the better blogging promo

It’s Day Three of my participating in the 31DBBB project, so it’s blog post promo day here at the fringe.

From The Book:

Having hit “publish” on your post yesterday, don’t just leave it to chance that people will read your post. Be proactive and spend a little time today giving it some nudges to help it on its way.

I was actually very skeptical of the 31DBBB project once I got my hands on The Book last night, and that very likely showed in my approach to the assignment for yesterday’s post. I didn’t think anyone but my regular readers would show up to read it. And maybe it would have been only my regular readers if I hadn’t found a little extra time in my cubiffice to hang out in the comment section of the Day Two post. I replied to comments both there and here at the fringe. I visited a few new blogs. My blog traffic was triple an average Tuesday, and I really enjoyed meeting new bloggers. That’s mutually beneficial front end promotion.

Twitter can sometimes be deceptively one-sided. It looks as though there could be an exchange of information and ideas, but very often, it’s a cacophony of colliding self-interests. My take on this, my blog post on that and—holy cow—buy buy buy this product from me. My own blog posts are automatically streamed to Twitter the minute they are published, yet I very rarely see a visitor to this blog because of it. How many of my regular readers are on Twitter? About four. How many readers have I picked up directly because of Twitter? About three. In a year. But the streaming costs me nothing, and the WordPress plug-in handles it in the middle of the night, so there’s that.

The Book suggests pitching to other bloggers. Uh, no. The high-traffic blogger who seems friendly and open enough is probably operating her blog like a business, and my pitch would be ignored anyway. If it’s a smaller blog like this one, who needs a pitch? Join her community, comment on her posts, exchange lovely emailed pleasantries. Let the relationship come naturally, not from you-link-to-me-and-I’ll-link-to-you emptiness. No pitching.

Social bookmarking is another suggestion that requires far more self-promotion than I’m willing to try, even though there are links to several bookmarking sites beneath this post. I can’t imagine my kids or the now infamous birthday weekends with Q ever making the front page of Digg, and StumbleUpon hasn’t quite completed its comeback attempt from 2006. Come to think of it, neither has Digg. Anyway: tiny niche blogs are tiny niche blogs for a reason.

I do love my internal links. Did you know I use more than 1200 tags on this blog? If it’s hyperlinked, I’ve tagged that word at least three times, so there are at least three posts mentioning it. I also have a sitemap that organizes my blog for Google and other search engines for anyone surfing the ‘net looking for whatever this space has to offer on a lonely Saturday night. Very effective backend promotion techniques.

Behaving yourself and actually completing your assignments in comments…