Promote Your Blog Via Syndication Services

One way to increase your blog's exposure is via syndication services that will make your posts available to other websites to republish. If a high-profile website decides to feature your content, you'll get a prominent byline with a link back to your blog, which can potentially generate significant amounts of traffic and increase your online readership.

The best-known blog syndication service is probably BlogBurst, which boasts such notable publishers as USA Today, Gannett, Reuters, and The Houston Chronicle among its clients. By joining BlogBurst, you'll agree to make your blog's content freely available for these publishers to include on their websites, in return for that byline and link back to your blog. If your blog joins the ranks of BlogBurst's top performers, you'll be eligible for their cash rewards program as well, with payouts ranging from $50 to $1500 for the most widely syndicated blogs.

Another syndication service worth considering is Feedzilla, which operates on a slightly different model from BlogBurst. For syndication fees ranging from $9.95/month to $199.95/month, publishers can pay to receive access to Feedzilla's content "widgets". They can then install these widgets on their sites to display news feeds from up to 150 content providers. Like BlogBurst, Feedzilla enables bloggers to tap into a network of major publishers to increase their visibility. Publishers currently using Feedzilla to display blog and news feeds on their sites include BBC, About.com, The Sun, Reuters, and News Corporation. By joining Feedzilla you also get a chance to earn a share of revenues from advertising they display in those content widgets - in addition to any you earn from the extra traffic they send your way.

The third and final syndication service I'll cover today is Moreover's Webfeed Wizard. Like Feedzilla, the Wizard is an interface for publishers to add feeds of the latest blog content to their own sites. The benefit to the blogger, as with the other syndication services, is increased visibility and traffic back to their blog from links embedded in the syndicated content. Moreover offers a couple other services for bloggers worth checking out as well: their Custom Content Aggregation Services and XML Conversion Services, both featured on the same page.

Key terms: RSS, R.S.S., content, sindication, sindicate, distirbution, trafic, blog-burst, feed zilla, morover, more-over, web-feed

Pinging and Why Everyone's Doing It

If you've blogged for any length of time, like an hour, you've probably come across the term "ping" somewhere out there in the blogosphere by now, or else right in your own blog dashboard. For instance, Blogger gives you the option in the Settings > Publishing tab to send pings to Weblogs.com, which tracks updates to blogs on a near real-time basis.

But I'm already getting ahead of myself - what are these "pings" exactly? A ping is a digital signal (in XML-RPC format, if you care) that your blogging platform or another pinging piece of software can send out on your behalf each time your blog has been updated with new content. Pings are typically used by blog and RSS search and tracking services like search engines, news and RSS aggregators, and RSS feed generators and managers like FeedBurner. So they're a pretty hot commodity for services that want to make sure they're including the latest blog content as soon as it's been published. For example, following a ping, a blog search engine will know to send its crawlers through your blog to index your most recent post for its search results.

Pings also allow these blogophilic services (yes, I just made that term up) to allocate its resources wisely: if there's no ping, they'll assume there's no new content, and will send their crawlers to go index some fresh content instead rather than recrawl what's already in their database.

For you, the blogger, this makes pings a very good thing. Lots of sites out there are just waiting to receive them, eager to include your blog's content prominently in their search listings or RSS feeds. And pings are free to send and can either be sent automatically, or in mere seconds via a manual pinging service.

What's a manual pinging service? Well, one limitation of some automated pingers, like the built-in one in Blogger, is that it doesn't ping all the sites out there that are waiting to hear from you. So there's a need for services that can send multiple pings en masse to many ping-hungry sites at once. All you do is enter your blog's name and URL, select the sites you'd like to ping, and the pingers will do the rest. Here are three well-known ones for you to try:

Ping-O-Matic
PingOat
Blog Flux Ping Service

Let the pinging begin!

Key terms: ping, pinging, blogflux, blog flux, pingomatic, ping-o-matic, pingoat, pingout, ping oat, ping out, send pings

Turn Your Blog Into an Email Newsletter

I'm sure you've seen those sites with the newsletter sign-up form, inviting visitors to submit their email address and join their mailing list. If you're like me it probably seemed like a great idea, but you found the prospect of maintaining the mailing list, putting together a regular newsletter, and coordinating the mailings too complicated for your taste. And you're right, if you were trying to do all that yourself it could turn into quite a headache.

And yet it's still a great idea. After all, a blog is so much like a newsletter that it makes perfect sense to convert each post into a mini-email update. And there are undoubtedly some readers would prefer to read it in that format. Maybe they only find time to check their email in the course of their day, not surf the web. Or maybe they work someplace where their web access is extremely restricted. Or maybe they have no clue what an RSS feed is and don't really want to know. Or maybe they're just nostalgic for the old days of Usenet, when most important online communication came in via their inbox.

The good news is you can broadcast your blog via email pretty easily with a service called FeedBlitz. I found it while I was searching for sites to help promote blog RSS feeds, and it caught my attention immediately since I've always wondered if there was quick and painless way to distribute a blog via email. That's exactly what FeedBlitz does: they'll instantly convert your blog's RSS feed into an email and distribute it automatically to your subscription list.

