Part 1.
Part 2.

Almost-Conventional-Marketing Techniques

12 You cannot live in isolation. Similarly bloggers cant blog in isolation – they live in blogoshere. The trick is to get other bloggers to notice you; to interact with them. Read many blogs and leave many comments on many blogs. It will pay off. All bloggers should subscribe to other blogs site feeds. Blog webrings are good place to start.

13 Participate in blogging games and memes (for example, this one at ProBlogger). These are often projects in which many bloggers try to write on a specific topic. They are fun. More importantly they generate traffic to your blog. You can get to know of such things by reading other blogs widely, especially those in your blog webring.

14 Join social bookmaking sites such as digg, del.icio.us etc.(My personal favorite’s reddit) Submit your best work to them and you may be surprised at the fruits of your labor. These sites can direct thousands to your blog! Use the tips under no.11 to ensure your posts rank highly on social bookmaking sites.

15 Use link baiting techniques. These are methods of getting people to link back to you from their own blogs/sites. Such links earn you visitors. Link baiting techniques range from good to evil. Some of the good methods are making other bloggers your friends your friends who will then link to you, writing interesting or useful stuff, linking to others in the hope of them reciprocating, Drastic, evil link baiting involves attracting others in your writing thus causing them to respond (with links) and any other devious scheme you can think up. More of this here.

16 Put your blogs URL (address) in your email signature, on your business cards, on posters, stickers, letterheads and anywhere else you can.

17 When all else fails, advertise.

Now, to burst some jargon:
Social bookmaking websites – These sites aim to develop a community of friends, online or otherwise. These friend’s interactions are primarily the sharing of each others list of interesting websites.

You can find more tips at problogger, specifically here. more Cool Tips.

1.Technical Techniques

2.Content- based techniques
These have to do with whatever you’re blogging about and how you deliver your content.

6. Not only should your blog’s name be catchy but so should all your articles titles. If in doubt, make big promises in your titles – it works! E.g. loose 2 kg in 2 weeks.

7.Quality is paramount. Whatever you write, write it well. Nobody wants to struggle reading poorly written material that may not make much sense.

8. Update your blog frequently. Trust me, it is quite a disappointment to keep on checking a blog for updates – you eventually give up on the blog. For novices, a few posts per week are okay. However, if blogging is anything but a hobby for you, you need to blog daily.

9. Planned blogging always beats random blogging. Think about what you want to tell your readers in a given amount of time (say a week), plan your posts, do some research and take your readers for the ride of their lives. It is true that failing to plan is planning to fail.

10.Keep in mind that most surfers aren’t ready to get into 1500 essay with huge intimidating paragraphs. Keep many of your pasts short, with short paragraphs.

11. I’m in no way a writing instructor, I know you know your stuff, but the following tips can make your blog more readable:

• Occasionally write an article in which you attempt to teach your readers something i.e. a How-To .
• Make a list e.g. ‘methods of promoting your blog’. Better yet, number your list e.g. ’17 ways to promote your blog’. Such types of posts are very reader friendly, to say the least.
• Writing about technology is a definite crowd puller, especially if you display expertise.
  In fact, if you manage to convince your readers that you are an expert on anything, you have hit it big time. Now anyone looking for information on what you write about will come to you.
• Another crowd puller is inspirational writing. I guess people love getting inspired. They will keep coming back for more.
• Lastly, humour still works. Use it.

I hope that our previous discussion on blogs influenced you, in some way, to go out looking to join the let’s–all–be-bloggers bandwagon. It would be really nice to know that you all have sparkling new blogs. That would mean that the blogoshere got larger, cool. This reminds me of my first foray into blogging. Few things beat the excitement that comes with setting up a new blog. How will people react? How many readers will like it? So many questions. No answers. Anxiety.

Unfortunately, a few days down the road many new bloggers are worried. Their bubble burst. Your parents siblings, significant–others and friends have all been to the blog that you told them so much about. Nobody comes anymore. (Unless you threaten them with those …you can’t even visit my ….emails). To avoid the heartache, spend some time promoting your blog – and get those much–sought–after regular readers!

There are three main methods of blog promotion:

Technical Techniques
Theses have to do with the more technical aspects of your blog

1. First things first. Your blog has to appeal to the eye. Nobody wants to read what they can’t bear to look at. If you got your blog through blogger or other fine service, take some time to choose one of the more aesthetically correct templates. As for professional blogs, it would pay to hire a professional website (or blog) designer.
2. Provide a site feed to your blog. Most blogs already do this out of the box but just make sure it is that important! We all get tired of continually checking a site for updates. It would be much better if we were automatically notified of any updates, right? A site feed does just that. It allows people to subscribe to your blog and be automatically notified of any changes or updates you make. If you really want to do cool amazing things with your site feed, check out the Godsend that is feedburner.
3. All your posts should have the ‘email-this-post’ feature. This allows your readers to email your articles to their friends (and publicise your blog).
4. Register your blog with sites such as technorati, blogtopsites or weblogs. These sites track many blogs. Therefore, many people search such sites for interesting reads. If you are not registered your blog cannot be found by such people.
5. Join a blog webring. These are blog communities where you cannot only make good friends but also make frequent readers. A good place to start would be the one and only Kenya Bloggers Webring (KBW).