You shouldn’t pack it up and call it a day after you write and publish a blog post. In fact, after you publish a blog post, you should look at it as being the beginning of your day rather than the end of the day. I’ll admit, this strategy is new for me; however, it works. My traffic has increased so much over the last few weeks and partly due to what I have done after I publish the post.

If getting traffic to your newly published article is important to you, then you’re going to need to reach out and pull people in to view your post. It is your blog and it is your responsibility to capture the attention of people. Again, that is assuming that you care about having people read your posts. Some bloggers just blog to pass the time and don’t care who or how many people read it.

How Attractive Is Your Post Title and First Paragraph?

First thing is that you really need to write something special. Your post really needs to reach out and grab someone within the first few seconds of reading. The blog post title is extremely important. In many cases, the post title is the deciding factor whether someone even gives your post a chance.

If your post title is hot, then you’ll get people to visit the page. However, very quickly thereafter - within the first few sentences - if your writing doesn’t continue to interest the person reading the post, they will quickly lose interest and not continue to read your post. The post title and the first paragraph of your posts have to be spot on and be an attention grabber.

Don’t Waste Your Material.

Lately, in more recent posts, I have been suggesting that people reduce their post volume down a bit. To me, it seems pointless to publish new content until your most recent post has reached its maximum exposure. How do you determine the maximum exposure rate? Well, I am sure there is more of an analytical way to determine this, but for me, I relate my maximum exposure rate to cooking popcorn in the microwave.

When you cook popcorn in the microwave, the instructions on the bag say, “stand by the microwave oven and listen for the popping sound to slow down. Do not wait for the popping sound to completely stop before turning off the microwave oven.” I use those same set of instructions with my blog. In other words, I monitor how many times my most recent post has been viewed, I monitor the number of interactions (e.g. comments) the post has had and I observe when the traffic has hit its peek and comments start to dwindle down. To me that is how I determine when it’s time to publish a new post.

Marketing and Promoting Your Blog Post

After a new post has been published on a blog, most people will wrap things up and call it a day. This is far from what you should be doing. Publishing your post is really only a fraction of the work that you need to invest in. Most of your time needs to be invested into marketing and promoting your blog and most recent blog post.

How Do You Market And Promote Your Blog?

Well, this has been a recent huge focus for me. I have been studying, testing and trying to figure out some of the most effective ways to promote my blog and my posts. What I have been doing is far from a master plan or anything like that, but I can tell you that it has really helped me to get more people to read what I write and visit my blog.

Email Newsletter Subscription VS FeedBurner

I have found that promoting a free newsletter on my blog is more effective than promoting my FeedBurner subscription options. In many ways, this really does make sense. For me -and I believe it would be safe to assume that the same goes for many others - my Google Reader is filled to the maximum. At any given time, my Google Reader tells me that I have 1000+ unread posts. However, my email inbox only has less than 100.

If the same is true for other people, then when I write a blog post and then write an email to my list subscribers in Aweber, my notification gets bumped ahead of everyone else. In the game of marketing, I have to believe that I am really not much different than other people. And in doing so, I know that email takes a huge priority over RSS feeds.

The number one way to promote your newly published content on your blog is by establishing an email list and using it to notify people when you have written something new and cool on your blog. FeedBurner provides an email notification service, which I feel is better to promote than your FeedBurner RSS feed, but even that is still far from being as powerful as sending out a personalized email to your subscribers. I use Aweber for my email newsletter needs. you can sign up or learn more.

Social Bookmarking and Networking For Marketing and Promoting

Sites like Digg.com, StumbleUpon.com, Propeller.com and Sphinn.com all have their special blend of people who are primarily interested in certain topics. Contributing in social bookmarking sites is a very effective way to market and promote your blog and content within. However, your primary topic of choice will dictate which social bookmarking site works best for you. You need to invest time into researching many social bookmarking sites and not limit yourself to the just the four sites listed above. There are many different sites that hoard a lot of people who have specific interests (e.g. ActiveRain caters to the real estate niche).

Effective Method For Social Network Marketing and Promoting

There is a right way and a wrong way to market and promote your blog in the social networking and bookmarking sites. Each community has their own set of written rules as well as community based unwritten rules (e.g. what you do to be cool within the group). Most places such as Digg.com and StumbleUpon.com, discourage and frown upon others who submit their own content into their network.

The main reason why it isn’t good to submit your own content is because history usually repeats itself and most all people who submit their own content are doing it for the wrong intentions. Many consider this as spam. Many people know that the primary purpose for an individual to submit their own content is for the purpose of getting more traffic and exposure. That breaks the unwritten social community rules of engagement.