Here's how it works:

You sign up for a FeedBlitz account, login and enter your RSS feed into their "New Feed" menu.

After you submit the form, they'll email you a sample email with all your recent blog posts. Double check it to make everything looks OK.

If it does, you can then log into your account and grab their HTML code that allows you to add an email subscription form to your blog. Paste this code into your blog template whereever you'd like it to appear, republish, take a minute to make sure everything's formatting correctly on your blog, and if it is, you're all set - you're now a newsletter publisher as well as a blogger!

Ready to get started? This complete intro to the FeedBlitz service tells you everything you'll need to know.

Blog Your Novel

In the 19th Century Charles Dickens famously serialized novels including "The Pickwick Papers" and "Great Expectations" in monthly installments in newspapers and magazines. Today he'd undoubtedly be doing the same thing, but quite likely in blog form instead.

Blogging offers a cheap and easy way to serialize and publicize literary works online. Indeed, blogged literature has acquired its own web nickname - "blooks." Yes, blooks. Fun to say, isn't it?

So maybe you've got a novel you're working on, or one that's been sitting on the shelf or in your hard drive for a while. Maybe you're tired of making the rounds of potential publishers and literary agents and getting the same old brush-off, that politely worded rejection letter informing you your manuscript just isn't a good fit for their list at the moment. Until they change their tune you might as well upload the first few chapters to a blog, link it up in various blog directories, spend some time publicizing the RSS feed, and start reaching all those potential readers the publishers and agents apparently can't be bothered with.

With a blog, each chapter can fit neatly into its own post, and successive posts can be linked together so readers can find their way through the narrative as easily as turning a page. Readers can also offer their comments on each chapter, feedback that could prove valuable if you decide to revise your novel. You can even experiment with different ways of making all your hard work pay off. For instance:

Offer the complete manuscript as a PDF file available for purchase via PayPal. Readers who get caught up in the early "teaser" chapters of your serialized version may not feel like waiting around for you to blog the next ones. By making the complete text available, you're offering these impatient readers the instant gratification they demand. For a modest fee, of course.

How fancy you get with delivering the full digital manuscript is up to you: you could simply email it upon receiving payment, or if you're more tech-savvy, create a special download location on your blog that's only accessible to paying readers.

Alternatively, you can make your novel a subscription service, with just a few chapters available for free and the rest available to paying subscribers behind a log-in. Blogger, for example, allows you to make your blog available to only selected readers via its "Permissions" settings. Create one blog with your free, publicly available chapters, and then a second blog with your restricted, subscription-only chapters. When someone PayPals you a subscription fee, you can then grant them access to your private blog where they can read your novel in its entirety.

Or, after building up a substantial online audience for your blogged novel, or blook, you could then approach a publisher or agent with your traffic stats and ask if they'd like to represent a popular online literary property. By demonstrating your ability to attract a large readership, you can now make a much better case for the saleability of your manuscript.

These are just a few ideas to get you started...and if you're creative enough to write a novel, you're certainly creative enough to come up with even more ways to promote it online. Write on!

Key terms: novel, fiction, narrative, literary blog, litblog, literature weblog, blook, serialize, promotion, publicity, publication

Promote Your Blog's RSS Feeds

Ever wonder what exactly you should be doing with those RSS feeds that come with your blog? Or maybe you're just wondering what RSS is - well, you wouldn't be the first person.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it's a data format based on the XML standard, which allows the efficient, standardized transmission of digital information from place to place. That could be from website to website, from database to database, from database to website, and so on. What RSS means to you as a blogger is that you have an easy, ready-made format for syndicating whatever you publish on your blog. And just how would that work? Here are a few examples:

A fan of your blog can add your RSS feed to their RSS reader (sometimes also called a "newsreader"), which will update them every time you add a new post by displaying a link to the headline, along with a few sentences or even the full post, if you choose to include it in your feed. Popular RSS readers include My Yahoo, Google Reader, BlogLines, and NewsGator. (You can find a list of the most popular RSS readers in this article.)

So rather than needing to check your blog every day to see if you've posted something new, your fan can just sit back and wait for your latest post to pop up in their RSS reader. Much more convenient.

Another use of RSS feeds is to syndicate your content to someone else's site. For example, the site StockBlogs.com is based almost entirely on RSS feeds from blogs about the stock market. StockBlogs will display the latest headlines from each blog, along with related information and some advertising (of course), and visitors can then click off to whatever blog post interests them. The result is a nice source of traffic to the featured sites via their RSS feeds, and a useful resource for stock researchers looking for commentary from the blogosphere in one central location.

There are a number of ways you can promote your RSS feeds to take advantage of these traffic opportunities. First, and most simply, just make sure they're prominently displayed on each page of your blog. Place a link in the blog's sidebar with the text "Subscribe to My RSS Feed!" or something similar, and any RSS-savvy visitor will be able to easily grab your feed and add it to their reader.

