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Wednesday, January 2, 2013

How To Market Your Blog at Shoe-String Budget

There’s literally millions and millions of blogs on the Internet today. Even large businesses and established brands have blogs of their own. How can a simple blogger deal with a competition of that magnitude without going broke?

While some people would pay big money just to get their blog’s name out in the open; the fact is that you could very well promote your blog by yourself, sometimes, with even better results. This way, you have better control on the marketing aspect of your blog and save money at the same time too.

Some cheap and easy blog promotion tricks include:

1. Offering to write for somebody else’s blog as a guest blogger.
Great minds think together. Once you’ve established the topics and subjects that your blog will be tackling, seek out the prominent bloggers in your line of specialty and offer your services to them for free. This is a win-win situation, actually. They get free content for their blogs, you get exposure and readership for your own. This opens up a lot of opportunities for collaboration on future project and also allows you to network with people who matter.

2. Getting your own domain name.
WordPress.com and the Google-owned Blogspot are all excellent blogging solutions. While there are many bloggers who found success using these platforms, it can’t be denied that they are bounded to the limits and rules set by these proprietary blog hosting sites. Also, having a.wordpress.com or.blogspot.com appended to the end of your blog’s URL looks less professional than having a domain name of your own. For example, think about the difference between www.myawesomewebsite.blogspot.com versus www.myawesomewebsite.com. The second one looks more reputable, doesn’t it?

The best thing to do here is to register your blog’s domain name and find a reputable host like GoDaddy or HostGator (hosting services usually come cheap, plus they will also do the domain registration for you).

3. Being social.
Social media networking is a very powerful marketing tool. With just a click of a button, you can instantly connect with followers (and potential readers) all over the globe.

The best thing about social media is that it’s dirt cheap. Setting up an account at major social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is absolutely free of charge. Meanwhile, the Google+ social network benefits from its direct integration with some of Google’s largest services, namely Gmail and Google Search. Google+ also allows people to establish authorship over their content (people with author profiles can have their name and profile picture displayed next to their content on SERPs).