Submitting To Directories
There are hundreds of directories out there that let you submit your blog to them for free (there are also some paid ones). This will not only help increase your traffic by people looking through the directories and finding your blog, but it will also help you to get backlinks to your blog. A lot of blog directories have a high page rank and this in turn will help you to rank in the search engines.
Doing this manually is very time consuming and a bit tedious, so I recommend using a software tool such as Brad Cullen’s free Directory Submitterhttp://directorysubmitter.imwishlist.com/ that will automatically do it for you.
Submitting RSS Feeds
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds allow readers of your blog to automatically receive any updates for you blog as they happen. The great thing is, Wordpress automatically creates an RSS Fed for your blog.
Submitting your RSS Feed to RSS Feed sites will help give you more high PR backlinks which will help with your SEO and rankings.
Do a search for RSS Feed Feeder sites that you can submit your RSS Feed to.
Pinging Your Blog
Pinging your blog will notify the Search Engines of your blog’s content, since the search engines are always scanning the net trying to pick up any new content. By pinging your blog you will speed up the process of getting all the pages of your blog indexed.
There are also a lot of sites out there that publish any new content found on the web. By pinging your blog you will also notify these sites of your new content.
Here are a couple of free pinging sites to ping your blog on:
http://www.pingomatic.com
http://www.just-ping.com
http://www.pingthatblog.com
Social Bookmarking
If you social bookmark your blog you will not only get more high PR backlinks, you will also get more traffic by people finding your on social bookmarking sites and visiting your site.
Make sure to bookmark every single post you make.
There are dozens of social bookmarking and web 2.0 sites out there that you can submit your blog posts to. Doing this can be very time consuming though so I suggest using some kind of software to automatically social bookmark your posts for you.
Here are a couple of popular ones that are also free:
http://www.onlywire.com
http://www.socialposter.com
Also remember, there’s the plugin we talked about earlier that can automatically do submissions with Onlywire.com every time you publish a new post:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-onlywire-auto-poster/
Article Marketing
Article marketing is very popular and has always been a very effective way to not only get backlinks, but also traffics from interested readers. The key here is great quality content that leaves the reader wanting more.
It’s fairly easy to come up with new articles because you can just use material from the blogs posts you’ve written. Try to submit your articles to the top articles directories, but try not to double-up on content. Try to re-write your articles a bit to change it up and avoid duplicate content.
Here’s a few of the top article directories I recommend:
http://www.ezinearticles.com
http://www.articlesbase.com
http://www.suite101.com
http://www.buzzle.com
http://www.helium.com
http://www.articlesnatch.com
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.articlealley.com
http://www.articledashboard.com
Article Writing Tips:
The headline is one of the most important parts of your article. Try to create a catchy headline that creates curiosity. Here are a few good ways to format your headline:
Top 5 Ways To….. (Using numbers)
Would You Dump Your Boyfriend For $100,000? (Using questions)
Discover the Secret Method To….. (Using words like ‘discover’ ‘secret’ etc)
Because submitting your articles to many articles directories at once can be very time consuming and tedious, here’s some free software that can help automate this process for you:
http://articlesubmitter.imwishlist.com/
In my next blog article I will go over video marketing.