Nine Ways to Promote Your Blog Posts

You’re writing and podcasting and videoblogging your face off and it’s starting to feel like no one’s paying attention. You want to get the right comments, and meaningful conversations started, or you want your peers to come and start a lively discourse. How do you get your best posts out there in such a way that people will come by and add to the body of work? (Note first that I’ve said “best posts” and not “every post.” If you abuse any of this, it goes poorly for you pretty quickly.) I have nine ideas to share your best posts in ways that aren’t heavy-handed, and aren’t likely to get you tuned out by the people of your various communities.

Nine Ways to Promote Your Blog Posts

1. Bookmark your best posts on Delicious. Once it’s in there, there’s a chance someone might happen upon it.
2. Stumble your best posts on StumbleUpon. Some folks disagree with stumbling your own work. The way I feel okay with it is that I stumble approximately 9 other people’s great blog posts to every one of my own.
3. Post an intriguing title and link to the post in LinkedIn’s status message.
4. If your post is about a specific industry or relates to other great blogs, find a recent blog post that has related information. (Now, this is different than what you MIGHT normally do, so pay attention). In the URL part of the sign-up form, put the link to your post, not your blog in general. In the comment body, don’t talk about your amazing post. Just offer genuine commentary on the post you read, and share your thoughts and ideas. Repeat: don’t mention the post. (If your comment is great and worthy, people will click through and check it out.)
5. Share your post on Facebook. I really like BlogCast, which used to be FlogBlog. It’s got a nice interface.
6. Share your post in FriendFeed automatically, and let the amazing community there decide if it’s interesting.
7. Try Zemanta. Zemanta is a blogging tool that either adds on to your browser (Firefox only, I think), or comes now as a WordPress plugin. It allows you to find related stories and post them at the bottom of a post. When you’re part of the Zemanta community, I believe your stories also go into their list of potentially related stories. I’ve seen traffic coming in from Zemanta-recommended links.
8. Don’t forget Twitter. I find lots of my traffic comes from Twitter, especially because I don’t ever just post a link. I ask questions, inspire comments, etc.
9. Write blog posts that others will find useful. I know it’s not a technology answer, but it’s the truth. If your posts aren’t that useful to other people, they won’t be popular. People won’t care. If you’re re-blogging news that several other larger sites have covered, who cares? If you’re telling us about your day at college, who cares (unless you’re a great writer)? Make it really good, useful stuff, and we’ll come along for the ride.

**Update: Here’s what people on Twitter said you should do:

Perhaps you have some other ways to promote? Do you have any recommendations? Do you have disagreement with the ways I shared above? Let’s talk about it.

Photo credit, KungPaoCajun

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