In my previous post Easy Ways to Promote Your Blog & Drive Traffic – Part 1 we explored Search Engine Optimization SEO, Blog Communities, Blog Directories, Stats and Site Checkers and Feed Directories. It’s my personal belief and experience that you should at least dabble in each of the categories I am providing in this mini-series in order to position yourself to connect with other bloggers, to have your blog indexed and to drive traffic to your blog.

Let’s start the second part of our list with pinging websites.

6. Pinging Sites

Pinging is important if you wish to grab the top positions on the search engines with your content. It’s an easy way to let alert search engines that you have new content on your blog and invite them to check it out. You should ping every single piece you publish whether it is an article, press release, video, etc.

Pinging sites I use are: Pingomatic.com, PingMyBlog.com, pingdevice.com, bulkping.com

7. Social Media Sites

One of the things I learned too late in the game was when registering accounts on various social media sites like Twitter.com, Facebook.com and YouTube.com – use your blog name as your username in order to get your blog indexed quickly.

Be sure to share your new blog posts on all social media sites. Ask for comments and retweets, and be sure to return the favor. More comments might actually mean higher Google ranking.

8. Social Bookmarking

Share your content with readers online by submitting your newly published blog posts to social bookmarking sites like Digg.com, Delicious.com, and StumbleUpon.com.

One of my newest favs is OnlyWire. OnlyWire is a service that allows you to submit your new blog posts to multiple social bookmarking sites across the web at a touch of a button.

Tip: Use appropriate keywords and tags for your bookmarks.

Do you have personal favorite methods you used to promote your blog or drive traffic? Please share those in the comments section below.

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My Comment Commitment: If you leave an approved comment on any of my posts, I will visit your blog and “share it” in some way whether on StumbleUpon, Twitter or Facebook depending on if I can find a nice fit.

One of the most common reasons a blogger throws in the towel is the lack of traffic to their blog. They write their little hearts out and in a matter of weeks, they feel as though they are writing entirely for the one person reading their blog – their mom.

There are a blue million opinions on how to drive traffic to your blog, and I strongly encourage you to examine as many of those recommendations as you can. The list below happens to be my own favorites and those I have found myself using time and time again.

1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Add your RSS feed to search engine accounts (Google, Yahoo and Bing).

All in One SEO Pack plugin – Use it to add title, description and keywords for your blog, posts and pages.

Change the permalink settings for your blog posts from the number style URL to one that includes the blog post title.

Deep link posts to other blog posts and to other sites within your niche.

2. Communities

Submit your blog to blog communities such as BlogCatalog, Blogged and NetworkedBlogs.

3. Directories

Submit your blog to directories in the relevant category(ies). This is kind of like being listed in the yellow pages. The more places you list your blog, the more people will find your blog!

Some of the blog directories I personally use are BlogTopList and Technorati

Technorati is one of the top blog directories that indexes millions of blog posts in real time. It can take a bit of time for your blog to get listed. It is worth it to list your blog though – do it.

4. Site Check and Stats Sites

When you check your blog stats on some sites, your information is stored. This can actually provide some benefit to your blog as far as indexing goes. A few sites you can check your blog stats on are: WebsiteOutlook.com, CubeStart.com, BuiltWith.com, WhoIs.com, QuarkBase.com and UrlFan.com

5. Feed Directories

Submitting your RSS feed to feed directories such as OctoFinder and FeedAdage has often proven to be quite beneficial in terms of indexing and traffic sourcing. Feed Directories keep track of and index new posts. When people click on your blog post title on a directory site, they are redirected to your original post.

In Part 2 of Easy Ways to Promote Your Blog & Drive Traffic I’ll share my preferences on pinging sites, social media and social bookmarking.

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My Comment Commitment: If you leave an approved comment on any of my posts, I will visit your blog and “share it” in some way whether on StumbleUpon, Twitter or Facebook depending on if I can find a nice fit.

Reader: Can you give me a list of directories to submit my blog to?

Gayla: I’ve never used blog directories and some of my blogs have gotten fairly high on the search engines without them. I have focused on using the proper keywords and did just fine.

Reader: Is there any place I can go to learn more about how to use keywords?

Gayla: What I do for keywords is:

Watch Technorati to see what people are searching.

I use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find variations of keywords and phrases.

Example: Say you’re wanting to use the keyword HOLIDAY — the Adwords keyword tool will tell you all the variations of the word holiday in how it was searched recently. I personally try to utilize as many keyword combos as I can with searches of 1,000 or greater. You’d be surprised at just how many visitors you can pull in that way.

Go to the Google Blog Search and see what other blogs similar to yours may be writing about, how they are tagging etc.

Yahoo Buzz is another great place to watch to see what the movers and shakers in the search world are. Try to incorporate as many of those top search terms into your blog posts as you can and tag them as the keywords that are being searched.

Another tip I’ve found to help is by bolding out the keywords within your post. You don’t have to do this on every single occasion, but it does help to do it once in a while. In as much as your eyes will pause on the bolded words, so will search engines.

That’s not saying I’m totally against blog directories — it’s just that I’ve never found the need to spend my time submitting to them.

If someone has an opinion that supports directories, I’d love to hear it.

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My Comment Commitment: If you leave an approved comment on any of my posts, I will visit your blog and “share it” in some way whether on StumbleUpon, Twitter or Facebook depending on if I can find a nice fit.