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After you’ve spent a few weeks naming your site, finding your niche, writing your posts, putting together your design and setting up your blog, you’ll find yourself in the awkward position of actually launching it. The first day will feel really “make or break” ( even though it isn’t.)

On July 13th, I saw my first three posts go up with little fanfare. In fact, if you check, all three of them likely have zero comments. In those first few days I was happy to get 20 views. In the weeks that followed, though, I started seeing the effects of certain marketing techniques I’d put in place. By the end of the second week, those 20 views per day had turned into 200 and a small community started popping up around the site leaving a comment here and a comment there.

When my traffic spiked at the beginning of the third week I was euphoric. Three thousand views per day!

In this post, I’ll reveal to you some of the best ways to induce the rapid growth of your readership. These are all things I’ve done and things that, I believe, have most contributed to WSR’s success.

Commenting

This is a bit of Blogging 101 and it’s probably obvious for a lot of you, but for me it was a happy little accident. In the months leading up to WSR’s launch (before I had even conceived of having a blog) I had been an avid reader of Zen Habits. I read almost every new post and commented occasionally. After WSR launched in July, I kept doing what I always did. It had nothing to do with blog promotion. It was just a routine, except now I was including a link to Wage Slave Rebel.

I started noticing something strange in my site analytics, though. Every time I posted a comment near the top of a new post on Zen Habits, I got an average of 75 visitors *from* Zen Habits! This was in the first week, so 75 visitors was one heck of a reward for posting a single comment.

If there are blogs you read, especially larger ones, who target a similar audience as you, comment on new posts there. It’s an easy and free way to get new readers and maybe even to find yourself as an integral part of a like-minded community.

Some advice though… don’t be a douchebag. Don’t list your name as MySite.com and don’t talk about your site or ask for visitors. That’s spammy. Make a relevant comment about the topic of the post and, for God’s sake, if all you have to say is, “Great post!” just shut up. Make a valuable contribution and you’ll get noticed.

Guest Posts

Guest posting is when you write a post for another, usually higher profile, blog. These posts will include a bio about you that gives some information as well as a link to your blog. This is a great way to share an audience with another blogger. If you have the same target audience, or even better if your target audiences overlap, doing a guest post is a good way to get noticed by people who are genuinely interested in what you have to say but who you might not have otherwise found.

Guest posting is also a great way to get involved with a certain community of people and to make a name for yourself. It’s likely that your target audience will all read a handful of the same blogs. If you can manage to find out what these blogs are and write guest posts for them, you’ll start getting noticed. If they see you’ve written on this site they read and then that site they read, they’ll start thinking you’re a pretty special person. This also builds your authority on whatever your subject is. If people see you writing for several other blogs on the same issues, you’ll become an “expert” in their minds.

Twitter

This is, by far, the most useful method of marketing. Create a username specifically for your blog (mine is @wsrebel) and use it for connecting with and providing value to your readership. I’ve set up the WSR Twitter to autotweet the feeds of a few other sites that cover the same topics. This is to give followers consistent value even when I’m personally unable to log on.

Also, use Twitter to connect with people directly. Twitter search is a great way to find a new audience. If I do a search for #lifestyledesign or #freelancing I get an infinite amount of people who would be interested in what I have to say. All I have to do is connect with them on a personal level, or even better, suggest a post on WSR that relates to a problem they are currently having.

Besides directly using Twitter, you might notice that right above the comments section of Wage Slave Rebel there’s a button that says “retweet”. Retweets are one of the greatest things Twitter offers you as a blogger. With retweets, the posts you write have the opportunity to go viral and practically market themselves. Every time a new post is published here a tweet goes out in the format of “New Post: <title> <link>.” Some of you might have gotten here through a link like this, even if you don’t follow WSR. That’s because lots of WSR followers will send out the link to their followers who in turn send it out to their followers. Because of this, I’m able to connect with people who I could have never found.

Conclusion

There are many, many more ways to market your blog, but these are the ones which have provided me with the largest amount of high-quality traffic in the shortest amount of time. Master them and you’ll be set for quite a while.

Do you know of a marketing technique that you feel is absolutely essential? Let us know in the comments!

Part 5 – Optimizing Your Site will be posted on September 28th. Please subscribe to stay updated!

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Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/macomaco/ / CC BY 2.0

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