Rui Zamith

A lot of my friends have suggested me to speak about the several ways to promote your blog – for free, of course. After creating, developing and optimizing your blog’s structure (check some of my older posts), on this post I’ll be giving out some suggestions on how to promote your product.

Most of web users still don’t understand the true concept behind Twitter (why telling other people what you’re doing at one exact moment, right?), but the fact is that Twitter is one of web’s top channels to promote your website, make no mistake. Even if you don’t like it, use it for your blog’s sake! I personally find it extremely valuable, to promote new tools, good news or articles (even if I’m not their author). You can both promote them yourself, or simply use a cool wordpress plugin that will do the job for you.

Another great practice is to offer your readers a simple and effective way for them to promote your posts. By installing, for example, the “Sociable” plugin, a few links to your favorite social bookmarking sites will be added to each of your posts, pages, or RSS feeds (all of this being totally customizable). You can choose from dozens of social network websites, and it couldn’t be easier for your blog readers!

It may sound silly and obvious but.. always write your own content! That way, you can promote your own writing, your own ideas, and really leave your mark. By coping other people’s content (even if referring their original source) you’re not creating your blog, but just repeating information that is already published somewhere else. Be unique, smart, attentive, and try to promote your blog by showing your readers that you write about “hot” topics. Use plugins and widgets on a balanced way (make sure that all of your content is easy to access, simple and clean).

Here are some good examples of tools that you may want to adopt to your blog (obviously depending on each concept and market niche). Use them together with the other recommendations that I’ve been doing on this section’s previous posts.

• WP Related Posts: this plugin prints some links to other posts within the same topic (based on your tags). Of course you can also manually run a ‘related posts’ section also by simply ending your article with other relevant things you’ve written that readers might like to check out;
• OpenID Comments for Wordpress: by using this plugin, your users will be allowed to use OpenID for authentication;
• WP-Polls: build some interactivity into your blog by creating several polls (same of them can be short-term polls, but others can last for several months). With this plugin, you can print the polls randomly, anytime that a page is refreshed.
• Popularity Contest: this plugin counts the number of views, comments and trackbacks for each of your posts, to basically create your “best of”. This is an extremely interesting tool, as blog readers usually feel attracted to the most popular or most visited links.

Feel free to tell us your experiences with wordpress, and perhaps suggest some other tools that you’ve been using with success. See you next time!