The community also understands that most people who do submit their own content will do so regardless of the level of quality. All in all, it is not advisable to submit your own content into social networking or bookmarking sites. The goal is to have other people do it for you.

How Do You Get Listed Without Doing It Yourself?

This is a slow growth process. In order to be successful with marketing and promoting your blog and content in social networking and bookmarking sites, you need to downplay the real reason why you are there and or just forget about your original intention or marketing and promoting your blog for awhile. If community members perceive that you are engaging into their network for the purpose of promoting your blog and content then they will likely not become a social networking buddy with you.

The key to success in social networking is having friends. So anything that you do to prevent gaining friendships in social networking sites is bad. Real bad! Gaining the trust and respect of others in social networking sites shouldn’t be hard, but make no mistake, it doesn’t happen overnight either. It’s a slow growth process.

In the long run, if you successfully establish yourself into one or two social networking / bookmarking sites, then your friends will automatically and naturally submit your content into the network voluntarily. The ultimate goal is to carry yourself well and build up a level of trust and respect with your peers within the social network to the point to where they submit your content and market and promote it for you.

How Do You Get In Good With The Social Networks?

Forget about your blog. You have to play the game and be the best at it. First, you have to recognize what the majority of the community members are interested in. Then you need to be the best at delivering the things the community wants. Be a contributor. View the profiles of members within the social networking community and observe the type of content they submit into the network. Cherry pick people and find individuals who share similar interests to the content that you typically publish on your blog. Select a handful of these people and cling to them.

Participate in their campaigns, vote or rate the content they submit into the network, visit their own blogs and read and comment on their posts. Submit or vote on content they have written and slowly over time, begin to build up an establishment of trust and respect with this selected handful of cherry picked individuals. Slowly, they will see your level of commitment and level of contribution.

The way most of these networks are set up, the members of your group will really have no choice but to recognize your efforts as everything you do within the network is documented. As time goes by, your name, your avatar and your profile will begin to be noticeable within your cherry picked group. Soon the tables will turn and you’ll hit the breaking point from being a newbie to an authority within your group. When that happens, people within your group will start to plug, rate, submit and or vote for your content instead of the other way around.

During this time as you’re attempting to conquer and become the authority in one group, you need to constantly be repeating the process in another. Commonly you will start to discover that these micro groups intertwine as you’ll start to see familiar faces from one one group to another group. This is a good thing!

What About Search Engines and Directories?

The reason why I am not talking much about search engines is for the fact that SEO is really a no brainer. People tend to over complicate SEO. Making a blog or web site friendly for search engines is not rocket science. The true challenge in getting hoards of traffic to your blog or web site is not in scoring traffic from search engines. If your web site or blog is built correctly, then search traffic will naturally come as your web site, blog and content within will rank accordingly in the search results.

The true challenge that is close to rocket science is in social networking. The reason being is simple. With Google, you’re trying to butter up to a computer program. Computer programs don’t have good days or bad days. Computer programs don’t base their decision to approve you, your blog or your content off emotion, personality or personal interest.

A computer program has a specific set of rules and instructions and regardless of who you are as an individual, race, gender, religious beliefs, etc… Google and all automatic search engines will still subject you to the same standards as everyone else. Search engines don’t care if you’re female, black, white, gay, satanic, etc. They care about content and ranking it accordingly.

The same is not true in social networking sites. In social networking sites you’re dealing with people and you’re attempting to harness the power of people within a mass group towards using them to market and promote your blog and content within.

In the long run of things, social networkings sites can harness more power than a search engine. I believe that word of mouth marketing is much more powerful and effective than any other form of marketing. Word of mouth marketing typically results in a higher success rate for the desired action. With that being said, in my opinion, social networking / bookmarking sites is the same as word of mouth marketing but on steroids.

Ranking in Google and other search engines is easy. The results are decent, but far from being as effective as getting a solid word of mouth lead. When a trusted friend tells you about a new and cool web site, more likely you’re going to check it out. When a trusted friend in a social networking site submits your content into the network, the only difference is instead of that person telling one person about your blog post, that person is telling thousands. The result is so powerful that literally thousands of people will come crashing into your site within hours.

I hope that you found this article helpful. I would totally appreciate if you took this moment to drop me a comment and share your thoughts. I would also appreciate being rewarded with your vote, rating or submission of this post into your favorite social networking / bookmarking site. As I had just mentioned, word of mouth marketing is very powerful. You’re small contribution of helping spread the word about this article carries a magnitude of power. Help me continue to help others by telling your friends about my blog and specifically this article.

To encourage you to share this article with others, I have converted this article into a free full high quality and downloadable mini eBook. You can download a copy here and share with others.