I have really been trying to “give more than I take” when it comes to blog/site promotion. I do believe that you almost have to spend as much (if not more) time promoting your “brand” as you do creating the “brand”. What I mean is, how much time do you spend researching and writing your articles vs how much time do you spend promoting your articles?

Promote Others:

For some reason so many bloggers don’t realize that to get you must give too. I have written about a challenge to promote others over on BloggerLuv, so I won’t get into this too much. But try to make it a habit to promote others too.

This is especially important on articles you comment on, if the article was good enough for you to comment on, it is good enough for you to share on Twitter, Facebook, Stumble, Digg, etc… (wherever you submit/share). Another reason you should share when you comment is while you are promoting that site, there is a chance that others will RT your tweet giving more exposure not only the article you commented on, but your comment too, which could lead to clicks to you.

Make It Easy:

If you don’t have ways for people to share your hard work, it will NOT happen! Get some plug-ins to help make it easy for your readers to promote you.

I use Sexy Bookmarks for my main avenue of sharing my articles, I like how many options it has, and graphically, well it’s SEXY! You can configure it to show just about anyway I could think of to submit/share articles and pages.

I also use the BlogEngage vote button. I want it to be very visible because, right now, they are my second source of traffic by number of referrals. If you are not on BlogEngage, you need to be!

MMO is a new bookmarking network I recently started sending my articles to. This button is a little harder to put in because you have to insert it in the code your self, but I am sure they will be getting an easy to install plugin soon enough.

Twitter:

This one is really important, if you are on twitter and have a blog, you need a re-tweet button! I like the Tweetmeme button the best, but after installing it, make sure you visit the settings and change the RT@tweetmeme to RT@yourname this way you can be alerted to re-tweets because they will show in your replies on twitter (I use Tweetdeck on my PC, and SocialScope for my Blackberry).

Conclusion:

Make sure you are easy to promote. Whichever plugins you decide to add, just make sure it is easy to find them and that there aren’t too many steps involved for the user.

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