'How can I get my blog noticed?'

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I like many others before me have decided on the concept of starting up a blog to give the real view of a student’s life. Many consider a blog as the place where thousands of voices can flourish, communicate and connect. Nevertheless, you want your blog to be successful, a place for people to continuously visit. So, many bloggers are left feeling ‘why is my blog not reflecting its best potential?’ 

With over 100 million active blogs in the world, there is stiff competition to make sure your blog stands out from the crowd. How do you achieve this? What can you offer that the other 100 million cannot?

The answer is simple! In order for your blog to get noticed, there are several marketing techniques which I have come across which can help benefit your blog and bring in those all-important readers!

Firstly, before you start marketing your blog you must make sure your blog is filled with quality content which people will want to and continue to read. Here are a few guidelines to ensure your blog is at its highest potential.

• Update your content regularly – Professional blogs do not leave gaps in posting content. If you have not posted in a few months – people will think the blogger has gone dormant. 

• Make sure the content is relevant – Make sure your posts are straight to the point. The use of images and video’s will also make the content more interesting. Users also prefer blogs to be specialised on one topic.

• Getting the design right – First impressions count regarding the look of your blog. Users want a simple yet sophisticated design which is easy to read and navigate.   

• Good navigation – Users will be able to experience the full potential of your blog. The use of tabs is essential to divide your content. For example one of my tabs is used for my timeline section about the history of British Universities. Always include a ‘home’ tab so your users are easily navigated back to the beginning.

As soon as you have these guidelines in full motion, the next step to think about is how to actively market your blog. The majority of your visitors are directed to your blog via search engines. Around 50% of all visits to websites come via Google. Bing and Yahoo count for less than 2% each. Therefore it is important to ensure that you make it easy for people to find your content through Google.

Google searches are all about key words. It places great value on where the key words are also located within your search. The Google website states:

“Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes.”

For example, if someone searches for keywords used in your headline or intro of your post or your alt text, greater value is placed on your blog and will be placed high within a Google search than others. The use of key content tags otherwise known as ‘labels’ on blogger are also acknowledged when Google undertakes a search. These also help benefit helping people read your blog as the labels are alternative key words that Google can aid in its search to find what a user is looking for. For example on this blog I have used market, successful, blog and student life.

Always remember to include alt text as this makes your blog accessible for blind people using screen readers. Here is a useful website to demonstrate how to include alt text.

Another option of marketing your blog is social media optimising. An excellent way to gain followers and page views is continuously advertising your work on social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Referrals on Facebook and Twitter account for around 8% of traffic to websites on average.

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Blogging sites make it very easy for you to advertise your work via social networking. A variety of gadgets and buttons are provided to enable you to share your content, allowing users to subscribe to your content through email or RSS.

As well as using gadgets, there are also other ways of getting your blog noticed:

• Have your blog URL as your website on Facebook, Twitter and any other social networking you may use.

• Get your friends to tweet about your blog – this is a very easy way to publicise your blog and boosts your blog views in an instant!

• Feature guest bloggers within your posts, they may return the offer!

• Frequently visit blogs, leaving comments on posts to encourage them to do the same.

• Find forums discussing about student life, University opinions and views – post and comment and add a link to your blog at the end.   

• Get your friends and family to read your blog and post comments.

There are also websites which specialise in sharing your content. Stumbleupon is a discovery engine that randomly finds and recommends web content to users. With over 20 million subscribers, there is defiantly a guaranteed few who will stumble upon your blog. Pinterest is a similar up and coming website to Stumbleupon but at the moment you can only register for an invitation to join the website. It has had raving review already, claiming to receive more traffic than Twitter. I recommend you visit both of these sites to get your content out there!

If you imply all these guidelines to your blog, you are definitely on the way of gaining page views and loyal readers. Remember in order for readers to be loyal to your blog – do not forget to add a subscribe button as users will never remember your URL.

I hope you have found this guide helpful in aiding you to market your blog. If you have any tips or queries please comment below and good luck!