Marketing

I had no idea that marketing ones blog was such an intricate proposition. I knew that getting a link on another site was important, but I had no idea that there was a company you could pay to help you facilitate a connection with like minded sites or blogs. I also was unaware of the system of ranking and how that could affect your site, so I found this information particularly interesting. As a lot of things on the Internet are, the “traffic generators” described by Gary Simpson sounds like a case of too good to be true. Anytime someone tells you they can do something for free, you are usually getting what you paid for. In this case, the generator sounds like one of Dante’s circles of Hell. You have to click on the same banners day after day to build points that are meanwhile being eaten away by the same people clicking on your banner to build their points, etc, etc., etc. This sounds like a lesson in futility.

Ken Mowery had very simple, but very good advice about search engines. You have a lot of options when it comes to naming your blog or website, but if you use a title that is closely related to the actual content, and not something cutesy, than you are going to be more visible in a search engine. Mowery also suggests a banner rotation program that will have banners relevant to your site. For example; I am doing a blog about Habitat for Humanity, so perhaps Lowe’s or Home Depot would be a relevant banner.

TC Thorn also offers advice about how to increase your sites PageRank. I am a computer neophyte, but Thorn made his 3 steps seem easy enough for even me to accomplish. I didn’t know about backlinks, but I will be more aware of this now, and these steps do seem like it would cut down on the time it would take to find links that relate to your site, and would be willing to exchange links.

The most important information about increasing traffic to your blog, at least in my opinion, came from the article by Duncan Riley. Submitting your blog to all of the search engines and posting regularly and often were the bits of advice that I hadn’t seen before, but made the most sense. Even though submitting to all the engines maybe time consuming, you should probably see results, especially if you are posting often. These seem like steps anyone can take, and they are so ridiculously easy I’m not sure why I even needed them pointed out to me.

I would never have thought to edit my posts into articles, as Priya Shah suggests, but this is a great idea, especially for the blog I have in mind. I can easily see how posts about Habitat for Humanity could be made into articles and then submitted to article directories. I also liked Priya’s suggestion to create buzz around your blog. While it may be more of a financial undertaking than some are willing to make, I like the idea of bumper stickers. You can almost imagine a sort of cult following for your blog, but this might work better for something less serious than Habitat for Humanity. However, especially during an election year, I could imagine making noteworthy connections between the working poor and the election.

As for my own blog and marketing, I can see using a couple of these ideas. I would like a link exchange with other Habitat for Humanity sites or blog, especially the local chapters. I could also envision links with the local paper (The Kendallville New Sun) and perhaps a press release to them. Because it is a small community, the paper is always looking for human interest stories to run, and if they do an article about one of the families building a Habitat home, which they often do, then perhaps they could include a link to the blog so that interested readers could find out more. I would also make sure to name the blog something like “Habitat for Humanity Noble County” that way if someone was utilizing a search engine, there are several keywords that may come up and would be relevant.