While Technorati may be tracking 107.6 million blogs it doesn’t mean that all of these blogs will still be active by the end of the year – in fact approximately 55% of blogs don’t make it past the first three months. In order to ensure that your blog doesn’t suffer the same fate there are a few things you can do:
List your blog on blog directories: while they’re not as popular as search engines many Internet users do in fact visit them while looking for information. Examples include: Google’s blog directory and blogcatalog.Ping web services with your updated content: Sites like ping-o-matic and FeedShark offer a service whereby they ping multiple web services, blog directories and search engines to let them know that your blog has fresh content.
Use Trackbacks: If a blogger writes a new entry commenting on, or referring to, an entry on your blog, and both blogging tools support the Trackback protocol, then the commenting blogger can notify your blog with a “Trackback ping”; the receiving blog will typically display summaries of, and links to, all the commenting entries below the original entry. This allows for conversations spanning several blogs that readers can easily follow.
Participate in the Blogosphere: You can’t expect anyone to engage on your blog if you’re not engaging on theirs. It’s all about fostering a sense of community.
Make use of aggregators: Examples of aggregators include Technorati, Amatomu and Afrigator (take another look at the third part of our series on Social Media for a recap on these websites and what they can do for you).
Use traffic generating tools like MyBlogLog: The MyBlogLog widget allows you to see who in the MyBlogLog community has visited your site and they can see it if you have visited their site in return. Bloggers will more often than not click through to your site from this widget as they are interested in learning more about who is reading their blog. If they like what they see when they get there they may become regular readers.
Other Articles in the How To... Social Media Series :
- Part 1: Social Media - The down low
- Part 2: Social Networking - You can never have too many friends
- Part 3: Social Bookmarking and Aggregating - Avoiding overload
- Part 4: Content Sharing - So hot right now
- Part 5: Blogging - Starting a blog baby, starting a blog
