Promoting Your Blog

By Author: Johnson Philip
Total Articles: 90
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Once you start blogging, which should be as soon as the blog is set up, you should start promoting your blog.

Most bloggers do not realize that while their blog is very much visible to them, it is practically invisible to everyone else. That is because it is only another one among millions upon millions of blogs. To be exact, just a newcomer among tens of millions of blog.

Obviously, only those websites and blogs that stand out for some reason or other will be noticed. The rest will remain part of the crowd. Thus your next goal should be to make your blog visible -- to make it stand out among the millions. This is to be done with the help of the search engines.

Just as one searches for the name-plate in a neighborhood with similar houses, or the names displayed in front of shops and malls, most people reach websites for the first time by searching through search-engines. Once the find a site useful, some of them might 'bookmark' which will help them to come repeatedly to your site. However, getting found is more important that getting bookmarked because people cannot bookmark a site unless the reach a ...
... site. Here we face a second problem

I am sure that you have set up your blog or blogs in certain specific niches. However, just setting them up does not lead to "recognition" by the search engines. Unless the search engines recognize your blog/s as belonging to those niches, they will keep displaying other sites which were "close" to the niche before your blog/s came on the scene. Thus the next step is to make search-engines aware of your blog/s and also tell them the niche to which it belongs.

Major Search Engines: There are thousands of search engines, but just a handful of them get more than 80% of the traffic. It is in these that you should get registered first. These are:

www.Google.com

www.AltaVista.com

www.MSN.Com

www.Yahoo.Com

Thus as soon as two to three posts are there on your blog you should visit them and submit them to these sites. Usually you will see a "Submit Your Site" link somewhere. If not, you can always search "submit site in Google" kind of phrase for each engine and you will get the link.

These search engines then send an automated "spider" which is a software that collects comprehensive information about the website/blog. What is more, if you keep posting on a regular interval such as daily or on alternate days, the spider will come to your site almost every day. This will update your site fast in search engines, and will also create a priority for listing your blog because it is perceived as an "active" blog in its niche.

Major Directories: Search engines send spiders and catalog your website/blog on an ongoing basis. However, directories are created by paid or voluntary human editors. The major directories include

www.Dmoz.org

www.MSN.Com

www.Yahoo.com

www.Netscape.com

www.Google.com

You should go to the first three and submit your website manually to them in the proper category. The last two (and thousands of other specialized directories) take data from the first one. Thus once your blog is accepted by the first one, it will automatically appear in the last two and also in many more directories.

Keep working on the visibility. Success is not very far!
Dr. Johnson C. Philip is a scientist and an acknowledged blogging guru having a worldwide following.