Blogs might seem like an old hat at this time as by now really everyone has one him- and herself. But exactly this fact is what makes them such a valuable promotion tool even for long existing websites (that are no blog and don't have one yet): The wide and large userbase. There are thousands of bloggers around in every kind of niche that will visit every new blog they can find with great interest and thus making great new customers for your existing website. And the best thing is it doesn't even take much work to add your own blog to your website and promote it. This article will take you through the only three steps that are needed.
1. Create Your Blog
I won't get into the technical details of creating a blog here much. You can find more tutorials on how to set up a blog on the internet than anyone could ever need and in the end it doesn't matter if you use WordPress, TextPattern or any other blogging software. However make sure your choice provides a RSS Feed for your articles as this will be later for promoting your blog. It also matters what you add to the layout of your blog: Since you want to use it as a promotion tool for your website you will want to include one or several prominent links to your homepage on the blog and don't give your visitors many choices through links to other sites.
2. Write Something
This one might be the hardest part for many people, especially for those with no earlier blogging experience. However it isn't quite as hard as it sounds: You just have to write little articles, news and thoughts about the topic of your main website(and be sure to include a link to it in everything you write!) and the more often you do this the better your blog will perform.
3. Promote The Blog
That's easy again! The first and best thing you can do is to ping your blog. That actually means to tell all those big blog content aggregation sites out there that you have added a new article to your weblog. They will then spider it some time later and place a link to your fresh content on their site thus driving visitor to you.
The best thing about pinging is that you can ping all the important blog aggregators out there at once with the Pingomatic.
The next step is to add your new weblog to all the RSS directories out there. Those are basically the same as normal directories, just that they index the RSS Feed and not the site itself. You can find a big list of them here.
After those three steps everything should start to get rolling automatically. How far it will roll however is totally tied to your content: The more often you update your blog the more success it will probably have and therefore drive more visitors to your website.
Thomas Höfter is the webmaster and publisher of the metal music portal Metally.net and the smartphone software directory [http://www.smartphony.net/] Smartphony. You can find more of his articles and tips at his personal website lunaticstudios.com.
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