Free Web Site -- Blogger.com -- Part 3

Promoting Your Blog

You will probably want to promote your site once you have it reasonably well developed. Probably the best way to promote your site is for it to be listed on the DMOZ site. DMOZ is a directory listing of web sites that are grouped by categories. Before you submit your site to DMOZ, you need to study their structure very closely. It is very important that you submit your site to the correct category. You need to spend about two hours or more studying the various categories and click on several web sites in each category to see if there are web sites similar to yours. After you submit your site, your site is reviewed by an editor at DMOZ. The editor must consider your site to have useful content in order to be listed. You need to wait about three weeks for the editor to review your site. If your site is not listed after three weeks, you might try resubmitting to another category. It is a bad idea to flood their site with submissions. It will only worsen your chances of getting listed. Even though I don’t get much traffic directly from the DMOZ web site, I consider it extremely valuable because it practically guarantees that my site is listed and maintained by the various search engines. After my site was listed on DMOZ, I found it was copied to about 60 other web directories. I could easily tell my site was copied because the short description of my site on DMOZ is exactly the same as the other directory web sites.

There are numerous directories on the internet where you can submit your site. You need to be careful about the directories to which you submit your site. Be aware that Google maintains a blacklist of directories. If you submit your site to a blacklisted directory, it will lessen the chances that Google will list your site in their search engine. I don’t think it is possible to get a list of blacklisted directories. Some directories will post your site automatically after it is submitted. Other directories require it to be approved by someone before it is posted. I would say that directories that are reviewed and approved by someone are less likely to be blacklisted by Google. I am sure that the DMOZ site is not blacklisted.

The Blogger site has a few suggestions on promoting your site that you can access by clicking here.

You can submit your site to various search engines, although this will probably be unnecessary if your site is listed on DMOZ. It may seem like there are thousands of search engines but in essence there are really only four, Google (the most popular), Yahoo (number 2), Teoma which drives the Ask Jeeves search engine and the newest is MSN. The MSN search engine has actually been in existence for a long time but it used to be driven by Yahoo. Only recently has Microsoft decided to create their own search engine at the MSN.com site. Just about all other search engines are actually powered by one or more of these four search engines. That makes submitting your site easier. If you want to know more about search engines, go to the Search Engine Watch web site.

You can also join a web ring at no cost. You may have noticed at the bottom of my home page that I have joined a freeware ring. I have only found two directories of web rings that are sorted by topics. One is Ring Surf and the other is Web Ring. There are a few other web rings that can only be found by using a search engine. Joining a web ring involves submitting an application to join. When you get approved, you will be provided some html code that must be added to the template of your blog. You can paste this just above the code you pasted for your StatCounter that I described above. You will end up with something similar to what is at the bottom of my blog.

My final suggestion is to look for forums related to your page. Sometimes called a bulletin board or message board, a web forum is a web site for ongoing discussions of specific topics and issues. You usually need to need to register to be able to post items of discussion. You can simply post a topic describing your blog and provide a link to it.

I have posted here nearly everything I have learned about blogging since I started. I hope I have not overwhelmed you with information. You can start out by just posting text and then learn how to do images later. It is rewarding when you get positive feedback on your blog. But above all else, have fun with it.

Go to Part 1, Introduction, Blogger.com Free Web Site

Go to Part 2, Adding Images to Your Blog