How To Get Your Blogs and Articles Noticed

So, you’ve written an awesome blog entry or article. Now you want it to be read. You can’t wait for the comments to pour in telling you how brilliant you are as a writer and as an intellectual. You are anxious to find the links to your website from the article or blog. When you hit the submit button you feel like you are about to hit the jackpot. You envision affiliate marketing money or Google Adsense clicks or $$ pouring in to your online shopping cart.

A day or two later you look at the entry  to see how many have read it. No one has.
No one? You check your website stats to see how many new visitors have arrived by way of that entry. Nobody?

Are you doing something wrong?

You read it again and still believe firmly that every word gelled, meshed, gave you goose bumps and you know in your very core that this is a brilliant piece of writing that begs to be read. You know you’ve written awesome copy that should be bringing in readers and potential clients in droves. How will you get your brilliant words noticed? How can you get people to read them?

Self Promotion of Blogs and Articles

Here are a few tips to get that brilliantly written blog or article read without your having to resort to Spamming. There are so many blogs out there and so many article directories that brilliantly written pieces  can be lost in the masses if they aren’t marketed. Marketing and advertising your blog and articles  is the best way to get noticed.

You can launch that sucker out into cyberspace with flashing lights and confetti raining down on it so that people can’t help but notice it.

How?

First of all, is the title catchy?
A catchy title can reel them in. You don’t want to mislead people but you want to catch their attention so that they can’t resist clicking that link when they see it wherever it turns up. Don’t mislead them either. I once really wanted an e-mail read by my colleagues so I entitled it, “Liquor and Free Stuff.” It got read but I got scolded for resorting to such dirty pool tactics. Reel them in but don’t tick them off.

Use conversational tones and write interesting pieces otherwise people won’t read the whole thing and won’t bother clicking your link to see what else you have to say. Consider putting the most interesting aspects of the gist of the article or blog near the beginning so that you can hook your reader.

Is your blog or article categorized well?  Do you have the right categories in place as for filing it? Be sure that you do so it’ll get read. A good way to further categorize your blog is to tag it. The tagging of blogs creates a directory of sorts so that people can find your blog easier. The more it gets read, the closer to the top of the tag cloud it gets. Technorati.com is a great tagging place that offers lots of resources.

Ping Your blog. There are services that send notifications out to the blogosphere that helps people interested in your subject know that you’ve updated your blog. This can help you get more readers. Pingomatic is a great pinging service.

Add RSS services so that people who like your blog can subscribe to it. If you’ve got a niche topic such as decorating, parenting, freelance writing, etc. you can get yourself a fan base of people who will come back and read more. This is like an elevated status of bookmarking. Instead of your readers having to manually check your blog, the RSS feature notifies them when you’ve written a new entry. RSS also feeds your blog to many news feeds all over.

Social book marking. Social book marking lets people on that social book marking site/community know when you’ve updated your blog or see something that you think others might find interesting. Book marking your blog is like giving it a positive review and telling people on social networking sites to have a read. It can be very beneficial especially if you use a social book marking aggregator to help you. An aggregator submits to multiple book marking services at once. I like Onlywire.com. It submits to over a dozen and plugs into my Firefox browser. Onlywire and StumbleUpon are where I see the most success.

Read your blog. Yes, re-reading it can be like recirculation for it. Put it back into the blogosphere by editing a small chunk or reading it which will put it out there into services that show most recently read entries.

Comment on other people’s blogs of similar subjects and put a link for your blog or article  into the reply. Learning some basic html can help you do this. Be sure to save it for when it counts otherwise it’s considered Spamming. If you have five different blog subjects you want to get out there, look at the tags on Technorati and comment on those blogs with something like, “I enjoyed your blog about scrap booking and wrote an interesting scrap booking post on my blog recently too, if you’d like to take a look”. Post the link in your reply. You could have the blogger stop by and read your blog as well as other readers of their blog.

Put your links to blogs and articles into your signature for community forums and post in relevant forums. If you’ve written an article about making money online, put a link to your article in your signature and post it in a money making forum. Be sure that you participate in the community otherwise it’s considered spamming.

Before you know it you’ll get noticed, obtain traffic and you will be much more likely to get results!

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Many corporate websites for companies large and small today have a blog attached to their website. A blog is a fantastic tool for doing multiple things. It can drive traffic, get you more customers, increase customer satisfaction and improve your SEO rankings.

First, it helps you communicate with your customer. If you have a voice, you don’t appear to be a nameless and faceless corporate entity. Customers like dealing with people and a blog helps your customer feel like they are buying from a real person. It gives you a chance to share information and news with your customers. It’s a great vehicle to drive information to your client base without pushing information at them too aggressively. They choose to read your blog and choose to find out about your company. They can also choose to comment and they can help spread the word. Blogs get syndicated and people do social bookmarking with them as well. Your blog is ideal for viral marketing!

SEO and the Corporate Blog

A blog does great things for your SEO (search engine optimization). Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Altavista love blogs and will often index them faster than websites. Linking a blog to your website can increase the number of links out there and increase your website relevancy in your niche which can doubly impact your PR. How? It can impact your public relations and your page rank!

Your blog should be optimized for your keywords just as much as your website is in order to attract the right audience. Blog posts should give value to readers and encourage participation. You can also use your corporate blog to announce contests, special discounts and to get feedback from your customer base.

How do you manage your business blog the right way?

If you don’t know that you can keep the content fresh and write it in a way that will bring you the right traffic and get you the right SEO value, hire a professional blogger. A professional blogger can work closely with you to ensure that your blog provides maximum benefits to your business.

Dana Prince is a professional freelance writer and blogger. Visit  www.Danaprincewriting.com to inquire about  professional writing and blogging services.