Marketing Your Writing Blog

Part of me feels apprehensive about writing this post. The fact that I'm writing about marketing a blog makes me feel a bit greedy and hypocritical. Its a bit self-serving in the fact that I would love some of your ideas about promoting a blog and growing readership, and I'm also not the most knowledgeable person to be giving advice on the subject. However, I think this is something that's important to many writers, I have been asked directly how I do it, and I'm assuming most other bloggers are as grasping and excited about readers as I am. So here are my three main ideas for blog marketing:

1) Quality content: This does not seem directly related to marketing, but think about it. If you stumble across a blog and the posts are poorly written, scattered, or irrelevant, you're not going to remember it, come back, or follow. Before you can really focus on marketing you have to make sure you having something good to offer. Don't get too stressed about it, either. Do your best and be yourself. Nobody's perfect and this is something we're all working on.

2) Guest posts/interviews: This is an area I have left sadly lacking on this blog (though that will be remedied in the near future). But I know it works. Get friends or other writer/bloggers to do a guest blog or interview for you, then when the guest post/interview is up they link to it from their blog and bazinga, more readers. This has the added bonus, too, that you don't have to think up a post for that day. (p.s. If any of you are interested in doing a guest post for this blog, send me an email with your ideas and I'll see if I think it would be a good fit.)

3) Comments: This is my favorite tool of the trade and is probably how many of you have found this blog. The means of promotion that has worked best for me is to go to some of my favorite author blogs, many of which have hundreds of followers. Followers who I know are interested in reading and writing because they are following an author blog. I click down the list of followers and see which followers have their own blogs. Then I go in, read the posts, and leave comments with a link to this blog. Not only has this been great for blog promotion, but I've read some great stuff and become acquainted with some awesome people. This does take time, but its worth it.

Now its your turn. What are your ideas? Any special tactics that have worked particularly well? Any nifty websites that do a good job of promoting blogs? What blog marketing techniques do you use?

Sarah Allen