20 Effective Ways to Market Your Blog

1. Submit your blog to blog directories. This takes some time, but it is time well spent. You can use this useful list of blog directories. Use keywords as much as possible in your title and descriptions, without keyword spamming.

2. Ping your blog each and every time you make a new post. You would be amazed at the number of people that mistakenly think that you only have to ping your blog once - ever.

3. Social bookmark your individual blog posts, each and every time you make a post (not the entire blog, the individual blog post...visit your own blog, click on the linked title of the post that you want to bookmark, and use that URL when submitting to the social bookmarking sites). Use a service such as OnlyWire to hit the smaller social bookmarking sites, but go to the important ones and bookmark manually, like Digg, Delicious, and StumbleUpon. Choose a few quality, yet low member social bookmarking sites as well.

4. Sign up with Feedburner. That should have been done right after you set up your blog. If you didn't do this, you've been missing out on some traffic. Join now.

5. Visit and comment on other blogs. Hit the popular (high traffic) blogs in your niche, as well as the medium traffic blogs in your niche. Make it a point to visit five different blogs a day, and leave comments.

...to be continued below (scroll on down).

6. Trackback to other blogs. Use the trackback feature of your blog. When you find blog posts (on high traffic blogs and medium traffic blogs within your niche) that will appeal to your readers, write a short post summarizing that post, or highlighting it, include the link in your post, put the link in the trackback section of the posting form, and submit. Many bloggers publish those trackbacks, which means that your linky gets put on those high traffic blogs. Very important, and it doesn't take up much of your time (you were going to post anywhere, right?)

7. Interview other bloggers in your niche, and publish the interview on your blog. The other blogger will link to it, their readers will come read it, and if it is interesting, and the person is rather important or well known within that niche, it will bring additional traffic as well. It's free, and you needed something to add to your blog anyway.

8. Join a blog carnival. A blog carnival is essentially a grouping of like blog posts, from different bloggers. It's a great way to get noticed, free of charge. It doesn't take up much time at all either.

9. Join a blog network. Some networks pay, and others don't. Most of the better ones will require that you have blogging experience, and that your blog is a certain age. This brings attention to your blog...lots of attention.

10. Pay others to blog about your blog. It doesn't cost nearly as much as you think, and as far as paid advertising goes, it is rather cheap. Make sure that you have the option of selecting the blogger or bloggers yourself, so that you can choose high quality blogs.

...halfway there. See methods 11 - 15 below.

11. Give something away, and only make it available from your blog. Notify other bloggers about it, as well as ezine publishers and webmasters within your niche. Make the thing viral, by including a link to your blog inside. An ebook about a topic within your niche is always good. Write it using a document (Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.Org), and then compile it into a PDF for free here. Make an ecover for it, put it on your blog, and you are good to go.

12. Join BlogBurst. BlogBurst serves to bring great blog posts together with publishers and other media outlets, like Fox News and USA Today. Get published, get famous, and get blog traffic.

13. Write and submit one article per week, about your topic, and submit it to at least ten article directories. Do this every week, and in the author's resource box, put a link back to your blog.

14. Write and submit one article per week to Helium. Make sure that you set up your profile, and include a link to your blog. If you write well, on interesting topics, this will bring you blog traffic. Be careful, Helium can be as addictive as Squidoo...and you should have a Squidoo lens that points to your blog as well, and make sure that you update it at least once a week.

15. Make use of your blog's blogroll. Exchange blogroll links with other bloggers who blog about similar topics. If you can get an exchange with high traffic blogs, that's even better.

...we are almost done. Methods 16 - 20 are below.

16. Submit your blog feed to RSS directories. This is not the same as 'blog directories,' although some of the places found on that list can also be found on this one.

17. Join MyBlogLog. Your blog will become an actual community, and you can join other like communities as well to get even more traffic to your own blog.

18. Link to your blog from all of your social networking profiles, and mention it often when you communicate in your communities or groups at those social networking sites.

19. Participate in forums that are related to your niche, as well as blogging related forums. Use the signature file feature that is available now on most forums, and make sure that you've put the link to your blog in that signature file. Post as often as you can, without bordering on spam. Don't advertise, become a real part of the community.

20. Write and submit a press release. You may not think your blog is important enough to be newsworthy. You would be wrong :)