A Pilgrim’s Digression

I spent some time tonight researching how to promote a blog beyond a small base of friends and relatives. I thought I would share my findings, though I am not sure how useful this information will be.

First of all, unless your best friend is a star reporter for the Washington Post who can boost your blog in his on-line column, you will probably have to resign yourself to more pedestrian tricks, such as (gasp) learning to write well.

The number one tip I found for getting your blog noticed is to write well; in other words, to “provide good content.” Unfortunately, the same sites that recommend you write well also recommend keeping your blog posts short and sweet. “Spare [readers] the one thousand word diatribe,” says Biz Stone of Blogger [Promoting Your Blog].

Since I myself enjoy reading thousand word diatribes at TPM Café and other sites, I tend to think of that as not an inviolable rule. Of course, I am master of the thousand word diatribe myself, so I have to be generous on the subject of word count for my own sake.

Following are all the sites I clicked in my search for a simple way to move my blog from obscurity to a little more public notice. Keep in mind, when registering at some of these sites, use a secondary email address—not your primary address. This is always good practice anywhere on the internet.

Promoting Your Blog. A page specifically aimed at people with blogspot blogs, but it offers some good general advice.

Top 10 Tips on Promoting Your Blog. Offers much the same advice for bloggers as above, but links to some different blog indexing services. unfortunately, some of the links are no longer operable.

Ten Steps To Promote A Blog. More general advice (seems like people copy each other a lot).

Feedburner.com. Some of the advice you get is to publish an RSS feed for your blog. WordPress already has a default RSS feed, but I suppose it can’t hurt to have another.

Feedster.com. Along the same lines as above, Feedster allows you to add your RSS feed to its directory, hopefully boosting your blog’s presence on the web.

Bloglines.com. An RSS feed aggregator. It is also a directory. Once you sign up, you will be added to their directory. It does much more than offer you a platform, however. It also allows you to track feeds from other sites to which you subscribe, including sods brood sites, and thus you can see summaries of recent posts before going to the site itself.

weblogs.com. Another blog indexing service. Add your blog to their directory. You can also configure WordPress to “ping” weblogs every time you publish a new post. Go to “Options” and “Writing” in your admin control panel. Scroll to the bottom. You’ll see a text box under “Update Services” with one entry in it. Leave that entry alone, but on a new blank line type in http://weblogs.com. Now weblogs will publish a link to your blog in its blogroll every time you update.

blogflux.com. Another blog directory. This one didn’t work for me–I couldn’t find the “submit” button after typing in all the requested info. Maybe it will work for you.

blogdex.net. Another blog directory. I was able to submit my blog, but I am not sure whether this site is even active anymore. It seems to have been an MIT grad student project from 2004, and the last news item on its blog page was from October of that year.

daypop.com. Another blog directory. I was able to submit my blog. Seems like a current and up-to-date site.

eatonweb.com. Another blog directory. I submitted my blog. Don’t know how current the site is, or whether it’s just an automaton. I like to see some evidence of human intervention in these directories–I like to see sites that claim that each blog submitted is personally reviewed by a human–but I realize I am probably asking too much.

technorati.com. This is a big name in the blog indexing business. The Washington Post uses Technorati to publicize what blogs are linking to their stories, a neat feature I’ve come to love. I enrolled easily enough, but when it came time to configure and claim my blog, I kept getting an error.

You are supposed to insert a snippet of javascript code into your blog template, so that Technorati can see it and index your blog. I couldn’t get it to work. I must have spent an hour adding that bit of code in every conceivable place in my template. I even turned off my spam filter briefly to see if it was blocking Technorati. No go. So I’ve put in an email to technical support, but haven’t heard anything yet.

Finally, some more general advice I’ve gleaned from my evening investigating how to get your blog noticed:

1. Use keywords in your titles (I don’t do this; my titles are typically obscure)
2. Link, link, link. Link to other blogs. If you link to other blogs, they may link to you in return.
3. Visit other blogs frequently, for the same reason cited above. Everyone loves getting comments, and if you write a genuine, interesting comment, the blogger may be compelled to reciprocate with a visit to your site.
4. Post nearly every day. Frequently updated sites retain readers, though if you overwhelm them with several posts in a day, you may drive them away. One post every day or couple days is appropriate.
5. Publicize your blog off-line. Tell people you meet about your blog and invite them to visit.

I don’t know if ultimately any of these techniques will do any good. However, this is the advice I found in my searches, and I thought I would pass it along to you. But since I just violated one of these rules, having now written yet another thousand word diatribe, perhaps I am not the best blogger from whom to seek advice.