Tonia Kendrick, over at Tonia’s Roots has started of a blogging series entitled ‘31 Weeks of Better Genealogy Blogging’. It’s Week 3 and the challenge this week is entitled ‘Promote a Blog Spot’
Tonia lists 11 ways to promote your blog, these are below:
Pitch to other bloggers: ask another blogger to consider linking to your post
Like Tonia I wouldn’t feel confident or comfortable doing this.
Social Messaging: use Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks to promote your post
This is what I tend to do after I’ve posted is to stick a link up on my facebook profile and on my twitter feed. I only do it the once, then I don’t really think any more about it. Each post gets plugged separately.
Social Bookmarking
I don’t have a Digg or Stumbled upon account. I’ve used their services before but haven’t really found them to be all that useful, at least when I tried them out I didn't.
Internal Links
The “ancestry of my blog” and “labels” sections do this from the front page. I have previously linked between my own posts when topics overlap or are relevant to each other. A more permanent linking system can be seen on my “STEERS” page. This static page links readers of “Slowly being driven mad…” to my other blog “STEERS ONS”
Newsletters
I don’t have time at the moment to pull together a newsletter. It is something that is popular amongst the One Name Studies members as it is a good way to keep people up to date with what work has been going on. These are normally produced monthly or quarterly.
Other Blog’s Comments Sections and Forums
Before starting on #31WBG I’d not left comments with links back to my posts, however as Tonia uses CommentLuv it has made it quick and easy to do this.
Email signatures
Again, this is something I do with my STEERS ONS blog, but not “Slowly…” as I am a member of the Guild of One Name Studies forum so it is targeted more to that group of people.
Follow-up posts
This is something I haven’t really done too much of.
Advertise Your post
I blog for fun, and hope that people find it interested to read occasionally. If I were to start to professionally advertise the blog it would take away from the tongue-in-check style in which I write.
Pitch Mainstream Media & Article Marketing
This isn’t something which I’d be confident enough to do yet.
So the couple of things I’m going to try are:
Signing up for CommentLuv. Thanks to Toina using this app it has topped the chart on my stats for referral sources. This is something that I think can definitely improve traffic to my site.
I’ve just signed up for Google+ and set up a genealogy ‘circle’, when you post you are given the option to also post to ‘extended circles’, hopefully this will be to like-minded genealogical peeps and I’ll find myself with some more subscribers.
And maybe I’ll link back to this post with the results, if there are any!