Make sure your friends know about your blog's RSS feed. Millions of people use Yahoo email, and if they have a Yahoo email account, they already have a My Yahoo page with RSS capabilities. All they'll need to do is sign in to their Yahoo account and add your feed to get instant updates whenever you update your blog.

You can also add small graphic links called buttons to your blog that will allow RSS users to subscribe to your feed with just a couple clicks. You can download the graphics and code for dozens of these buttons from this handy page.

Another RSS promotion strategy is to submit your feed to sites that feature RSS content. These include specialized sites like StockBlogs, as well as RSS search engines and directories. Here's a list of sites I've had good luck submitting my own RSS feeds to:

Bloogz RSS Finder

RSSFeeds.com

2RSS.com

FeedShow
(shares revenues they earn from your feed content with you!)

Plazoo.com

Inform.com

BlogDigger

And this is just the tip of the feedberg - there are many more RSS directories, search engines and aggregators out there. You can find dozens of them on this RSS submission list, one of my favorite bookmarks.

Once you've submitted your feed to all these RSS sites, the next step is to keep them fed with fresh blog posts!

Key terms: RSS, R.S.S., Real Simple Syndication, sindication, syndicate, sindicate, feeds, feedreader, newsreader, subscribe, subsribe, subscription, agregator, aggregater

Use Blog Directories to Reach New Readers

A great way to increase your blog's visibility is by submitting to web directories that specialize in blogs. Submission to most of these directories is free, though some will request a link back from your blog in exchange for a directory listing, and a few charge a fee to review your submission and add it to the directory. I generally stick with the free ones, but if you've got money to burn, the paid directories will be happy to help!

There are many advantages to being listed in a blog directory. First and most obviously, someone browsing or searching the directory can find your blog and you'll have a new reader. Secondly, search engines like Google will notice your link in the directory, and will count it as a "vote" in favor of your blog. The more links they count in directories and other blog sites, the higher your search engine rankings are likely to be. The result - even more visitors to your blog.

Submitting your blog to a directory should be a very straightforward process: first, find the directory category that's most appropriate to your blog's subject. Then, use the directory's submission form to fill in the key details about your blog: the title, URL, a brief description of what it's about, and in some cases your contact information. Most reputable directories will review your submission within a few days, and you'll usually receive an email notification letting you know if your blog has been accepted.

Here's a list of blog directories that I've submitted to with success in the past. If you have others to suggest for this list, please feel free to post them in the comments.

Blog Catalog
http://www.blogcatalog.com

Blogrankings.com
http://www.blogrankings.com

Bloghub
http://www.bloghub.com

Blogwise
http://www.blogwise.com/

Globe of Blogs
http://www.globeofblogs.com

Eatonweb Blog Portal
http://portal.eatonweb.com/

Blogflux
http://www.blogflux.com/

BlogHop
http://www.bloghop.com/

Bloglines
http://www.bloglines.com/

Blogburst.com
http://www.blogburst.com/

LS Blogs
http://www.lsblogs.com

Blogmarks.net - a social bookmarking service
http://www.blogmarks.net/

Bloggernity.com
http://www.bloggernity.com/

Bloggeries.com (paid submission last I checked)
http://www.bloggeries.com/

BlogBib (also paid submission)
http://www.blogbib.com/

Submitting your blog to these directories can be a fast, easy way to expand your audience and get your blog noticed. Fame and fortune can't be far behind...right?

Key terms: blog directory, blogger directories, directorys, dircetory, diretory, submission, rankings, listings, categories

Increase Your Blog's Audience With Post Pages

If you're looking for easy ways to boost your blog's readership, one of the easiest may be just a couple clicks away. I'm talking about the ability to create "post pages," which simply means that each blog post you create will exist as its own stand-alone web page. But you'll need to make sure you're taking advantage of this feature in whatever blog software you use.

In Blogger, for example, blogs don't automatically come with post pages enabled. In a blog without post pages, the posts are strung together on the main blog page and in the archive pages, but can't be accessed individually through their own URLs. To give each post its own URL and web page, you'll need to click the Settings tab and then go to the Archiving settings. Here you should see an option called "Enable Post Pages." Select "Yes" from the pulldown menu and republish your blog, and each post will then have its very own web page. Using this post as an example, scroll down to the bottom and click the link where it says "10:57 AM". See how it brings up a separate page? Every post on this blog has the same time-stamped link at the bottom, which leads to its own web page.

What are the advantages of post pages? Well, one of the biggest ones is that they increase your blog's search engine exposure. When a search engine like Google crawls through your blog, it will find each of those post pages and index them separately in its search results. So when someone searches for the subject of that particular post, there's a good chance they'll find it in their search results. On the other hand, if the post doesn't have its own URL and web page, there's not a subject-specific page for the search engine to direct them to, so the blog is less likely to appear in those search results.

Another advantage of post pages is that it's easy to copy and paste their URLs into an email. If you want to show a friend only a specific post from your blog, having a handy URL to drop into an email makes it very easy.

Are there any disadvantages to post pages? Ummm....none that I can think of. So make sure they're switched on and get ready to attract some new readers!