How do you get a personal blog noticed? You do not want to spend a fortune on it, but you do not want to be writing hundreds of posts that attract absolutely no readers. Well, here are my top tips for getting a personal blog noticed.

1. Use a specialist blog host
Whereas normally I would recommend hosting a WordPress blog as the best way of getting a blog going, for certain personal blogs there are advantages in using a specialist host.

For example, with my own running blog, instead of hosting that myself I went to a community website that allows members to create blogs and set up the new blog there.

Why? Well because it is a community of runners all coming together to share hints and tips are bound to then read other blogs on the system. The same happens with the hosted version of WordPress – there is a community of people waiting to read what you have to say.

2. Participate on similar blogs
Have a look at some other similar personal blogs and see what they are writing about and what is generating comments. If you can contribute usefully to these conversations, then at the same time your comments will link back to your own blog. Some readers will notice what you have to say and be interested and then click the link to visit your website.

You can also have a look at what is generating comments and write some content on your own blog about the same subjects. It is likely that if one website is getting comments about a subject that yours might also get some search engine visitors if people are wanting to know more.

3. Guest post on other blogs
Write up some of your favourite or best posts as completely new posts and send them off to other blogs that invite guest posts. This will work the same way as commenting on other blogs – people seeing your guest post will decide to read more about what you have to say. So make sure that the posts you submit are your very best writing and extra specially interesting!

4. Mention other bloggers
If you mention other bogs in your own posts, maybe talking about one of their posts that you have found interesting, then it might be possible that if they monitor trackbacks to their blog that they will notice your link to them before you even ask for them to give you a name drop.

In this case, they might actually give you a mention, flattered that you took an interest and wanting to show their readership how well they have been rated by another blog.

5. Ask other bloggers to mention you
And if they do not take the hint and mention you when you have mentioned them, just approach other bloggers directly and ask them to give you a mention. Tell them where you have talked about them and see if they will give you a mention back.

All of the ideas work along the same theme – you are trying to get your blog noticed by getting mentions on other websites that show you off to your best. Easy to do and entirely free.

Setting up a blog on your website should only take a few minutes and the return can be hundreds of extra visitors. Here are the steps you need to know to set up a blog on your own website.

First Step – Sort your hosting
The easiest blogging tool to set up on your website is WordPress. There are other tools that you can use, but this one is free and my preferred tool. So, before you even attempt to install it, you need to check your website hosting. You will need PHP enabled and access to a MySQL database.

What if for some reason you cannot add PHP to your existing website, for example if you have an ASP website? Well, maybe your hosts can allow you to set up a subdomain of your website (e.g. blog.yourdomain.com) that you can use and give this the required PHP.

Second Step – Install WordPress
There are 2 ways of doing this:

1) Go to WordPress.org, download the latest version of the blogging software to your computer, unzip the files then using an FTP tool, upload the files to a directory on your website – for example either blog.yourdomain.com or yourdomain.com/blog.

You will need to look at the config file before uploading it to your website. There is plenty of information within this file itself, but you basically need to change the database access to those given to you by your host.

2) If you are very lucky, go to your host’s control panel and click a button to install WordPress!

Third Step – Activate It
Now, just go to your blog URL and it will automatically activate the software and finish the installation. You are automatically allocated a temporary password for the Admin user, use this to sign on to the blog and then immediately, before you do anything else, go to the user maintenance screen and change the password to one that you can remember.

After this, there are some standard security features and other quick alternations that you can make to set up WordPress to the best.

You should also look through the list of available themes and find one that you would like to use for your blog. These themes are the basic style of the blog – the website design. Choosing a nice lookign theme will give it a good look and make it look presentable to visitors when they start to arrive.

You can also have a look through the list of pluggins that are available for WordPress. These are little add ins that you can install to your blog to add extra features and functions, such as a statistics package or a list of posts that are related to the one currently being read.

If English is not your first language, then look at the feature on the right of every page, just below the calendar – click on the language you would rather be reading this post in!

It is not an instant translation of every page, but then it is trying to translate all of the pages in the blog to a total of 48 different languages! So we need to give the translator time to react. But, hopefully given time, we will have most of the site translated into all of these languages.

Why do we do this? Well, instead of people being able to search the blog only in English, we now have all of these languages available. With the installation of 1 pluggin, there is 47 times the content that there was!

This should increase the global reach of the site and hopefully allow more people to start reading. If you are fluent in any of the languages listed, please do give it a try and let me know, via the comments, if the content is at all readable!

If it looks to be working it will go on my list of vital pluggins and everyone can start to use it.

Is it really possible to advertise a blog for free? Is every form of suitable advertising going to be expensive and cost you a small fortune? Not so – here is why and what you can be doing!

A popular question and one that a lot of people ask. “Can I advertise my blog for free?”

Many people starting out in the world of blogging are doing so to make a little bit of extra cash that they so desperately need and paying for any kind of advertising is completely out of the question. Some people are even unhappy at the thought of paying a few pounds or dollars to register a URL. So, here are a few tricks and tips to use to advertise the blog for free.

Article Writing
This is probably the easiest way to promote a blog for free and very successful. Rewrite a handful of your very best posts as articles, aiming for a few hundred words each at least (I frequently aim for 500+ words) and then take a look around at some of the best article submission sites going, such as:

All of these should publish your articles for you and expose them to their readers. Some are excellent for driving their readers to your sites whilst others will improve your search engine ranking.

Guest Posting
The same idea as article writing, but a little more involved. Look out for blogs that are willing to publish guest posts, write some top quality posts that fit in with their criteria and send them off.

If they advertise that they take guest posts then do not bother emailing and asking if they are interested and then emailing an outline. Just send them a copy of the finished work. It makes it so much easier for them so they are more likely to accept your submission.

Again, this works because their readers see your post and some who enjoy it will be interested in reading more and visit your blog.

Joining Forums / Comments
Not, please, spam comments and forum entries! You can join in with forums and comments on blogs in a meaningful way. Make comments that add value to the discussion and do not fill the comment with links. A few readers will be interested in your thoughts and will know that they can click on your name to reach tour blog. Yet another way of attracting visitors from other websites.

There are more free traffic methods, such as banner swaps, but I believe that these distract too much from your own site, making it untidy, and in all honesty have a very tiny success rate.

These three ways are all about showing off the quality of your writing on high traffic blogs and attracting their readers to your website. But they also have something else in common – you must prepare your website first so that arriving visitors stay, read plenty of pages and then come back. You can find out more about that on out website.

Keith Lunt