Get That Brilliant Blog Read!

Here's an article about blogging that I recently wrote for 1888articles.com that I thought was worth posting here.


So, you’ve written an awesome blog entry. Now you want it to be read. You can’t wait for the comments to pour in telling you how brilliant you are as a writer and as an intellectual. You hit the submit button and feel like you’re emulating the shining writer’s aura!

A minute or two later you look at the blog to see how many have read it. No one has.
No one?

The right corner of your mouth turns up ever so slightly and you squint. You crack your knuckles, stretch and hit the refresh page. Two reads! No comments...

You browse the tracker and find out you’re the reader, both times.
You read it again and still believe firmly that every word gelled, meshed, gave you goose bumps and you know in your very core that this is a brilliant piece of writing that begs to be read.

How will you get your brilliant words noticed? How can you get people to read them?

Here are a few tips to get that brilliantly written blog read without your having to resort to Spamming. There are so many blogs out there that brilliantly written blogs can be lost in the masses if they aren’t marketed. Marketing and advertising your blog is the best way to get it noticed.

You can launch that sucker out into cyberspace with flashing lights and confetti raining down on it so that people can’t help but notice it.

How?

First of all, is the title catchy?
A catchy title can reel them in. You don’t want to mislead people but you want to catch their attention so that they can’t resist clicking that link when they see it wherever it turns up. Don’t mislead them either. I once really wanted an e-mail read by my colleagues so I entitled it, “Liquor and Free Stuff.” It got read but I got scolded for resorting to such dirty pool tactics. Reel them in but don’t tick them off.

Is your blog categorized well? Do you have the right categories in place as for filing it? Be sure that you do so it’ll get read. A good way to further categorize your blog is to tag it. The tagging of blogs creates a directory of sorts so that people can find your blog easier. The more it gets read, the closer to the top of the tag cloud it gets. Technorati.com is a great tagging place that offers lots of resources.

Ping Your blog. There are services that send notifications out to the blogosphere that helps people interested in your subject know that you’ve updated your blog. This can help you get more readers. Pingomatic is a great pinging service.

Add RSS services so that people who like your blog can subscribe to it. If you’ve got a niche topic such as decorating, parenting, freelance writing, etc. you can get yourself a fan base of people who will come back and read more. This is like an elevated status of bookmarking. Instead of your readers having to manually check your blog, the RSS feature notifies them when you’ve written a new entry. RSS also feeds your blog to many news feeds all over.

Social book marking. Social book marking lets people on that social book marking site/community know when you’ve updated your blog or see something that you think others might find interesting. Book marking your blog is like giving it a positive review and telling people on social networking sites to have a read. It can be very beneficial especially if you use a social book marking aggregator to help you. An aggregator submits to multiple book marking services at once. I like Onlywire.com. It submits to over a dozen and plugs into my Firefox browser.

Read your blog. Yes, re-reading it can be like recirculation for it. Put it back into the blogosphere by editing a small chunk or reading it which will put it out there into services that show most recently read entries.

Comment on other people’s blogs of similar subjects and put a link for your blog into the reply. Learning some basic html can help you do this. Be sure to save it for when it counts otherwise it’s considered Spamming. If you have five different blog subjects you want to get out there, look at the tags on Technorati and comment on those blogs with something like, “I enjoyed your blog about scrap booking and wrote an interesting scrap booking post on my blog recently too, if you’d like to take a look”. Post the link in your reply. You could have the blogger stop by and read your blog as well as other readers of their blog.

If you feel that your piece of writing is something that demands to be read, also consider placing it in free article directories. Your catchy title and your categories can get it read and give you great search engine exposure.

Happy Blogging!