Here is how various people promote their blogs. This is from an interactive session at WordCamp 2006 yesterday.
- Using Blog Aggregators
- By linking to others heavily and starting conversations as extensions of previous conversations
- By simply telling a bunch of people that I blog
- By having how-to-dos (building a better podcast, for example)
- By providing expert advices ( this specific case was about creativity and innovation)
- One blog specializes in gathering stats on a wide variety of topics and publishing them
- Specializing in local useful issues (the case in point was legal issues in Delaware)
- By being helpful in solving problems in mailing lists (this specific one was blogger mailing list)
- Answering lots of questions on mailing lists and blogs
- Covering special subjects (in this case genealogy) and being discovered through a search engine
- Having your blog address listed as your email signature
The clear message I got from this is that no one really did a lot of marketing but just were good bloggers. They covered the subjects they were good at, helped others and found novel ways to serve others.
WordCamp 2006 is the first WordPress event I went to. It is amazing to see a set of bloggers congregated to learn from one another. In most of the sessions, the audience provided most of the material.
Links: WordCamp Blogs