Sites to promote your blog

In this lesson we're going to take a brief look at using social networking sites to promote your blog.

A blog is the perfect tool for integrating your web 2.0 and social marketing strategy.

Blogs allow you to document your thoughts and opinions on a particular topic. They are dynamic social websites that allow users to interact via comments and ping backs. If done well, your blog can make you quite a bit of money in affiliate commissions.

In general, people who like social sites will also enjoy reading and posting to blogs. It makes sense then, that people who find your blog through Digg will very often also be the type of person who wants to read and add comments to your blog.

Ways to promote your blog

Here are three great ways to promote your blog:

1. Place links to your blog on your profile pages.
2. Plug RSS feeds into social networking portals.
3. Use blogging network sites.

My Blog Log is a super cool blog directory that allows you to list your blog, profile and build a network of friends. It has all the bells and whistles of a social networking site but it is build specifically for blogs.

Your profile page contains statistics on how many people are looking at your blog and so forth—which is undoubtedly handy—but possibly the best thing about My Blog Log is the 'Recent Readers' widget. The 'Recent Readers' widget is a small piece of code that you place in your side bar to display the photos of users who have recently visited your site.

Essentially this acts as a 'social proof of the herd' - if people can see that lots of others have been viewing your blog, they'll think: "Hey a lot of people read this blog so it must be great stuff!"

However the best is yet to come: the real beauty of this widget lies in how you can use it on other people's blogs to drive traffic back to your own!

As you browse the My Blog Log directory, your picture will appear in the recent readers box and this will link directly back to your profile page, which in turn links directly to your blog!