitter
• Tumblr
• Posterous
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Plaxo
• Streamy
• Friendfeed
• Google Reader
• Blog Catalog
• Blog Engage
• MyBlogLog
• Ezine Articles
• iSnare
• Scribd
• Twitterfeed
• Yahoo Buzz

This sounds like an awful lot of work, but all of most of these sites use RSS to pick up new content so in most cases the time involved is just for setting up the account.

And not all of these sites are relevant to every business so you have to figure which ones have relevance to your target audience.

So now we have our multi media content and we’ve offered it out to the world.  The rest depends on what Matt Cutts describes as the combination of Relevance and Reputation.

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