Promoting your blog with a few bucks

When it comes to blog promotion the free methods are the ones which are used the most and many of the most famous blogs today started their run with the help of these methods, but currently most of the free promotional methods are getting saturated and are not as effective as they once used to be. Methods link blog commenting, article marketing and forum marketing still have a lot of potential to create more millionaires, but its not as easy as it once used to be.

Its my kind advice that you start off and create the first audience for your blog with these free methods itself, but taking your blog to the next level requires a few bucks which I think most of you will have after you build a small audience. These advertising techniques are sure to grow your blog very fast mainly because you’ll be doing both together. I don’t mean to say that the value of this campaign will be $100, because its valued way more than that, but the $100 is something you’ll be putting out of your pockets.

The first thing is I want you to do is to launch all of these campaigns at once and keep up your normal promoting schedule, as this brings in a hell lot of exposure. So if you follow this I’m sure you can touch 1000 daily visitors and you can get more if you well target your ads and optimize your images. The traffic is sure to come in, but the question is how your planning to retain that traffic, this is the most important of all because its really not worth spending this much every month to advertise your blog. So before you opt to this its highly necessary that you create a blog with great content and design with highly sticky posts.

Google adwords

When it comes to advertising, Google Adwords is of course the best, not only is it cost effective, but also targeted which is easy to convert into sales and repeat visits. There are many things to consider when launching a campaign on Adwords, the success depends on how smartly you invest rather than how much.

Adwords provides you with a huge sophisticated dashboard, which is really useful, but a bit confusing for newbies, so first of all read a guide about using Adwords and play around with a few things so that you understand it better before launching your campaign. I’d say that the best resource for newbies would be the adwords quality guide.

The next part would be to optimize your blog for this, your aim must be to generate returning visits, enough page views and also convert the traffic into subscribers. For this I’d say that sending that traffic to your welcome page instead of your home page will give better results. Your welcome page must contain a brief description about your blog and why you must read it and later on put a email subscribe form and in the end list all your posts, neatly categorized.

Now its time to launch the campaign, I did this with the help of a adwords coupon I had got via Hostgator, which was worth around $100, but I still had to pay $10 to activate my account. This was really efficient and resulted in huge traffic and the campaign is still running and will be exhausted in the end of this month, after which I’ll be funding it again. Finding Adword coupons is not as easy as it once used to be, you can find these only on their partner sites which give them to you only for purchases, but its not impossible.

Adgitize

This is a small and upcoming network which has not yet made it big. This is something you can take advantage of, because their ad prices currently stand at just $14 per month for a 125*125 advertisement which will be showed across hundreds of blogs. If you own a tech or make money online blog your sure to get around 6000 monthly visitors for the same price.

Adgitize pays its publishers in points, which is generated for clicks and impressions and if you can generate 300 points a day which comes from clicks and impressions on ads and a extra hundred for advertising, so if you do this all, then you’ll get back your investment in the very same month.

The true success of Adgitize depends on your ad creative, so make sure you create the most attractive 125*125 advertisement possible and try to get it animated. The traffic doesn’t convert well if you send it towards the homepage or any post, so like above use your welcome page or else the most recommended would be a page were you give away a gift or something as an incentive to subscribe.

Facebook advertisement

I’m sure most of you would have realized by now about the importance of Facebook in your blog marketing and nothing is complete without a fan page on Facebook. The best method for promoting your fan page is to suggest it to your friends and ask your friends to the same, but if you want to make it grow faster with quality fans, then an advertising campaign is required.

You can advertise your blog itself, but it results in very high bounce rate and moreover an existing community on Facebook will be one of your most powerful assets. If you send traffic to your blog, it would mostly result in 2% or 3% in conversions, but it’ll touch 10% to 15% when your advertising your fan page. Moreover this is also a great way to get return visits and send your posts viral.

Finding Facebook coupons is pretty easy, just a few minutes of search will land you with one, and Facebook itself is running a promotional offer currently with $25 if free advertising credit for first time advertisers.

Entrecard

I’m sure all of you have heard about entrecard, which recently rose to fame and has attracted millions of bloggers. This can be a great source of traffic and almost everyone has a chance to grow traffic with this. There is no need for any marketing plan or any sophisticated idea to make this work, the more drops you get the more traffic you can get.

I never got the time to be active on entrecard, but on the days when I used to drop 15 to 20 cards, I was sure to get 7 to 8 visits and it used to remain constant for almost a week. The best way to gain traffic via entrecard is to use your cards to advertise on other blogs listed, if you don’t have enough cards, you can buy them for as low as $3 for 1000 ecs.

Entrecard also allows you to buy full advertising on their network for just $10, this includes showing your ads on hundreds of other blogs. However I haven’t tried this yet, so don’t know about its efficiency. The thing about entrecard is that the number of credits you spend to advertise your blog can be quickly regained by placing their widget as many of them will notice your blog in the market place.

Send out a press release

Press releases are one of the most used ways to convey information for corporates and after the birth of internet press releases, its become an efficient way to gain backlinks and exposure. I have seen many bloggers who claim to have reached PR 3 or 4 with the means of just a single press release, one of them includes Micheal Dunlop.

You cannot hope to get good traffic via press releases unless your launching some sort of product or service, but your sure to get a hell lot of search engine exposure. For a blog, the best thing to do will be to promote an ebook, so if I just launched a free ebook on my blog I’d say ‘Teenage blogger launches his master piece – Make money online’.

Press releases range from $10 to $1000, usually depending on the the media attention they’ll get, so for a blog the main media would be other blogs and if you have a pretty big blog then you can target mainstream media.

Pay for getting popular on Digg

During the past few days I have established contacts with a few power digg users, who are usually successful in getting their submissions popular. They take advantage of this and all of them sell these services to other bloggers. I am sure all of you know the result of getting on to Digg’s front page, these guys ask their contacts to digg n their submissions or use their powerful accounts for these.

Only money isn’t enough for this, you’ll loose everything if your post isn’t good enough for the front page, so its recommended to have a post on a universal topic and the best performing are lists and entertaining posts. The traffic from Digg isn’t very targeted either, so to monetize the heavy traffic CPM or CPV advertisements work the best.

These services range from $10 to $200 depending on the success rate, its recommended that you don’t go for the cheap ones because you may stand to loose your entire investment. Another tough thing with this is that its tough to find such users, they never publicly disclose this due to the fear of getting banned, so their blogs will be a good place.

On to our readers

There are many other ways to advertise your blog with the help of a few bucks, thats why I say that blogging is meant for success if you have money to invest and invest it wisely. So even if you don’t, monetize your blog initially and try to earn money so that you can reinvest it.

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