This is Part 1 of a Three Part Series on Promoting a New Blog

So, you have your blog up and running and you have written a couple of posts and gained a few comments. What is next for your new blog? Well, its pretty obvious your not going to get any traffic if you don’t get off your butt and start promoting yourself. The first step in promoting your blog is to make sure your readers have a good first impression of your site. A good site design and well written posts is a sure fire way you will hook your readers. A boring site and poorly written posts will turn readers off and they may never return. Before you go live with your blog make sure you have the site design down and a few ideas for your first posts.

The first thing, and probably the easiest thing, I did for promoting The Rookie Blogger is commenting on blogs with similar content. You are not going to get huge streams of traffic from this initially, but that isn’t the idea right now. Commenting on blogs with similar content will bring you a few hits. More importantly, you are building relationships. I think in the beginning of a blog this is more important then traffic. The traffic will come. For some blogs, like this one, it will be slow in the beginning. If you write interesting content, eventually you will make a name for yourself. The camaraderie you build in the beginning of your venture will not only help get the word out about your new blog, but may come back to help you down the road (guest writing, blogging partnerships, etc.).

What I am concentrating on now is reading as many blogs as I can on similar topics and commenting. There has been some questioning on whether commenting even helps your blog. Could you just be wasting your time? I don’t think so! Not only will you find many interesting and helpful bloggers out there - you are building relationships. These relationships can and will help your blog in the future. Stay tuned for Part 2 - Promoting a New Blog.