Promote your blog – 10 easy ways to get the word out

I was checking out the Blog Engage blog today and noticed that Brian is starting a cool weekly feature.  It is called the weekly word challenge and the way it works is bloggers in the community will create a post on their blog about the topic of the week.  This weeks topic is Marketing and Promotion.  These are two topics that I write about often, in fact, promoting your blog  is one of the four categories that I write about here on Tycoon Blogger.

I want to start of by saying that to me, Marketing and Promotion are two different (but related) concepts.  In my mind, marketing is more strategic in nature, you develop a plan, craft your message, deliver your message to your target audience and then acquire customers.  When I think about blog promotion, I think about getting the word out.  With that being said, I thought I would create a simple Top Ten post.

10 Easy Ways to get the word out about your blog

1. Comment on other blogs.  To maximize your effort, I suggest commenting on high traffic blogs and/or blogs that have comment luv installed.
2. Get active in forums. To maximize your effort, I suggest joining Digital Point, they let you create two signature links where you can promote your blog.  It is also a good idea to help others in the blogging section of that forum.
3. Publish some articles.  To maximize your effort, focus on the top couple article directories like Ezine Article and GoArticles.  These sites allow you to include a link to your blog in the author section.
4. Blog Directories – To maximize your effort, take a look at this top free blog directories post I wrote several months back.
5. Guest Post – Write some killer posts and instead of posting them on your own site, offer them up as guest posts on more popular blogs.  If you are interested in guest posting here, contact me and let me know.
6. Twitter- It is not the most popular word of 2009 for nothing.  Network with other bloggers on Twitter and they can help you get the word out. You can follow me on Twitter @tycoonblogger and I will follow you back and will RT your posts if they are good.
7. Facebook – I was late to the Facebook game for blog promotion but I have seen the light.  Quick and easy way to get the word out.
8. Join a Blog Network – If you are looking for free, check out Entrecard.  If you do not mind paying a bit and recouping it later, I recommend Adgitize.
9. Sponsor a contest – You can sponsor your own or other blogger’s contest.  Great way to get the word out.  My experience with “Rookie Blogger” contest confirms this.
10. Join Blog Engage – Seriously, this is a great way to connect with other bloggers and increase the exposure your blog.  To take it one step further, why not take part in the weekly word challenge.

What would you add to this list?

5 tips to get the most out of Sponsored Tweets

I have been writing a lot about the best ways to make money on Twitter and you may have read my posts, Sponsored Tweets vs. Adly or Sponsored Tweets or Adly Comparison this past month and I wanted to follow up on these posts and provide some tips to help you get the most out of Sponsored Tweets.  We might not be able to make thousands like John Chow but I believe we could make hundreds if we set things up correctly and keep at it.

If you haven’t signed up for Sponsored Tweets yet, just click on this link to get started.

Before I dive into the 5 things to keep in mind to get the most out of Sponsored Tweets , lets just go through a quick rundown of what this service is all about.  Basically, it is a service that connects Twitter users and advertisers and allows both parties to set their prices and criteria.  I have been using this service for about a month and I am very impressed and recommend it as it is the best one I have seen so far.  The one thing I have noticed is that it is a very competitve marketplace and their are a lot of Twitter users competing for advertising dollars.  With that being said, it is important that you are visible and that you get thing right so you are not passed over for opportunities.  Here are some tips to help you on your way.

5 tips to get the most out of Twitter

1. Your follower count – This one is pretty obvious, the more followers you have the greater the likelihood of get clicks, which is what the advertisers are looking for.  Based on what I see, it appears that you need at least 2,500 followers to get noticed in this community.  There are many ways to increase your Twitter followers and I will be writing about more later this week so stay tuned.
2. Pricing – It is important that you get this right, you do not want to price yourself out of consideration and you do not want to give it away either.  The cool part is that ST actually will suggest a price for you.  My suggestion is that you cut that price almost in half.  For me they suggested $4.00, I tried that for about a week and received no offers.  I changed it to $2.00 and the offers started rolling in.
3. Targeting- Most advertisers filter their search based on keywords.  It is important that you enter as many keywords that apply.  It is also a good idea to have your Twitter account name be reflective of your niche.  For example if your niche is travel, you may want to change your Twitter handle to @travel_guru or @travel4life.  You get the idea…
4. Friend/Follower ratio- This is also something that many advertisers will look at.  The assumption is that your Twitter status is stronger if more people follow you and you follow less.  If the ratio is closer to 1 to 1, the assumption is that people just follow you because you follow them.  It is wise to spend some time and trim your list of people you are following.  There are many services that can help you out with this and help you get rid of some of that dead weight.  This will help you with Sponsored Tweets and will also give you a more pleasurable Twitter experience overall.
5. Your FAR rate – FAR stands for follower activation rate and it is a measure of link click throughs.  The higher your rate, the greater the likelihood that advertisers will want to work with you.  You can help increase this rate bit engaging with your followers and building strong relationships.  Of course if you continue to tweet interesting links they will be “programmed” to click on all your stuff.

There you have it.  If you keep building a strong target following and continue to produce interesting tweets you will be well on your way to making good money with your Twitter account.  Remember, you will not get rich quick with this, like blogging, it takes time to build.  With the right techniques and patience the money will follow.

