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Posted: 08 Apr 2009 03:21 AM PDT

Yesterdays task in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge was to write a ‘list post’ on your blog. Hopefully you’ve had a chance to write that up and publish it by now.

Today we’re going to take that post and attempt to drive some readers to it.

Today’s Teaching on Promoting Blog Posts:

Blog Promotion is something that most bloggers have tried to do in many ways - however one mistake that I see a lot of bloggers making in their attempts to find new readers is that they only ever promote their blog as a whole. Their promotion is all about driving traffic to their blogs home page URL.

While there’s nothing wrong with this - I personally have had A LOT more success in promoting individual posts than my blogs front page. That’s what we are going to do today.

Having hit publish on your post yesterday - don’t just leave it to chance that your post will be read by people. Be more proactive than that and spend a little time today giving it some ‘nudges’ to help it on its way.

I know quite a few have already done some of this by leaving a link on our previous post promoting your link (some of your are reporting quite good traffic from doing it) but lets go a step further and find some ways to promote your post in other networks outside of ProBlogger.

11 Ways to Promote a Blog Post

note: please be careful in using these techniques. Don’t use them all with every post you write. Choose your best posts and promote them selectively and in ways that are useful to other people.

1. Pitching Other Bloggers - asking another blogger to consider linking to your post. note: there’s a real art to this - read more on how to do it at 11 Ways to Increase Your Chances of Being Linked to By a Blogger.

2. Social Messaging - what social networks like Twitter and Facebook are you a part of? Attempt to leverage these to promote your post. The key is not to incessantly spam your followers and friends with your link - but use your network to ’seed’ the link and let your followers spread word of it for you (this won’t happen every time but as your network grows it can become more and more powerful).

3. Social Bookmarking - promoting selective links on a site like Digg or StumbleUpon can lead to amazing results. Further reading on this topic at How to Get to the Front Page of Digg and Using Social Media Sites to Grow Your Blog’s Traffic.

4. Internal Links - don’t just promote your post on other people’s sites - think about where you can link to it from within your own site. Perhaps you’ve written on the topic before and can add a link for further reading, perhaps adding a section in your sidebar for ‘latest posts’ could work. Internal linking won’t drive heaps of new traffic but it can help with SEO and increase page views.

5. Newsletters - if you have an email newsletter list - shoot out an email to your list about your latest post.

6. Other Blogs Comments Sections and Forums - leaving helpful and insightful comments on forums or other blogs can be great at driving traffic if your comment is genuine, relevant and sensitive to the discussion. Leaving a link is sometimes also appropriate if highly relevant.

7. Email Signatures - Adding links to your blog to your outgoing emails is fairly common place - but whatever including links to recent posts instead of just your blog’s front page URL.

8. Followup Posts - write a new post on your blog that picks up where your last one left off. This builds momentum and if you inter-link the posts drives more page views.

9. Advertise Your Post - for posts that you’re particularly proud of and that are well received by readers you might even consider a mini ad campaign with a small budget using a service like AdWords or StumbleUpon advertising. Further Reading on this at Run a StumbleUpon advertising campaign on your blog.

10. Pitch Mainstream Media - occasionally posts will be relevant to mainstream media. You want to really pick a highly interesting post for this - it’s not something for every day.

11. Article Marketing - I wouldn’t recommend submitting exactly the same article you’ve posted on your blog to article marketing sites (this can get you into trouble with Google penalties for duplicate content) but I know of a few bloggers who rewrite their key articles for article marketing.

Of course there are many other ways to promote posts. Feel free to tell us how you do it in comments below.

Please note: don’t do all of the above things for every single post on your blog. I personally tend to pick 1-2 posts a week to give a push and let others grow organically.

Today’s Task - Promote a Post:

Take a little time to look at yesterdays post and ask yourself where it might be appropriate to promote it. If you look at the post and don’t think that it is really worthy of promotion anywhere - feel free to choose another relevant post to do it with. If you don’t have one - spend some time today writing something that you feel IS link worthy and then try promoting that.

For most of you I’d start with point #1 above - pitching to other bloggers. Choose another blog with highly related content to your post and politely submit it as a suggested link to that blog. Again - check out 11 Ways to Increase Your Chances of Being Linked to By a Blogger for tips that will help increase the likelihood of it being successful.

Feeling Timid?

I know that many new bloggers often feel quite timid and wary of promoting themselves. Don’t worry - you’re not alone. I have felt that myself many times and have at times not put my work forward where perhaps I should have. However - the times that I have been willing to push myself out of my comfort zone have often paid off.

While I’ve had a few times in my blogging life where I’ve had lucky breaks that result in traffic - most of the times traffic has arrived at my blogs in numbers have been a direct result of me doing some promotional work. Don’t just leave it to chance - put yourself out there and see what comes as a result.

Once you’ve done it - I’d love to hear how you went about promoting your post and what the result was in comments below. Lets learn together how to get this task right!

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FAQs about 31 Day Project and Email Delivery Problems

Posted: 07 Apr 2009 10:28 PM PDT

I’ve had a few questions being asked quite a bit by those participating in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog challenge so thought I’d post here some answers:

1. Missing Emails - I’m afraid that for some reason a number of those participating are reporting not getting emails. There are a number of reasons for this:

New Signups - if you signed up since Monday it takes up to 24 hours for the sequence of daily emails to kick in. New signups will be put into an email sequence where you’ll be sent daily emails starting at Day 1. This means you’re a little behind the main group but means you don’t miss anything that the main group has covered already.
Spam Filtering - some people are finding our emails in their spam/junk mail folders. Please search for them there and mark them as ‘not spam’ and you should get future ones in your inbox.
Missing Confirmation - some people did not confirm/verify their participation by clicking a link in the email that we sent you soon after you signed up. We need this confirmation before we can send you anything else. Search for this and click the link (it could be in your spam/junkmail folder). If you can’t find it try subscribing again on this page. If you still can’t find it - contact Aweber.com who are managing our list.

2. Email Delays - a few people are concerned that they see posts go up on ProBlogger for days but don’t get emails until hours or even days later. As mentioned above the main reason for this is that emails are sent out in a sequence. Most people reporting this problem have signed up since the program started and will be a day or two behind the main group. You’ll get the emails eventually but will be taken to the start of the sequence of emails.

Other people reporting shorter delays in getting emails will unfortunately just have to wait as we don’t have complete control over when emails will be delivered. Aweber queues these autoresponder emails so that they go out usually 1-3 hours after the posts go live on ProBlogger.

If you want notifications as posts go live please subscribe to our RSS feed. This way you’ll see posts as they go up on the blog. You’ll still get the emails eventually and can see any other information I’m including there.

Apologies for those experiencing delays but there isn’t a lot we can do about it at this point.

All in all though it seems that the project is being well received. We just passed 10,000 registered participants and many are reporting that they’re enjoying the tasks being set so far. Thanks for everyone’s involvement!