Now, once you have your brand new site all set up, it’s time to start creating content and promoting your site.
Here are the top 10 techniques you can use to write content that will attract readers to your site.
1. Publish at least five long and super-useful posts to teach your audience something about your subject. You can call them authority posts, pillar articles, or whatever else you want. The point is that these posts have long-term appeal, stay current (it isn’t news or time-dependent), and offer actual value. How long do they need to be? At least 600 words or more. Super-useful meaning with lots of practical tips, advice, lists, and step-by-step tutorials.
Pro Tip: You can find many articles 1,000 words long and plagiarism free on Dropl.io’s Expired Article Search Engine.
Of course, don’t stop at five—the more articles you publish on your site, the better. Please make sure they are easy to find on your site, getting more exposure than other posts. Just remember to keep providing valuable information to your readers. Don’t sacrifice quality for quantity.
2. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have some content on your site, you can promote it by visiting other blogs and leaving comments. It would help to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog. Find popular blogs that are a good fit for your target audience, read some posts, and write relevant comments.
Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you write a comment. This way, people reading your comment can click on the link and get to your site. If you have something interesting to say, people will want to read more of your work and click through to visit your site.
Tips for commenting:
- Don’t bother writing comments like “Handy post, thanks,” as most webmasters consider such statements spammy and don’t approve them. Try to add something to the conversation, and you’ll not just get approved, but also people will click through your link to visit your blog.
- Always fill in the URL box so that the owner can find your site.
- Go to gravatar.com and get yourself a gravatar. A gravatar is an image that follows you from site to site, appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog. This image is linked to your email address, so whenever you enter your email address when leaving a statement, the gravatar will be shown next to your name.
3. Encourage comments on your site and respond to them. To encourage comments, you can pose a question in a blog post to start a conversation going. Be sure to always respond to comments as well. When you answer people’s questions, you become an authority.
A highly effective way to encourage comments is to install the following plugins on your site:
- Do-Follow
- Comment Luv
- Keyword Luv (this plugin needs to be manually uploaded)
- Top Commenters
Once these plugins are uploaded and configured, post to your new site that your ―blog is a Do-Follow blog, and also be sure to include them as keywords in your title and description such as Keyword Luv, Comment Luv, DoFollow, and Top Commenters.
Tip:
- Expect low-quality comments, so you may want to warn people that comments like ―” Nice site” will be deleted. Also, tell your visitors to add relevant comments and their comments (and links will be gladly accepted).
4. Link to other websites and blogs in your writing. By linking to other authority websites in your niche with helpful content, you can add lots of value to your readers. When linking to other blogs, the added benefit is that you can trackback to their entry. This does leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry – it’s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.
This is a good technique because, like leaving comments, a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something significant – it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post, eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you, and if you are lucky some time down the road, they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.
5. Submit your site to blog directories and blog carnivals. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Many other blogs often link back to a carnival host, and as such, the people who have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.
6. Repurpose your content and post it on other sites. Write short articles and include a link to your site in the bio/resource box at the end of the article, and post them on free article sites, such as:
http://EzineArticles.com
http://www.ArticleCube.com
http://www.IdeaMarketers.com
http://www.ArticleAlley.com
http://www.SearchWarp.com
http://www.ArticleBiz.com
http://www.ArticlesFactory.com
http://www.Amazines.com
http://www.Buzzle.com
7. Offer to be a guest writer. Guest writing is a powerful technique. Find popular blogs or websites in your niche. First, to establish a relationship with the website owner, you may want to read their posts for a while and leave thoughtful comments. If you can write an article for someone’s site, you will undoubtedly be able to link to related resources on your site. Write a great article and submit it to a high-traffic site.
8. Offer to do link exchanges. Ask to exchange links with popular sites. One way to do it is to find a post that is interesting and relevant to your readers and link to it in one of your articles. Ask them to do the same. You can also exchange blogroll links.
9. Write and submit press releases. Sites like PRWeb will publish them and link them to you.
10. Use forums and discussion boards. Try to find something that people are perplexed about. Provide an answer to their question or problem. If you answer their question, they will automatically wonder who you are and follow the link in your signature.
11. Make sure your blog is set to public so that your content is visible to the search engines and publish a newsfeed.
In your Administrator’s panel, go to Settings, Privacy, and make sure that the first option is selected “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers.”
Every WordPress blog automatically creates an RSS feed. FeedBurner is a free service that will host your feed, provide basic stats and give your readers some additional options with your meal. FeedBurner is a well-recognized service that will make it easier for your readers to subscribe to their RSS reader of choice.
These are just a few essential tips. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience.
If you want more tips, read 102 Ways To Make Your Site A Backlink Superstar.
Tagged as: backlinks, Getting Traffic, how to promote your website
Questions? Comments? Suggestions?
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