Your site is up and ready: you have an eye-catching, eye-pleasing layout, a build up of quality content that will wow your loyal readers, and keywords sprinkled here and there to make your site search engine optimized.  But you have no readers.

There’s one very important thing left for you to do: Blog Promotion.

Blog promotion is what you do to spread the word about your blog.  It includes anything you do to tell people your blog exists.  This is very important for growing blog traffic.

Here are some steps you can take to promote your blog

1. Tell Your Friends

A great initial place to start.  Your friends can even give you a few tips, especially if your blog just started.  When you start blogging, mention it to your friends, and tell them you would love for them to post comments and start discussion.  Don’t be too pushy though, otherwise they might be dissuaded.

2. Explore Your Subject “Niche”

Search for blogs, websites and forums within your subject area and that have a similar target audience to yours.  On each site, take a look around before doing anything.  Read a few entries, pages, or forum posts and check out the about section.  See what the typical “netiquette” is and be aware of rules and guidelines.

Bloggers Forum is one discussion community that offers tips and has a board where other users can visit your blog and give tips.  However, there are more out there, so don’t be afraid to look around.  Be sure to also look for forums related to your subject area.

3. Post Comments

When you’re ready, find an entry or post and make a polite, intelligent comment that contributes to the discussion.   Focus on being constructive and adding to the conversation.  Make your input worthwhile.  Do not spam with links to your blog.  People won’t take you seriously.

Your goal here is to make friends and build relationships.  Politeness and friendliness will go far.

4. Start promoting!

A blogging forum may have a designated board for providing links to your blog.  Be sure to look up the rules before promoting your blog (you don’t want to violate them or appear to be spamming).

Once you have made a few posts and integrated yourself slightly into the blog’s community or a forum, start posting links to your blog.  Put a link in your signature.

Show how your blog is similar, but different.  Show the blog readers and forum posters that you are offering something similar that would interest them, but that is also different from what they are already getting by the current site they are on.

5. Guest Post

By this point, you should have made several friends on blogs and forums.  Approach them politely and see if you can do a guest post on their blog.  Explain what you would like to write about – and be open if they have any suggestions for you – but do not send them an already written post (as they may say no, and they may be turned off if you assume they’ll want your post).

Your post should of course match the content and theme of the blog.

Be sure to check any guidelines for guest posts – many blogs will have these posted somewhere, so look for them.

Another option…

Facebook

A few of my creative writing friends have been posting links to their articles as they publish them on Facebook.  It appears in my News Feed every day and is a great way to attract visitors.  Also include a link on your profile on Facebook, if you are comfortable with this, of course.  You can reach acquaintances this way.

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Remember to be polite at all times!  There is a distinct difference between being controversial and being rude.  It’s great if you want to post a constructive comment that disagrees, but be civil and make it clear that you are posting merely for the sake of a genuine discussion and to play devils advocate.