Regardless of why you created a blog, it can become a success only if you know how to promote it or drive traffic to it. There are several ways to drive traffic depending on whether you want to spend time versus cash. Experience is the best teacher. As you experiment with various methods, you will learn what works best for you.
Link Your Site. Once you’ve posted a couple of posts, subscribe to several of the social media sites and put your site in your profile. Then add the individual posts as reviews. Some of the more popular sites are Technorati (requires temporary verification code to be posted on your site), Digg, StumbleUpon, delicious, Twitter, Facebook, and mySpace. Sites like Ping-O-Matic is a service to update different search engines that your blog has updated. If you are using WordPress, you can set this automatically in the settings. Another way to get your site URL on other sites is to comment on other popular blogs. Most of the time, you can put your website in the signature section of the comment. Finally, writing articles on article sites like Amazines will give you an opportunity to promote your site.
Google Webmaster Tools. Since Google is the gorilla of search, they have many tools to help you optimize your site for their search engine. They have webmaster tools located at www.google.com/webmasters/tools which will allow you to submit your site to them and once the site is verified, you can see the activity of their search crawler. You will need to put some code on your site to complete the verification process. It will also be beneficial to create an XML sitemap and submit the sitemap to Google through this same site.
Google Ad Words. If you have the budget to promote your website, Google, Yahoo and MSN have programs to post ads when surfers search for a keyword that is relevant to your blog. You can start researching this technique at www.adwords.google.com. This subject is far too extensive to cover in this blog and there are plenty of gurus that promise they can teach you how to make big money with Google Ads but buyer beware! I would suggest that if you decide to go this route, buy the book AdWords Miracle. I found it very helpful. [Update: I now recommend you get Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide to Google Adwords instead]
