There's a real dance to this process, which I wrote about yesterday, on how to meet and connect with blogs in your field. The goal is to get more and more links from more and more blogs that reach your people. Then casual blog readers will find you, love your posts, put you in their rss feed and hang with you more and more.

Here's my newly developed system for doing so.

1. Determine exactly who your market is. (Example: mine tends to be life coaches, speakers, professional organizers, wellness vendors, and assorted solo professionals.)

2. Go to blog search engine technorati.com, and do a search for blogs in your field. Type in relevant keywords

3. Visit some of the blogs returned - not necessarily the biggest, but not the smallest either.

4. While visiting those blogs, start to peruse their blogroll - that would be their preferred blogs and friends whose links appear in a list in the margin. This is where you really find the goods, as somehow these highly relevant blogs don't always show up in blog SE's like technorati

5. Find blog posts you can comment on wisely, giving some truly useful information, a relevant opinion, etc.. Don't just leave a promotional splat. That is NOT OK. Instead, post with your expertise. Consider leaving your URL to your blog as part of your sign off on the post.

6. Put this blog in your RSS reader (see Bloglines or other RSS readers for a free download of this software.) At any given time, have about 5 to 10 you check in with. The reader brings abstracts of the posts right to you so you can easily scan fast, then hop over to the blog if you want to comment.

7. Every day carve out a little time to visit a few blogs and make yourself known. If your comments are truly valuable, the blog owner will possibly reprint your comment in a post with a link to your blog. Or maybe even give you an inclusion in the blog roll (that would be a rare and serious home run.)

8. After a while, when the relationship is established, no need to constantly visit these blogs for the rest of your life… unless you want to, of course. And time to cycle in some new ones so you can constantly read and comment on fresh perspectives, and make more friends. (A network is a beautiful thing to have.)

Have fun, be considerate and be authentic. AND don't be overly promotional - in fact, don't be promotional at all. Just be an interested reader … which is easy to do.

Technorati Tags: Blog promotion, blog search engines, blog etiquette

Comments

[Sarah Zeldman]

Hi,

I do a variation on this that I wanted to share, in case someone out there finds it useful.

In my blog I post Solutions For Busy Moms that I find...(hence the name of the site, www.SolutionsForBusyMoms.com) so whenever I post a link to a "solution" I always send the website owner an email with the subject "I Blogged about you today!" and then I write a nice brief note about how much I like their product &/or site and how I shared it with my readers. The receiver almost always looks at my site & blog & writes back with a "thank you" and we often start building a nice relationship that leads to joint ventures of some sort. For example, every month I send out FREE stress-relief goodies to the members of my mailing list...so, when appropriate, I might ask one of the people I've blogged about if they would like to write a 5-page ebook on their area of expertise and how it relates to "busy moms" and I will give it to my list. (For example, this month I'll be sending a "Busy Mom's Guide to Aromatherpay" by Buffy from BodyBubbles.com) It's a win-win. I gain repore with my list b/c I'm sending them a high-quality, unique freebie & the other person gets exposure to my list of people.

I guess this is more of a networking technique than a blog promotion technique, but often people do reciprocate by blogging about my site as well. Anyway, thought I'd share ;)

Sarah Zeldman
www.SolutionsForBusyMoms.com