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My apologies for the 3-week lull between entries. The holidays were here and I was busy being merry! I did, however, recently add a post about what makes a good blog entry that has to do with the content of your blog, rather than the structure and functionality. Anyways, back to business. Here’s tip #11 through 15 for marketing your blog.

For 1-5, click here.

For 6-10, click here.

11. Submit your blog to directories—This will provide more channels for new readers as well as build your credibility.

12. Submit to paid directories—Yahoo, BOTW, bCentral, WOW and JoeAnt are sites with high traffic and are great venues for attracting new readers. Submit to their paid directories with categories for blogs.

13. Build links—You can do this any number of ways, including finding suitable sites to link to you, adding a guest book or newsgroup, requesting links from other sites, etc.

14. Write a press release—Announce your blog to online and offline news sources to raise awareness. Optimize the content of online press releases for search engines to direct traffic to your blog via applicable search terms.

15. Request feedback and reviews—Ask people to talk about you. The best way to do this is to ask for their honest opinion. Reviews will provide links and expand the reach of an old-fashioned marking tool: word-of-mouth.

As the college football season comes down the stretch there has been the annual talk about whether the Bowl Championship Series is a good thing for the game or not. As I listened to coaches and players talk about where they might fall in the standings I began to think how close the BCS is to search engine rankings.

Every season each team starts out with a clear slate, much like when a new website is created. Sure, there may be preconceived notions about how a team will do, but it’s really up to the team to prove itself over the first few weeks before the first BCS rankings of the year come out.

When a new website is created at a new URL, Google generally will not display that site in its search results immediately. It will wait to see what other sites link to it and what kind of updates it gets before including it in results. With sites that already exist it’s much like a team that was ranking high the previous year. They will have a high ranking right after the updated site is launched, but Google is always watching to see if the updates have changed the content and value of the site—much like a team that loses all it’s seniors to graduation.

Sites can work with partners or post on blogs to get as many incoming links as possible, but at the end of the day it really boils down to having quality content on the site that people find useful. I’d throw the “If you build it they will come” quote in here, but that’d be mixing my sports analogies.

Players and coaches across the country are talking about just winning their games and letting the rankings take care of themselves—just like building a solid website with info people want.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, I did wear a different T-shirt for last Thursday’s Ducks game. That’ll teach me.

There are thousands of blogs—probably hundreds of thousands—on the web nowadays. It seems almost impossible to build readership on a new blog when you’re in the same arena with more long-standing, well-established blogs on the same topic, but I have 25 tricks to the trade that one person or company starting a new blog should always keep in mind. Here are the first five:

1. Choose a unique domain name. For example, if your blog—let’s call it “How to Peel Oranges”—is set up on Wordpress, the default URL will be something like www.HowToPeelOranges.wordpress.com. Shelling out about 15 dollars a year can buy you a unique domain name like www.HowToPeelOranges.com (same URL, sans the “wordpress” bit), which has a certain sense of legitimacy about it. It becomes its own standalone site and is more likely to appear to be the ultimate blog for discussing methods of peeling oranges.

2. Use blogging software. I may have jumped ahead a bit with #1, so first things first is choosing software with built-in blogging functionality. WordPress and TypePad are two popular ones. They are essentially the same product, but WordPress has one major bonus—it’s free!

3. Make it pretty. And make it your own. The more professional and relevant your design, the more appealing it’s going to be to those who visit your site. If HowToPeelOranges.com has a generic blue header with “How To Peel Oranges” bolded at the top of a block of black text, it’s gonna be much harder to engage your target than if it had an engaging layout, color template and design.

4. Do some research. Without researching keywords, your blog is nothing more than an online diary. A blog is a source of information, and the number one way people seek out information on the web is through search engines. Use Keyword Discovery, WordTracker or any other keyword researching software to discover the keywords that people are searching to find the information you have to offer.

5. Optimize accordingly. It’s important to have your blog target specific search terms that would draw readers that would benefit from your site as much as you would benefit from them going to your site (that applies more to company blogs than personal blogs). So, for HowToPeelOranges.com, I’m going to want to target keywords and phrases such as “oranges,” “orange peel,” or “peeling oranges” in order to direct relevant readers who don’t just land on the site by accident. I’d be sure to insert these search terms into the content (without forcing it—the quality of the content is equally as important).