Over the last couple of months I’ve started looking into the tools and programs that are available for website promotion, particularly in the realm of blogging.  I have a few reasons for doing this - for one, it helps with my content writing.  My real reason however is completely selfish: I’d like more visitors (and readers), and I’m interested in finding out the best way to get the right people to my site.  Not surprisingly this is incredibly difficult - it seems that in blogging, just as in real life, unless you have a lot of marketing capital and some very clever advertisement plans you’ll find yourself stuck in the slow lane to growth.

As of April 2007, 120,000 blogs were being created every day.  Sifry, who is affiliated with Technorati, hasn’t updated his numbers for the 2007-2008 period so far as I can tell, but it’s easy to imagine that this figure will have jumped significantly once again.  In real terms, 120,000 blogs created every day means that the possibility for receiving and retaining visitors is dispersed dramatically.  Back when Blogger.com was launched in 1999 (I remember it because I signed up and created one of those incredibly self-absorbed teenage angst blogs that no one read), the blogosphere was in an optimistic mood.  Surely blogging was a new way of communicating and sharing your world with others, and no matter what you wrote people would visit?

How wrong we were.  Nowadays I think the reason so many blogs are being generated is because they’re being used for spamming and advertising purposes rather than their original intent, that of personal use.  How many of us have checked our web stats only to find our content is being linked to by spam websites?  How many of us have clicked through to a page from a search engine to be confronted by a blog full of gobbledegook?  How many ping-backs do you get from nonsense topic-based blogs that are clearly trying to make a quick buck through advertisement clicks?  If you really want to make your blog stand out in this current climate of spam-nonsense-topic-advertisement based blogging, what’s the best way to accomplish it?

In the last month I’ve increased my daily traffic by 217%, and I’ve had a few spike days when one article or another has been picked up by StumbleUpon.  Because my blog is new I’m still battling with the problem of a 0 PageRank, which is one of the key factors used by ranked blog lists to determine popularity, and one of the elements that Google uses to slot your site into search engine results.  Some blog directories and listings won’t accept your listing until your site has at least a ranking of 1, whilst the others may confine you to the blogging dregs along with those annoying spam blogs until your rank improves.  That being said, there’s  no reason not to start laying the ground work for ranking success - in fact it makes sense to do as much as you can while you’re waiting for the PageRank update so that when that blessed day does come around, your rank jumps more than one spot.

Here’s some tips that I’ve found helpful so far:

- Sign up for relevant forums and start joining conversations.  It’s human nature to be curious about newcomers, so forum regulars may visit your site when you sign up and leave you some comment love.  If they like what they see they may help you along with link exchanges, publicity on their own blog, or a simple offer of friendship.  I’ve found the Aussie Bloggers Forum to be particularly helpful.

- Sign up for social networking sites.  Members on the forums you join will likely also be members, and you can add each other to your friends lists, bolstering the likelihood of random browsers to click through to your profile (and thus your website).  Technorati, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, Furl, Spurl, Reddit, BumpZEE, and Digg are all good starting points.  If you do join up, consider listing your member profile links on your ‘About’ page so that interested visitors can add you to their friends.  If you’re happy to fiddle around with widgets and plug-ins, also consider adding a panel of ‘Bookmark’ or ‘Send to…’ links at the bottom of each post (as you can see with mine, if a Technorati, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, etc member where to click on the icon, it would automatically add my post to the relevant website’s popular links function).

- Sign up for sites like Last.fm, Flickr and Shelfari, and add your member information to your blog side-bar or ‘About’ page.  This allows for greater interactivity between visitors to your blog and yourself, as visitors will be able to see the latest music you’ve been listening to, your newest photo uploads, and the most recent books you’ve read.

- Be a good commenter.  You often see signs in cafes and restaurants near the tip bowl that read, ‘Tippers make better lovers’ - I think you can adapt this sentiment to the blogging world.  Browse widely amongst topics that are relevant or interesting to you - this is where StumbleUpon and Technorati are particularly useful.  Try to leave comments on every site you visit, but make sure the comments you leave are fun and relevant, as there’s nothing worse than coming across a spammy comment which is obviously aimed at trying to get visits to the commenter’s site.

- Be a good website owner.  Respond to every comment you get, both in your own comments and on the blog of the commenter (or even through email).  If you notice referrals from a website coming up in your stats (if you don’t have a statistics tracker yet, try Google Analytics or SiteTracker), pay the site a visit and thank the owner for the link.  Try to keep your front page size down for faster loading (check your page load speed with the SelfSEO tester).  Make sure you have an informative ‘About’ page set up so that people can quickly find out exactly who you are and what your blog is about.

- Sign up for monitoring and measuring services like Google Webmaster Tools - this service helps check and improve your META tags and descriptions, the way your site is spidered by the search engines, and even with creating a good site map.

- Make sure your blog has a feed, and that it’s listed in feed directories.  This list by TopRank is incredibly helpful.

- Join blog directories.  Join any that are relevant to your topic, and all that are general to blogging.  Some may ask for reciprocal links, some may cost money (I, as yet, have stuck with the free directories).

And my most important rule of all - write fun, interesting and relevant content, and do it often!