Blog Marketing

[Hardley111]

Hi everyone, I have a quick question regarding blog marketing. A colleague  is embarking of her new years resolution to get in shape and is blogging about her experience, which has so far been successful. Can anyone suggest any good free blog directories where I can list her Blog? Or any other ways to market her blog? (she will be doing one post a week over the next 20 weeks)

[FedeEinhorn]

There are lots of blog directories, but those won't get you any significant traffic at all. In fact, I would recommend you focus on social media to become viral.

First, make sure you have created a FB page, Twitter profile and G+ page, verify everything needed and start posting on the 3 networks on a regular basis. Not only post your blog posts, but try to build a community. This could take a while (and you can push it with a few ads from facebook and twitter). Remember to use hashtags to get new followers that read about certain topics.

Then you can also use sites like viralcontentbuzz, which allows others to share your pages in exchange of sharing theirs. There's also a paid version that gives you more exposure and a few of free credits, although the idea is to share in exchange, not to "buy shares".

To add up, you can always offer yourself to guest post on other related blogs, even if the outbound links are nofollow (no juice to the site), you still get your article and your name out there.

There are millions of other ways to promote your blog that I;m sure you'll discover on the way

Hope that helps!

[KeriMorgret]

Federico, can you speak to the visitors you get from viralcontentbuzz? Do they have the same time on site as other visitors? How is their conversion rate? I've only had a small amount of experience with them, and I did see a difference in the analytics of the posts I've seen that used it.

[FedeEinhorn]

Keri,

There are some excellent profiles that can share your content, unlike other "services" that are paid to share, the people sharing the posts are actually reading and finding them interesting enough to share. Of course, there are some that click on each and every share button just to get the credits, but as viralcontentbuzz "pays" by how popular you are based on metrics (I think from Klout) those that share just for the credits can't do you no harm.

I've used them for several posts and some ended up with tweets from high level profiles that got retweets, favs, etc.

I am totally against their paid version as it could become a paid to share scheme, which ends up as a way of spamming the networks, but still, high end profiles won't share everything just for the points, they have a "reputation" to maintain.