They’re waiting to read your blog! At Liberty Hall in Tyler Texas (photo by Sheila Scarborough)

Unless your blog is a completely noncommercial, hobbyist diary project, you may occasionally want someone to read it, look at your photos and watch your videos.

Creating content is only the first step in online publishing; the next steps involve helping people to find what you have created.

One exception to this is linking out as you write …. when you link out from your blog to background information or a resource site, those are seen as inbound links, or backlinks, on the back end of the recipient blog.

Most bloggers are curious sorts and compulsively check our blog’s data like to click back through to see what you’re saying and what you’re all about. That’s why it is important to pay attention to who links to you, and respond when you can by leaving a friendly comment on the post, even if it’s just, “Thanks for the mention!”

Ways To Spread The Word About Your Blog

Blog publicity happens via a whole ecosystem of online and face-to-face interaction ….

**  It happens via your comments on other people’s blogs or in an online forum, because your name on a comment is usually a hyperlink back to your blog (so think before you comment.) I still see traffic to my blog from comments I left on other blogs years ago.

**  It happens via Facebook through the blog post link that you put in your status update on either a personal profile or business Page. Don’t auto-feed posts to Facebook; take the time to craft an interesting update that includes tagging the people or organizations that you mention in your blog post.

**  It happens via LinkedIn the same way, on personal profiles, LinkedIn Company Pages and Group discussions. Again, don’t auto-feed posts to LinkedIn; take the time to create an update that includes tagging the people or organizations that you mention in your blog post, because yes, you can now tag on LinkedIn.

**  It happens via Google+ the same way, on both personal profiles and on G+ business pages. Again, don’t auto-feed posts to Google+; take the extra 2 minutes to tag the people or organizations that you mention in your blog post.

**  It happens via Twitter, both because your blog URL should be listed in your Twitter bio, and from the occasional post URL of your own that you tweet. You don’t just auto-post everything onto your Twitter stream, do you?  Good – didn’t think so, because then you can’t include Twitter handles or hashtags that are a good fit.

Note:  not every hashtag takes kindly to people dumping their links into hashtagged conversations. Do some research before you append a hashtag to a tweet, especially when it’s really just you doing self-promotion. Some hashtags are OK with it: for example, try the #TBEX or #TTOT hashtags in tweets about your travel-related blog posts.

**  It happens via StumbleUpon, which is especially nice when someone Stumbles one of your posts. Give back;  Stumble other people’s good content.

**  It happens when you bookmark on Delicious. Here are the Tourism Currents destination marketing links on Delicious (Update – Delicious bookmarking is now sadly defunct, so I had to remove the link) which can be a very helpful research site for curated links.

** It happens via Flickr photos, which are often found in Google searches IF you’ve titled, tagged and described them with keywords. I also try to remember to put applicable blog post links in the description of photos that I put online. Here’s one of my Edmonton, Canada photos with a link, as an example.

**  It happens via YouTube videos; put links in the description of those, too.

**  It happens via email – when people see your blog’s hyperlinked URL in your email signature line. Don’t clutter up your email signature with all of your social media links; only include the ones that really matter, like your own website and blog.

**  It happens when people see your blog’s URL on your business card. Pretty basic, but I don’t see it often enough.

And finally, it happens when you go Old School and meet people in person at conferences and networking events, and you mention your blog if it is appropriate.

Be everywhere, representing your work. Be ubiquitous, along with your content.

Marketing happens OFF of the blog.

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