"I Created My Blog. Now What?"

Okay. You created your blog now you are ready for the whole world to see it! The only problem is that you don't know how to get the whole world to see it!

Of course one of the first things that you should do (and it should be one of the easiest things to do) is to TELL EVERYBODY YOU KNOW ABOUT YOUR BLOG! Sounds simple doesn't it?

Take for instance if you have a professional blog like one of my clients, The Computer Brother. If your blog is going to be a professional blog then one of the things you should do is to include your blog's address on all of your professional paperwork - including your business cards. Remember the point of this is to promote your blog.

Another thing that you should do is to optimize your blog for the search engines. I read somewhere that 50% of a blog's traffic comes from the search engines. So when people are looking for relevent content you will want your blog (or site) to show up as high as possible on the search engine results.

I have made a few postings here about how a link to my blog is currently on page one of Google's search engine results when certain search terms are typed into the search engines. So far I have managed to accomplish this by working with the content of my blog. While a lot of the search engines have links to where you can add your blog or site manually, that's something that I haven't done yet. But that's not to say that you shouldn't do it - by all means manually add your site to the search engines. However you should know that this won't result in your site showing up right away. Some search engines can take a few months before they get to your site to manually add it.

Another thing that you should know that besides my blog site showing up on page 1 of google's search engine results, I have noticed that a lot of "indirect" links to my sites show up as well. One of my feeds shows up in the search engines as well as a few comments and replies that I have posted elsewhere on the internet have shown up too.

So tell everyone you know about your new site and watch as the traffic grows!

PS - Don't forget to add a counter to your site so that you can track your site's traffic. There are a lot of free ones available on the Internet.