Blog Tips

“Content is King” is one of the most important slogans for serious bloggers: No matter how well you promote your blog, if your content – what and how your write – is mediocre, people might discover your blog, but won’t come back. Good, original content is key.

It also works the other way round: you can write the best content but if people don’t discover your blog, you will be writing in a void. There is nothing as frustrating for a blogger than to write a fantastic post, … and see nobody reads it.

Here are the basic promotion techniques I use each time I publish a blog post:

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Sites linking back to your blog’s homepage or to a post, are a measure of success for a blog, as we explained before. It is always interesting to check the backlinks, to see what are others saying about your blog, what has been quoted or commented on.

As you know, you can find backlinks via the Google backlink checker, Google Blog search, and the webmaster utilities from Google, Yahoo and Bing. However these require you to check online regularly. And if you have a few hundred backlinks, it is difficult to pick out the most recent ones.

There is a way to get an automated Email notification when new backlinks become active, using Google Alerts. And it is for free. The only thing you need is a Gmail account, the log-in credentials Google uses for all its services.

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When you buy a piece of land, you have only a limited space to build the house of your dreams. When you design a blog, you have only a limited space to convey information. We call it “the blog real estate”.

The most precious real estate is the top of your homepage, the part a visitor sees when arriving at your blog. It is crucial you think about what information you want to display in that limited space.

Why? A typical occasional visitor will make up his/her mind to stay on your blog, in less than one minute. Between 20 and 57 seconds to be exact (see this post). He/she should, at the glance of an eye understand what your blog is all about, how to navigate through it, and what its key features are. Within less than a minute, we have to convince our adhoc visitor our blog is worth spending more time on.

In addition to ’seducing the adhoc visitor’, the prime real estate area of your blog is also the main working area. It is the safe harbour from which each visitor will start the voyage through your blog. It is also the safe harbour the visitor will return to after a trip through one or more posts. For instance: few visitors will look for the “home” link or main navigation features at the bottom of the page, will they? Nope, they will go back to your prime real estate: the top of your blog.

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Microsoft’s new search engine Bing has been released for about three months now. Have you checked how it returns keywords related to your blog? Or even more importantly, how would Bing compares to Google and Yahoo searches?

Michael Kordahi made it fun to compare the three search engines on his Blind Search site:

Enter any search argument and it returns three search results, one next to the other:

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“Throughout his career as a writer,” says Larry W. Phillips in Ernest Hemingway on Writing, “Hemingway maintained that it was bad luck to talk about writing.” Nevertheless the tips Phillips condensed into his book would be applicable to good blog writing too:

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