The Greasy Guide to Urban Blogging: Marketing Your Blog for Increased Traffic pt. 1

If you are going to be a serious blogger then you need to learn the in’s and out’s of marketing. Putting up blog post about Usher and his baby is really on half of the game. If you don’t have a clear cut marketing strategy your blog will get lost amongst the millions of other blogs out there. So this new series will allow you to tap into my knowledge of marketing, SEO, and how I took this site from only getting 300 visitors a month to over 5000 unique visitors a day. And it was all done with marketing, building relationships, social media, and a little search engine optimization.

But first here is what you need to think about before starting your marketing plan.

1. Get your blog site TOGETHER! Have you spent time working out the bugs on your site? Are you writing 3-4 well written, interesting, and search engine optimized post?

2. What are you an expert at? GreasyGuide.com is about gossip but I am also a marketing consultant and have worked on projects for Turner Broadcasting which tap directly into my knowledge of the urban online space.

3. Who is in your contact list? Have you made connections with other urban bloggers? Have you networked with others in your space, did a link exchange, and posted a comment on a blogs site that you like? If you network that blogger will more then likely become an active member of your community as you should be an active member of theirs. Have you joined theUrbanBlogger.net

4. Is your sites design FLY? Clutch Magazine has the BEST design out of all the designs on the urban blogosphere. Is your site as sexy as theirs?

5. Have you tapped into your social graph? Do you have a MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social networking sites that give users information about your site and do you have content widgets on those pages?
Have you heard about Google FriendConnect?

6. Do you have a visible RSS feed for your site that users can grab and follow your content via Google Reader?

7. Have you ever put out press release like this one The Stuff Inside Social Media Press Release

8. Are you an active member of your blogs community? Do you return e-mails and respond to your readers comments?

9. Have you done any interviews and made connections with the PR community? Check out Kirk Franklin’s interview on GreasyGuide.com

10. Have you started doing 100% original content and not something you saw on Perez Hilton?

11. Do you have an intern?

Once you have answered these questions you are ready to start your marketing plan. Next week we will discuss creating your marketing plan and I will post a sample plan and template that you can use to help keep track of what you want to do for your blog on a month to month basis.