Promoting Your Money Making Blog — Part 2

Yesterday in Part I of Promoting your money making blog, we talked about promotion and content.

Part II

Today we will delve into the basics of Search Engine Optimization.

Optimize Your Posts for Search Engines

There are plenty of SEO resources on the net but here are the most important SEO rules to follow in order to make your posts rank well for relevant keywords.

If possible, use your keywords in your blog URL.

Sometimes this isn’t possible or you are already established with a different URL without keywords, but if you are starting new, make sure you have those keywords in the URL.

Use your primary keywords in your post titles

If you are writing about money making, make sure you use money making in the title.

Make sure your RSS feed and blog are submitted to the directories and search engines

It’s amazing how many people never do this. Sure, the search engines and directories might find you. Eventually they will, but would you rather wait to be listed or be listed today? Submit your RSS and blog URL to all the big directories: Google, Yahoo, DMOZ

Here is a really nice list of places to submit your feed and blog.

Best Blog Directory And RSS Submission Sites
http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

Pinging!

There are a huge number of tracking and connecting services for blogs and bloggers.

One way to let them know you have updated is to ‘ping’ them. When they get a ‘ping’ they come and see what you have done. Bookmark the Ping-O-Matic ping results page so you can visit it and quickly ping a number of services with a single click

http://pingomatic.com

Link Building

In order to have any sort of ranking you have to have links pointing at your blog from other relevant blogs. Here are the methods I recommend as the best ways to get lots of links pointing to your blog

* Link to your blog from each page on your main website
* In your posts, trackback to other blogs
* Be a legitimate blog commenter on other relevant blogs
* Offer to make link exchanges with other bloggers and blogs in your niche or category

Write articles from your blog posts

This is one of the very best ways to promote your website. Write the articles and submit them to article directories.

http://bloghit.blogspot.com/2004/11/how-to-explode-blog-traffic.html

Make your blog controversial.

Creating a buzz about your blog in both local and online media can give your marketing a viral component

Be careful with this. If you do it well, it can work wonders, if you do it badly it can destroy everything you have been working for.

Create bumper stickers or other merchandise with your blog’s URL and tagline. Then give the products away. Unless you are already popular or you have a very cool logo and tagline, chances are you won’t be able to sell your branded merchandise. You’re better off doing graffiti on bathroom walls.

Write a kick-ass press release and tie it in with your blog’s topic

Let readers subscribe by email

Email is still the #1 choice of most people who want to receive news and information. If you aren’t giving your readers the option to subscribe by email, you are seriously missing the boat. It might seem odd to you that a blogger would send out email, but why not?

Feedburner and other free services allow you to manage your subscriptions. Not to mention, these services let your subscribers manage all their own subscriptions and feeds.

But, if you want more control over your list and don’t mind sending out the updates yourself, you can use any number of autoresponders or paid group email solutions. Many bloggers use yahoo or google groups to send out updates.

This should give you a good start and get you on the road to bringing in more traffic to your blog. If you have more tips or have found something that works well, please let all of us know by commenting below.

Thanks,

R.W. Jackson