Beginning to Market a Blog

As a web designer, I have found many of my clients who are new to the internet want me to build them a blog (or website) as a marketing tool for their business. One web design client even demanded to know, one month after building his site, why it wasn't on the front page of a Google search! What many newbies to web design, and internet marketing do not realize, websites may be a great way to spread the word about your business, but a website or blog also needs to be marketed to find readers, especially when starting out.

The whole topic of internet marketing and marketing a blog or marketing a website is a complicated one, which changes as the technology does. However, there are a few things a new blogger or website owner can do to begin to promote your blog or website online.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, refers to setting up and writing the content for your blog in such a way as to rank higher by the search engines when someone types in a keyword or phrase. If you think about it, there are so many new blogs and websites being created all the time. The search engines must figure out which web pages best match the search a potential visitor to your blog is making. We can make their job a little bit easier by optmizing a blog (or website) for better search engine ranking for certain keywords.

1. Begin by Deciding What Your Blog's Keywords Are

What are your blog's keywords? A keyword is a word (or even a phrase) that describes the main concept. Think of it this way. If someone didn't know about your blog, but was doing a web search to look for the kind of information you have on your blog, what would they type into the search engines? Those would be the keywords you'd want to optimize your website for.

2. Research Those Keywords

To start, find out what words occur most often on your blog right now. You may be surprised (I know I was!). This is a keyword density checker, and it will tell you which words and phrases occur most often on your blog.

Now, research the keywords you are going to try to optimize for, to see which wording or phrases are the most common searches for those keywords, so you can optimize your blog or website for the keywords people search for most often, with the least amount of competition. You can do this by using a Keyword tool like Google's Keyword tool. Type in the word or phrase, and Google will tell you what the average monthly searches are, and about how many competing websites there are. Obviously, a keyword with high search volume but low competition is ideal.

3. Craft Blog Posts using Good Keywords

Use this process whenever you are crafting a new blog post. Research the keywords for your specific post, and be sure to use that keyword over and over again in your blog post, in a meaningful way. In other words, don't just fill the page with your keyword in the hopes of getting your blog noticed by search engines, but rather use the keyword or phrases in sentences as much as you can.

4. Get Incoming Links to your Blog

Search engines are also looking to see how many other people have linked to your blog or website. One easy way to get more links is to create an attractive, eye-catching banner ad for your blog, with copyable HTML so that others can easily put  a link to your blog on their website.

The actual topic of SEO can be a bit more complex than this, as I said before, but these tips should get you started.

Another simple way to market your blog more is to use social media tools like Twitter and Facebook. You can set up your blog to automatically post links to your new posts onto Twitter using Feedburner. After burning your feed using Feedburner, go to the "publicize" tab, and click on "socialize", and type in your Twitter information.

Facebook has a tool called Networked Blogs which allows you to post links to your blog posts, using your blog's RSS feed, as soon as you publish them. You can post the links to your personal Facebook wall or to a special Facebook page for your blog or business.