Beginners Guide to Blogging: Web Promotion – Episode 4

Am back again today with the fourth episode of the “Beginners guide to blogging” series. This episode is titled “Beginners Guide to Blogging: Web Promotion – Episode 4” intended to teach you all the basic web promotion to drive good amount of web traffic your blog.

Web Traffic is the life blood of any successful blog and the only way you can make money from your blog is to drive HUGE web traffic to it. So if you are really interested in building a blog and someday earn real $$$$ from it, then you have to take this episode and all the previous episodes seriously. If you haven’t read the other three episodes I STRONGLY recommend you read them. Here are the links to the earlier published episodes;

Beginners guide to blogging: How to build a blog – Episode 1

Beginners guide to Blogging: Content Creation – Episode 2

Beginners guide to blogging: Search Engine Optimization – Episode 3

Recap: The first three episodes cover how you can build a WordPress blog from scratch, how you can create great contents and lastly how you can optimize your content for more visibility.

Beginners Guide to Blogging: Web Promotion

So today I am going to discuss web promotion and you bet I am going to share my web traffic secrets here with you. With proper web promotion you can drive massive traffic to your blog and make money from your site.

Always remember this formula; Traffic = Money

I will show you exactly how in awhile, I know you may have heard that traffic is one of the hardest part of blogging, well I won’t deny it but I will definitely show you how you can properly promote your content for wider outreach.

What is Web Promotion? Web promotion is simply all the things you do to promote your website and drive traffic to it. Getting people to come to your site to read your content is really a continuous task that involves many techniques such as search engine submission, search engine optimization, social media optimization etc.

Web Traffic: Web traffic is a measure of the number of visits and page views a site receives over a period of time. You can actually monitor the number of visits to your site, number of page views, visit duration, visit paths, entry & exit links, and returning visits etc using web analytics tools.

 Types of Web Traffic: There are basically three different types of web traffic namely Organic, Referral and Direct Traffic. Though lately there have been strong proposals to include one more type of web traffic called Social media traffic as it is becoming a thing of its own and the concept is really growing bigger every day.

In an article I published on this blog earlier titled “Types of Web Traffic and where you can get them”, I discussed the three types of traffic and where to get them, and I recommend you check it out.

Best Web Promotion Methods:

Search Engine Submission: I am going to discuss so many web promotion methods but I want to STRONGLY advise you to take organic traffic most seriously. So you have to optimize your content very well, submit your site to search engines, build quality backlinks to your site and rank high in search engines. All these were discussed yesterday in “Beginners guide to blogging: Search Engine Optimization – Episode 3”.

Social Media: In this era of Social media networks, the way we share information is totally changed, people simply share what they find interesting with their friends and family. So you have to be active on the various Social networks you can find, build a good follower-base and promote yourself, your content and your blog on your Social media profiles and pages.

Create Fan Page and integrate Social media share buttons on your site so that people can easily share your content with their Social media friends. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest are good Social media sites you can use in promoting your blog.

Social Bookmarking Sites: I drive a good amount of web traffic to this blog from some great social bookmarking sites I belonged. Maybe you came to this blog from one of them. I can simply refer you to “250 SOCIAL BOOKMARKING SITES THAT CAN DRIVE TRAFFIC TO YOUR BLOG” where you can find all the social bookmarking sites to promote your content on or share the few I am very active on that works for me. StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious, BizSugar, Blokube, DoSplash, Storify, Klinkk etc works best for me.

Content Curation: Content Curation is simply the process of discovering, gathering and cataloging interesting contents around a topic and share for a common benefit. So while you share the best contents you can find on the internet alongside your own content you will earn your audiences’ trust, respect and loyalty. Most importantly you promote your content side by side with the best and drive traffic to your site while doing this. This is an interesting web promotion strategy I have been using and now I am sharing the “Top 10 Tools for Content Curation” with you.

Forum/Blog Commenting: This is where most bloggers fail, spend less time on your blog, spend more time promoting your blog, engage in active forum activities and blog commenting. Take it as a task to leave quality comments on 20 – 50 different blogs every day. Not only will you be building backlinks to your blog you will also be driving huge traffic back to your blog. Remember the quality of your contribution out there is what will impress people and attract them to check you out.

Guest Posting: Give your best contents away to other bigger blogs, I know it will seem like you are making them even better, yes but you will also be making yours better. Publish quality contents on other blogs and gain both backlinks and traffic in the process. In fact this is one of the best web promotion methods I will advise you to always do. As you can see I also accept guest posts on this blog, so if you meet the criteria on my “Guest Posting” page, I will publish your content here on Netmediablog.

Engage on Wiki/Answer Sites: A lot of people with problems looking for solutions are asking questions on Wiki & Answer sites like Yahoo Answers, Quora, Replyz and Askmefast etc. Engage actively on such sites and provide meaningful answers to their questions. Most times you are allowed to add links in the answers; if you have published contents that answered such questions you can include the link.

Free eBooks: Turn your blog posts into PDF files using the “Print Friendly” browser plugin/extension and submit as free eBook to document/eBook directories. Remember to embed your site links within the eBook so your readers can follow it back to your site for more. I personally use Slideshare & Scribd.

Here is a list of other eBook directories you can submit your free eBooks to;

Issuu, DocStoc , eSnips , SlideBoom , SlideSix , WePapers , MyPlick , Easy Share , PDFCast.

Article Directories: Publish articles on article directories and gain both backlinks and traffic. People usually search for articles in different categories ad after reading the articles follow a link at the bottom of the article back to your blog.

Here are some well established article directories that have been proven to get website traffic;

www.GoArticles.com
www.eHow.com
www.EasyArticles.com
www.ArticleDashBoard.com
www.Article99.com
www.ValuableContent.com
www.EzineArticles.com

 Classified: You can place free classified ads on classified ads sites and drive traffic to your site. This is one web promotion method that can greatly improve your site’s traffic.

www.Kijiji.com
www.craigslist.org
classifieds.myspace.com
classifieds.yahoo.com

There are so many other methods of web promotion that can bring people to visit your blog; I doubt I can be able to cover them all in one article. You can go ahead and read my previously published traffic tips.

This is the end of the fourth episode of this series, I will continue with the rest tomorrow. I hope you find it interesting to share your views and contribute to it. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask me via the comments or better yet via the contact page.

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