Some Brilliant Tools to Promote a Blog

I set this blog up nearly 2 years ago and to be honest I have not really done much to promote it - in fact I have often struggled to keep posting regularly - but as I am about to start trying to help people in Hull learn how to blog - I have been spending a little more time researching this and have discovered a huge amount help available resulting in me spending much of this week exploring and installing some new tools on my blog.

First if you are looking for ideas to promote your blog there is one site I was referred to someone in the Everywoman network. I have only just started working through Yaro Starak's Blog Traffic School Pre-Launch Blog which is packed with ideas to get traffic to your blog. After following just couple of tips and already I can already see the results.

First you may have noticed the widget in the sidebar listing the last five people who read my blog. I was so impressed when I saw that one someone's blog I just had to investigate and discovered MyBlogLog.com which I can totally recommend. If you have a blog get over there right away and sign up. MyBlogLog is a Blog community - a chance to search and find other blogs of interest and by reading other blogs make yourself known to other bloggers, many of whom will in turn come and read yours - Traffic to my blog as more than doubled this week and I get that brilliant widget on the side bar shown me who has visited. All of a sudden instead of being alone blogger - I feel part of a community - real people are reading my blog wow!!

Next you will also see another addition to the side bar called GoodBlogs. That widget displays details of other blogs and in return my blog gets displayed on other blogs - This week already that has resulted in 10 visits and in addition 15 people who visited my blog have visited blogs I have promoted - nice synergy.

Then I was visiting John Jantsch's Duct Tape Marketing Blog - which if you are reading this blog is one you should also visit - and running my cursor over a link, a preview of the page leapt out at me. Wow - "How did he do that?" I thought and off I went to Snap to pick up that tool. If you want to see it in action simply point your cursor at any link on this page.

Finally I visited the blog of a professional speaker friend David McQueen and noticed two things on his side panel - First field allowing visitors to subscribe to an email notification if the blog is updated - and second lots of tags (called labels) which were all linked to his various posts - Wow - "How did he do that?"

Well the first I discovered is a site called FeedBlitz - which I have already signed up and added to my Personal Blog - I will be adding it here but the addition of Tags I discovered is a new feature in the latest version of Blogger and that is going to take a bit of work to install - I have already started and again that is already included in my Personal Blog and will be here over Christmas.

What it means is that customising your blog is now much much easier and as it is out of Beta is not going to give you any technical problems. So if you are looking for something to do to get away from the Christmas chaos - there is enough here to keep you busy for the rest for the week.

Rikki Arundel
Motivational Speaker
Speaking and Marketing Tips
The GenderShift Blog

Performancing - Makes Blogging Easier to Manage

Performancing.com | Helping Bloggers Succeed

I am still exploring what this site can do - but there are two features that have already become indispensible to me

The first is the firefox extention. (If you are still using internet explorer - you should have got the message by not - all the really cool developments on the web are now happening with Firefox) This makes it really easy to publish blogs and comes with a neet and much better WYSIWYG editor than blogger. (not seen the new service yet)

The second tool is the tracking service - do you know how many people, or as I have discovered how few people are actually reading your blog - well just add a line to your template and you can have up to date metrics on all the activities - including how may people are clicking on your adsense links and which of your blog posts are getting the most attention.

Finally the bit I have yet to get to, you get to join blogging community - and either lurk (read all the posts without actually getting involved - thats what I am doing first) or you can post your own blog posts and comments and find out how to make your blog more successful. This site has a Google Page Rank of 7 so posting blogs here is going to do your own site popularity a few favours anyway.

If you are using Firefox - I strongly recommend this site. If you are not using Firefox - trust me - It is free to download and will transform your browsing experience. You may already understand what Web 2.0 is - if not it's all about the evolution of the web from it's information providing phase to a new interactive and collaberative phase. Internet Explorer is a web 1.0 tool - Firefox is web 2.0.

Performancing.com | Helping Bloggers Succeed

Rikki Arundel
Motivational Speaker
Speaking and Marketing Tips
The GenderShift Blog