Promote your website without a blog
Posted by Administrator (boyd) on Jan 06 2009
Website design and development blog >> Search Engine Optimisation

Writing your own blog is a great way to promote your business, but lets face it. It's hard work. You need to create interesting, and on topic articles to attract readers, and then you have to do it again, and again, to keep them.

If you aren't blogging at least a few times per week, then you are unlikely to attract the regular readers that you need to create the community that will make your blog successful.
So if writing your own blog is too hard, why not use someone else's blog?

Blogs thrive on community discussion; comments. And the vast majority of bloggers welcome comments to their posts. In many cases it gives them the feedback that inspires them to keep blogging, and it helps them with their own search engine rankings and internet marketing, so almost every blog you find will allow comments.

Commenting on someone else's blog can help you to promote your website in two ways.

1. By writing a short intelligent response with a link to your website, you can attract visitors directly.
2. If you comment on the right type of blog, this link will also generate a valuable “on topic” back link to your website, which will help to improve your search engine rankings.

The right type of blog

When I look at potential blogs to promote my business in, there are a number of factors to consider. Ideally I want a “yes” to all of the following.

• Firstly: Is the blog on topic? Or, are the readers likely to become my customers? You can probably work this out quite quickly by reading a few posts.
• Secondly: Is the blog popular? One way to get a rough idea is to check the Google Page Rank, but a better way is to have a good look at the activity on the blog. What are the dates of the last 5 posts, and how many comments do they have? If it's out of date, or nobody is commenting then it's probably not worthwhile.
• Third: Are the posts easy to comment on? You should find them interesting and within your range of expertise so that you can come across as a bit of an expert, and so that you can comment easily and quickly.
• Fourth, and for my money, the most important: Is the blog a “do follow” blog or a “no follow” blog? This is slightly technical, but basically the link you get when you write your blog post will have code that looks something like this:
  <a href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com”>Your website</a>
  Or it might look like this:
  <a rel="”nofollow” href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com”>Your website</a>
  Note the rel="”nofollow”. If your potential blog has this in the code, then the link will not be recognised by Google and many other search engines, and so it will not help your search engine rankings. It is a “No follow” blog.

Do follow blogs can be hard to find, so here are two directories to get you started:
http://www.dofollowdirectory.com/
http://www.dofollowblogs.com/

A word of warning

There is nothing more annoying for a dedicated blogger than people blatantly self promoting. Most blogging software will have facilities to block your email address or IP to stop you from participating if your comments are not of a sufficiently high quality.
Keep your comments relevant and interesting, as if you were posting them on your own website.

So let's get started

Find three good blogs, bookmark them, then make a point of commenting on at least one post every week. After a few weeks you will have a number of quality back links to your website, and you will have started building your online reputation.

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