Best blog promotion techniques

I have been asked this question several times, and i decided to write this ultimate guide to blog promotion. In this guide i will present to you the best techniques to promote your blog. You can use all these techniques to promote your blogs and monetize your web presence. Either you want to cover your hosting costs or to start a professional blogger career, you will find this guide really helpful. Feel free to suggest any other technique if you think i should add it to my list.
Optimize your blog pages

1. Quality content consistently: You can spend a lot of money (or time) trying to promote your blog, either using pay per click, or buying traffic, but remember all the marketing in the world is useless if you have poor content. Blog Promotion starts with great content.When updated regularly, good content is the best promotion you can do for your blog. This can be a tedious task, especially in the beginning, but don't give up. Without content your blog will sink in an ocean of useless information. You can write the content your self or pay for it: you can buy articles or hire a ghost writer, we will explore thes options later.
2. Target your niche: You have to become an expert on something, you need to specialize in one field. Each blog needs to target a special niche either technical, artistic, social, politics or sports you need to focus on your niche. You need to become an expert of the niche you are targeting, so continue to read and write consistently, and you will see that bloggers will find you, recommend your blog on their posts, bookmark you, it is the best way to get noticed, linked to and cross promoted.
3. Design is really important : First impressions count, your design is the first thing readers will notice about your blog, that's why you have to take your design seriously. Don't use a template or theme unaltered. You need to break away from the blogging masses. So if you don't want to buy a custom design you will have to edit your templates yourself. You need to tweak your css files and your images or have a web programmer do it for you.
4. Optimize your blog for the search engines: It is recommended that you have your own domain name, host your own blogging software like wordpress which is free and open source. You also need to change your settings to enable permalinks, or seo friendly urls, install a meta tags creation module to edit your meta tags. Enable ping and track back in order to notify the search engines when you publish a new post.
5. Manage your rss feeds: Rss feeds are the best way to syndicate your content on other sites or rss readers like google reader or yahoo... You need to help your readers find your RSS feeds, so make it visible, you can get a big subscribe widget on your sidebar. You will also need to publish full feeds and not only abstracts, don't be afraid of content scrapers. Full feeds will increase your feed subscribers. Try third party services like feedburner that allow you so syndicate your content, track how many subscribers you have, usually subscribers rarely unsubscribe.
6. Interviews: try to interview some specialist in your niche or some newsworthy individuals, this can generate traffic to your blog through the link in their blogs or websites, since people will tend to link back to their interviews. Even better, manage to get interviewed. If you have done something newsworthy you can mange to get interviewed.
7. Get the scoop: You will need to find fresh news either online or offline, and then you will need to be among the first people talking about it, which will increase your chances to be picked up by others and even by authority news channels.
8. Offer contests: Contests will enhance your readers participation to your blog and can create a buzz in your niche category. Try to offer simple contests and keep your readers informed, try also to interview the contest winners or make them leave testimonials.
9. Press Releases: Use press releases to announce your new accomplishments (that are interesting for other to read), Particularly if you have something unique, useful, important to say. A simple search will find several press release services providers, some of them are free.
10. Choose the right keywords: Avoid popular keywords since the competition can be very hard in certain niches, you can use a free service called Hit Tail to find the right keywords you should target. Keywords with good search volumes and low competition will bring much more traffic than popular keywords.
11. Manage your comments: You need to enable comments on every post, moderate them to avoid blogspammers, and also answer your comments either on your comments sections or even offblog. Treat each comment poster as a potential subscriber or future friend or contact.
12. Backlinks and trackbacks: Manage to include relevant outbound links in your posts to high linking blogs or authority web sites, many blogs have trackbacks enabled and will have a link back to your post in their comments or posts. Everybody wants to know who is linking to them.

Connections and social bookmarking

1. Connect with other bloggers: Networking is really important, interact with other bloggers, read and comment theirs posts, add the most relevant blogs to your blogroll it increases your chances to get linked back. Request interviews, partnerships keep promoting your blog in your niche. Build a relevant network for your blog.
2. MyBlogLog MyBlogLog — is a powerful tool for bloggers that enables you to build a free community. In order to achieve this, you need to be an active member on MyBlogLog. Get the widget that displays who visited your blog, enhance your profile, join communities, add other bloggers as friends, join their blogs communities, visit their blogs, send messages, comments... You need to build your own blog community, increase the number of friends or readers, and generate traffic.
3. Facebook: It is a very popular social network. It can generate a lot of traffic. It is similar to other social networks, it allows you to find old friends, join communities, edit your profile, your preferences, manage events... But you can also import your rss feeds from your blogs, which is an amazing feature, since all your connections can read your posts, and visit your blog, and it also means that your will have links to your posts on a popular highly visited and well ranked website.
4. Helium: Helium is a new site that is actively looking for people to contribute in different categories. If you are a successful writer and have a special interest or knowledge that isn’t yet published on Helium you might want to contact them; Helium pays you for the content you provide them and allows you to link back your blog in your profile page, so you can benefit from an extra visibility.
5. Yahoo Answers! on Yahoo Answers you can answer questions that other people are posting. Yahoo uses a no follow tag for the urls it publishes, so the links will not help you increase your page rank. But it will certainly generate traffic to your pages if well used. Do not try to promote your pages on it, you should try to answer the questions in a clear way.
6. MySpace: Myspace is by far the most popular networking website, but it addresses a certain clientele. Build your profile, add friends, Add comments in friend’s profiles which Builds page views to your profile which Increases friend requests you get. Once you have a decent amount of friend’s, you can post a bulletin that goes to all of them, This needs to be interesting otherwise it will be ignored.
7. Squidoo : Participate in the Squidoo community. Squidoo has a lot of traffic, and you could funnel and redirect traffic by including links On a given related topic to your blog
8. Digg / Netscape / Reddit / Stumble upon: Are social bookmarking sites you need to get noticed on. You can read my previous post on social bookmarking sites here.
9. Meet real people: Find other local bloggers. And meet them, you can use services like Meetup.com to organize meetings in your area. It is actually the best way to make friends that share your interests, and potentially lead to a partnership, Bring a business card, and if you don't have one, what are you waiting for?
10. virtual groups: join virtual groups like Yahoo Groups, Google groups, Usenet, and more; participate in conversations, interact with others, be friendly and helpful.
11. Cross promotion: Once you managed to build a good community you can start cross promoting, you can kindly remind them to promote your posts or Digg them ...

Increase your visibility

1. Join a blog carnival: to blog about a topic, then each blog in the carnival gets promoted. Here’s an index of blog carnivals.
2. Join blog networks: like 9rules, b5media, and others, there is networking potential, income potential, and quality incoming links for you.
3. Join forums: Forums are an easy way to not only connect with other individuals, but an opportunity to demonstrate your expertise and a link back to your blog
4. Join Blogburst: Blogburst is a type of “blog network”, which syndicates content across American newspaper’s websites, such as USA Today and Reuters.
5. Submit to blog directories: So people can find your blog.
6. Submit to article directories: You can submit your favourite posts to article directories. The article might get picked up in a ezine or another blog, leading to more traffic and more inbound links.
7. PPC campaigns you can use adwords, Overture or other PPC engines if you want fast targeted traffic, but it can be expensive depending on your niche keywords. You can also try to buy bulk or targeted traffic but it is usually poor non converting traffic.

All these Techniques combined together will certainly help you promote your blog, feel free to comment them, or to share other techniques you experienced so we can all benefit from knowledge sharing.