Promoting a BLOG??

[Greg Lambert]

For all my blogging friends (and those who just read them):

How have you promoted your blogs?

Do you just do a shameless self-promotion, or is there a strategy to getting your blog recognized by other bloggers?

Of course, the assumption here is that the blog actually has some good content on it. Such as the great content you find on MY BLOG -- 3 Geeks and a Law Blog

Are there any tricks to the trade that you've learned along the way??

[Francis Norton]

I'm currently thinking of making CafePress T-shirts with my blog logo

and asking folks to wear them around.

[Greg Lambert]

Great idea. I'll see if I can get Brangelina to put my logo on one of the twins....

Oh heck, maybe both of the twins could wear it!!

Of couse, with my luck, K-Fed would be the one wearing it.

[Francis Norton]

Step 1. Take an exclusive shot of a celebrity's newborn.
Step 2. Photoshop the logo onto the onesie.
Step 3. Sell photo to People Magazine.

[Barbara Fullerton]

Interesting! I was just thinking about this a few hours ago. For DALL, we have asked that the messages going to the association members, contain the Blog URL in the sigs of each message.

For our work blog, I have asked the Librarians to add the blog url to their electonic signatures.

And, I just saw this on the Conglomerate Blog, http://www.theconglomerate.org/: the owner, Gordon Smith, created a Linkedin Group for his blog. This seems like a good way to find out how many Linkedin readers are subscribed to your blog (it is difficult to find an accurate count of how many subscribe by RSS feeds.).

[Sarah Glassmeyer]

Commenting on and/or linking to other blogs is a tried and true method of getting some traffic.

For my personal blog (*cough* http://technologicaltortoise.wordpress.com/ *cough*), I have an RSS feed going into my Facebook account, here and my FriendFeed. I also post a link to new posts on my twitter. There's also a relatively new application on Facebook called "Blog Networks" that I've signed up for. (http://apps.new.facebook.com/blognetworks/blogpage.php?blogid=15936) I can't tell if that's helped. My colleague, Stacey Greenwell, has also created a FB fan page for her blog to promote it and to compare against using Blog Networks. (http://www.new.facebook.com/pages/The-Uncommon-Commons/61030850595)

For my library's blog (http://uklawlibrary.blogspot.com/) , we provide a link on our library webpage, have signs around the library mentioning it and have it RSS feeding onto our library 's FB fan page.

[Greg Lambert]

It is too bad that everyone is so shy about shameless self-promotion around here.

What about resources like Technorati?? Or delicious?? OrLinkbacks (Trackbacks, Pingbacks, Refbacks, WhateverBacks??)

Anyone had success implementing these (without totally cluttering up your blog's look and feel??)

[Dan Blackaby]

I've actually never thought about this before, but how do feed aggregator sites like Bloglines or Google Reader collect the feeds for selection? Is there a way you can "push" your feed at those sites?

[Greg Lambert]

Well, quite frankly, I think that a lot of blogs fit under the "mutual appreciation association" category. From what I can tell, the best way to initially promote your blog is to site to other blogs within your topic. So, the linkbacks and other resources can track the links within existing blogs to new blogs, and back again. So, it is kind of an "inbred" system. Which is a shame, but apparently, the way you play the game. So, I'm going to find the biggest, baddest blog on Google, and start siteing it left and right!!

[Francis Norton]

Quite surprisingly, The Official Google Blog ranks very close to the top when you google the word "blog."