Have you ever put a lot of really hard work into a post, then sat back and waited for the traffic to come pooring in, only to be disappointed with your relatively unnoticed post? Or maybe some of your best work goes unnoticed, while a post you spent 5-10 minutes writing gets dugg and bookmarked into oblivion. This seems to be the nature of blogging (especially at the beginning), but there are a few things you can do to help promote your content.

  • Social Buttons – For Wordpress users, these are very easy to add. Simply grab a social bookmarking plugin (Share This, Sociable, and Notable will all work) and you’re done! For other bloggers, or Wordpress users that want to create a custom look for the social buttons, refer to my post entitled How to: Add Social Bookmarking Links with Icons. Having these buttons serve two purposes. The first, is to remind your readers that they have the option of recommending this post to others, or to save it for future reference. The second purpose is to make it really easy for your readers to do so. If you only go with a few, the three most important are Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. These 3 will be used the most and bring you the most traffic.
  • Feedburner’s Feedflare – This has a similar effect to the social buttons, except it applies to your site’s feed. If you use a Feedburner feed, you can enable the feedflare feature in your control panel and select which services you would like promote in your feed. Dosh Dosh has created two great posts to help with this, covering 15 Feedburner Feedflares You Should Use and How to Create Your Own Feedflare. Once set up and running, this will allow those that never visit your website to also help promote your content.

If you use both of these approaches to promote your content, you should see a significant improvement over time with the number of referrals from social bookmarking sites and services.

Any I missed? Feel free to add them in the comments below!