Not long ago I talked about possible ways to promote a blog. It’s just something I'm trying to do with this one. It could also be an interesting subject for people who’re just starting out in the blogging business. Today I continue with a new post in the series.

2. Submit the blog to blogs specific search engine and directories

There are a lot of websites that keep lists of different blogs. Some directories are categorized, like Yahoo directory, and some are not. One of the first page I found was http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/. It’s a compilation of blog directories and submission sites and is a good place to look at in order to find places you would want your blog to be listed at.

So far I submitted “Worm in liquid maze” to Syndic8 (http://www.syndic8.com/feedinfo.php?FeedID=395596 – Atom and  http://www.syndic8.com/feedinfo.php?FeedID=395597 – RSS), Feedster, RSS Network and Technorati.

3. Create a mirror blog

Several services on the Internet provide hosting for the blogs. LiveJournal, Blogger, MSN Spaces and Myspace.com come to mind, but I’m sure there are more places where you could create a new blog. These services often provide support to find other blogs hosted by it. They also often help users to reference friends and to join various communities. The idea is that if you were to create a blog on one of the services you will have tools available to you to automatically make the blog known to people with similar interests. The downside of the mirror blog is of course is that you will have to maintain two, ore more, blogs.

I went ahead and created a mirror blog at Blogger (http://liquidmaze.blogspot.com/). Blogger doesn’t support communities, but does allow people to search for other people and blogs by common interests. It is also a very nice service in terms of customization. The look of the blog can be easily modified by editing a template.

4. Sign all posts on the internet and e-mails with the link to the blog

Every time you post on forums, send e-mails, post an article somewhere, or write a comment on somebody’s blog add a signature with the link to your blog. People often like to find out who they’re dealing with, especially if they decided to spend time to read what you wrote, found it interesting, and want to find more of the similar posts. I often find other people’s blogs this way and start reading some of them as the result.

5. Reference other blogs

Some blog services can automatically notify the blog referenced in your post and it will create a link back to your post. If a post is created on blog A references a post on blog B, than blog B will be notified and will automatically create a trackback to the blog A. For this feature to work it must be supported by both blog A and blog B, and if it does work people may follow the link to blog A from blog B to see what other people had to say about the blog B post.

If you’re interested in reading more about this feature here’s a good post on it: http://scottwater.com/blog/archive/2004/02/06/Trackbacks

6. Pinging blogs list services

There are some services that display a list of all latest posts in the blog community on the Internet. Other services that can show the blog in a list can automatically update the list with the latest info from the blog. In order for that to happen you have to notify (ping) the service when the blog is updated. Here are couple of blog ping services: weblogs.com, Ping-o-Matic, and Technorati. Ping-o-Matic is a service that allows you to ping a lot of other services and is probably the only place you have to ping to notify them of the changes.