Click here to check out Sponsored Tweets

Here is my personal Twitter account – @followdankeller

Here is my Tycoon Blogger Twitter account – @tycoonblogger

Let me know if you are using Sponsored Tweets and if so how is it going?

Are you following me on Twitter?  If not, I encourage you to follow me, I will follow back!  Just let me know in the comments so I know…

Plugin that will help with your weekly roundup blog posts

I was checking out the Extreme John blog, like I do every day and came across an awesome post called 25 WordPress Plugins you might dig . One of the 25 that he mentioned really caught my attention and I decided to install it and give it a whirl.  After playing around with it, I am convinced that this plugin will save me a ton of time and make my blogging life much easier.

The plugin is called Instant Weekly Roundup .  Many of the blogs I visit do some sort a roundup, whether it is weekly or monthly or a best of series.  Having written several of these posts before I know first hand how labor intensive this can be.  I was actually preparing to write a 200th post best of series and was dreading it because of how much time it was going to take.  My whole outlook has changed since I started playing around with this plugin.

This plugin is so simple to use and with a few mouse clicks you can have your post completed.

Take a look at the screenshot below:

It is basically a three step process:

1.Enter in the date range

2.Enter in your header text and footer text

3.Click the box next to the posts that you want included.

That’s it, from there you copy and paste the generated code and click publish and you are good to go.

You can look for me to be writing much more round up posts from here on out.

What do you guys think ?  I am curious to hear your comments…

Do you do roundup posts on your blog?  If so, are you using any sort of plugin or doing it all by hand?

5 things Adam Lambert could teach you about blogging

Adam Lambert and Blog in the same sentence may seem a bit odd, especially here on a blog about making money blogging.  Stay with me on this one as I will attempt to draw some parallels between Adam Lambert and what you can learn from him to become a better blogger.

First off, if you do not know who Adam Lambert is you are probably either 70 years old or older or do not own a TV.  Last night Adam Lambert performed on the AMA’s and everyone is talking about it.  If you were on Twitter today, you know that he is one of the top 10 trending terms.

Here they are, 5 things Adam Lambert could teach you about blogging:

1. Promotion is key.  There is an age old debate in blogging, what is more important…Content or Promotion?  I think we can all agree that they are both essential ingredients but Adam Lambert proves that promotion is more important.  Did you hear him perform?  He did not sound good at all, he was clearly not as concerned with his music (content) as he has with the bigger picture.
2. Be yourself. A big part of the reason why Adam is popular is because he is unique.  He has been described as a cross between Kiss, Queen and Liza Manelli, but he clearly is in a class all his own.  As bloggers we can learn a big lesson about authenticity.  I see a lot of bloggers trying to emulate someone else.  Originality sells.
3. Packaging – Did you see any of the pictures from yesterday’s event?  Take a look at this shiny get up and the hair, makeup.  How much time and effort have you spent on your blog design?  Are you using a free template that looks like every other blog out there.  Design matters, the packaging of your blog makes a big difference and will help you stand out from the crowd.

   image credit - Tran/FilmMagic

4. Controversy Sells - Last night Adam did everything you can imagine to try to shock and awe an audience that has seen it all.  He treated his dancers like dogs, grabbed his crotch as if he was Michael Jackson, shoved a man’s face into his crotch and gyrated several times and then finished it off by kissing a dude.  Now I ask you this, do you think anyone would be talking about this if no of that happened.  I highly doubt he would be the fastest trending Twitter topic if he just went out there and sang his stupid song.  I am not saying you go out and kiss another guy but you can draw a lot of eyeballs to your blog if you post some controversial stuff.
5. Be Entertaining.  Whether you like Adam or hate him, it is hard to deny that he is entertaining.  It is like a train wreck, you just can’t look away.  I thought he sucked last night but I was entertained none the less.

So what do you think, any lessons learned, or do you think I lost my mind?  Let me know..

Check out my shiny new blog engage vote button

I finally added the blog engage plugin to my blog.  I have been talking about it for months and finally got around to doing it.  Guess what..it took less than 30 seconds, not sure why I waited so long.

What is Blog Engage?

Many serious bloggers already know all about Blog Engage and several famous bloggers like Extreme John and Hesham are big fans.  The leader in the Rookie Blogger contest, Gautam from Blog Godown is a proponent as well.  Blog Engage can best be described as a blog community where bloggers submit the links to their blog posts and other bloggers vote them up or down.  The top vote getters are pushed to the front page.  This community is similar to Mixx or Digg but better in the sense that you actually have a chance to get to the front and see a real traffic benefit form it.  I can go on and on about the benefits of using Blog Engage (I will write a separate post about that later on) but today I wanted to let you know about a very cool initiative that Brian (owner of BE) is rolling out.  Brian is offering to share his adsense earnings 50-50 with his members.  Pretty cool huh! That is not even the best part, you can bump your percentage to 75% just by putting a badge on your site and 100% for doing that and writing a post in your blog.

If you have never been to Blog Engage check it out!

If you have been before, check out the new arrangement, we all want to earn more adsense money, right?

Click here to read more about it on Brian’s blog