Marketing our blog
February 19th, 2007 | 
Author: Initially we just included our blog on the marketing lists for our other sites but quite quickly found out that a lot of places list blogs in a peculiar way or don’t list them at all so we’ve been looking around for other ways to get our blog known.The business of blogging is relatively new and so a lot of places aren’t quite sure what to do with them. Many site directories are set up on the basis that the sites on them are fairly static but that’s one thing that’s definitely not the case with active blogs. They also have the characteristic of being local news in many cases and whilst I’m sure it’ll be quite a while before we get mentioned on a news bulletin we are actually listed on one service which in turn feeds into Reuters, USA Today and FoxNews.
Each time a new entry is added various services such as Feedburner, Technorati and more specialised services like PingOMatic inform all the other news-type services that you’ve done that. The net effect of this is that you get the equivalent of a new listing every time you add an entry which can both produce an immediate flurry of hits on the blog and also helps the more gradual building up of hits from the normal search engines.
What’s also quite different from a normal website is that you get feedback and comments on what you said. For instance, a few weeks back I was speculating as to how many people were reading this blog, I was very surprised to have a reply from the Feedburner people themselves. There’s also much more interaction between the various bloggers than there is between people running up normal websites.
One “problem” with a blog is that you really have no idea how many people are actually reading it. The likes of feedburner return a count as to how many people are potentially subscribed to the blog but that doesn’t count those subscribed directly via the e-mail subscriptions and, on the whole, there doesn’t seem to be any 100% reliable way of counting those who reach entry.
What has really surprised me though is that somehow or other this blog has managed to get into the top 1/2 million blogs already which is pretty good going I think considering that I’ve only been doing it properly for six months or so.
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Arnold I think you have done brilliantly with your blog.
Well done
Jackie Smith
Arnold, I am not sure what is the best way to market a blog. I’ve been told that if you write regular good unique content then the search engines should pick you up. However we know that nothing is easy or simple, you could spend all your time researching and writing posts. I think it is a case of keeping going, the longer you have a presence and build up archives of quality articles, get more links, write guest blogs etc the more successful the blog will become.
In principle you’re right Karen, and I’m encouraged that FP is being hit both through the blog routes and also directly by normal search engines.
The problem with that is that it’s an almost “by chance” marketing approach. For instance, both yourself and Jackie found FP in a pretty much random fashion. Granted, Jackie was sure to find us eventually due to the overlap in our “buying a house in France” series with holiday-home-expert.com. However, you might not have for quite a while nor I you yet I find that I read maybe 50% or so of your entries and, as you know, comment on a number of them too ie yours is a blog that I find interesting yet I only found it by chance.
I think that it’s the “by chance” aspect that I probably find most frustrating. I’m quite sure that there are a number of people writing out there which I’d find interesting yet might never come across them other than by chance.
What’s quite encouraging is that both of us are now sitting around the 400,000 mark of all blogs and the 100,000 ring even seems achieveable, perhaps even sometime this year.