(Somewhat) Advanced Blogging Publicity Tactics

For a couple of posts now, I have been talking about some various ways to not only publicize your blog into the blogging world (a.k.a the “blogosphere”).  Now I thought it would be good to give you some more advanced strategies to help promote your blog that a lot of people don’t know about (or have never thought of).

Advanced Tactic 1: BlogTipping

When I normally talk about this with people, the first thing that normally comes up is the idea of ‘cow tipping’.  I’m not really sure why that is, since it has absolutely nothing to do with cows (or that kind of tipping), but you can think of it like more of the idea of tipping a waiter/waitress.

So here’s what the idea of blogtipping is about:  You go to someone’s blog that is in the same industry as yours and you ‘tip’ them.  Tipping can be monetary if you want it to (you’ll see many people have virtual tip jars on their blogs), but it usually has to do with publicly complementing them on the blogs and the quality of their content.

Here’s the effect: the author(s) are flattered that you took the time and energy (as little as it may be) to complement them on their post.  By leaving a link to your blog with your tip, chances are they will have a look at your blog as well as interact with it (whether it be a simple ‘thank you’ or something better).  If When they see you have some great content, chances are they will also start sending traffic your way.  Whether it be from just talking about your blog in a post or creating a permanent link to it on their blog, you end up winning.

Think about it: If someone spent the time to publicly complement you on your work, wouldn’t you want to return the favor in some way?

This simple strategy has been around for some time and still seems to work wonders, yet people never really think about it.

Advanced Tactic 2: Establish the “You” Brand

Good blogs are those which people will occasionally go back to for new content. Great blogs are the ones that establish an identity that people remember.

You probably know from personal experience that it’s aggravating when you can’t find something you ran into a while ago that you really liked.  This is where branding comes into play…

While it is important to use branding on your own blog, it is equally (well… probably more) important to brand yourself using external sources.

One of the more well-known places to implement personal branding is through Technorati. If you don’t know, Technorati is a tagging service so you can help people find your blog by associating it with ‘tags’, or keywords.

So, if you use a service like Technorati, use various tagging to explain the theme(s) of your blog, but don’t forget to use your own name as a tag as well.  That way, when people type your name into an engine, they’ll be able to learn about everything you have written about.