The concept that started its journey as a humble online journal turned out to become a force to reckon with at the turn of the century. The growth didn’t stopped there; rather it has multiplied over the year with a factor of n. The growth of blog as a medium has given voice to many people and food to others. The word blog is so profusely used that it faces the danger of getting abused, misused, and misunderstood.

By and large, people understand most of the peripheral things about blogging, but there are things which confuse even bloggers who are in there for 2-3 years. This article intends to explain such concepts. Let’s start with understanding the importance of an image in a blog post then we will talk about trackback, RSS, followed by a brief discussion on SEO, and we will end our discussion with talking about some strategies to promote your blog.

Why to add an image in the post?

I will not resort to the famous quote about pictures that says, “A picture speaks a thousand words” to explain my point. Not because I do not believe in it, but because it doesn’t solve my purpose. Indeed, picture is always worth more as it conveys the information visually, and for that matter, we all know that the best memory out there got the metaphor of “photographic memory.” This metaphor itself is a telltale. A good picture that supports your blog post has many advantages, which I have listed below.

• A relevant image helps you explain the core concept of the blog-post.
• Image helps you connect with your readers.
• It helps in eliciting the emotional response for the topic in question.
• And most importantly, an image with a proper Alt tag helps you rank up in Google, Bing and Yahoo image search. A properly supplied Alt tag is regarded as a good SEO technique.

What is trackback and why it is important?

A trackback is a method of notification that triggers when someone else uses your content or document on his website. This technology was developed by SixApart, the creator MovableType blog package. According to the creator, trackback is:

“In a nutshell, trackback was designed to provide a method of notification between websites: it is a method of person A saying to person B, “This is something you may be interested in.” To do that, person A sends a trackback ping to person B.”

Let’s try to explain this. Suppose, you have written an article on your blog that many people wants to link back to, or write something related to it for that they will need to use your article. Now, how will you know who all are using your articles, or writing about your articles on the Internet? This is where a trackback comes into play. When someone uses your article in any form in his website or blog, he sends a notification back to you informing you about the use of your article.

If you are using WordPress then you need to go into “Discussion Settings” and see if the checkmarks against “Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article (slows down posting)” and “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackback)” under “Default article settings” are enabled there or not. Enable these features, if you want trackback sent to and from your blog.

What, how and why of RSS

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication which helps the webmaster inform the blog subscribers about the changes made in the blog. This is a nice way to keep your subscriber posted with the recent changes in your blog, and do to this you will need to setup RSS feed for your website.

There are many paid as well as free RSS services available, but I will suggest using Google’s feed burner. Setting up a FeedBurner account is pretty easy, and it is completely free. To you it, all you need to have is a Google account. Follow the steps given below to setup a FeedBurner account for your blog.

Setup a FeedBurner account

Step one: Go to FeedBurner.com and click the register link. If you have a Google account then use it to log-in.

Step two: You will see a screen like this:

Step 3: Enter your blog URL in the box and you will be greeted by the following screen:

Step 4: Choose RSS 2.0 from the list and click next.

Step 5: You will be taken to a new screen. Enter the Feed Title in the red box.

Step 6: Press next and you are done. You have set the feed burner for your blog. Now activate your feed and choose a chicklet by clicking on Publicize followed by Chicklet chooser.

Step 7: Copy the URL from the box at the bottom of the page and use it on your blog, preferably in the sidebar.

Search Engine Optimization: why does it matter?

It doesn’t if all I have to do with my blog is to is impress my girlfriend and her mom, and it definitely does, if I want to impress Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines.

And why would I want to do that?

For traffic, traffic and traffic! I want people to come to my blog and see how cool it is, and how knowledgeable I am.
Let’s face it: the major share of traffic that any website gets comes from a search engine. That is why search engine optimization (SEO) is so important. You have to optimize your blog and every post, if you want people to flock around your website.

And how would I do that?

Let me explain the process in brief. SEO begins with finding right keywords or keyword phrases for your blog. To emphasize the importance of a keyword let me tell you that a keyword is the lifeline for your website. This is at the core of everything that you do to promote your website. Let me give you a quick list of things that you need to do to optimize your blog:

• Keyword Research
• On-page optimization
1. Title tag
2. meta tag Keyword
3. meta tag Description
4. Heading tags (H1, H2, H3, H4…)
5. Alt tag
6. Keyword rich anchor text
7. Internal linking
8. Outbound linking

• Off-page optimization: The goal of off-page optimization is to bring traffic to your website and get quality backlinks (links from other website to your blog) to your website. It involves everything that you do: from forum posting to writing comments to answering questions to participating in discussion to social bookmarking.

Can you do it?

If you are not an SEO expert then I would suggest getting an expert onboard to do this stuff because this is the most critical aspect; if done right, it will bring lots of traffic, do not expect anything, , if it is done wrong, not even rotten tomatoes.

If you are not an expert then over the period of time, you should learn the skill, but for now get someone who can do it. If you do not have the budget then you should immediately start learning SEO.

Connecting with the target audience

There are quite a few things that you can do to reach out to your target audience. Discussing each of them in detail falls outside the purview of this article, so for this article, I will just limit myself to listing each of them.

Before I start listing, let me tell you that the keywords you chose for your blog and blog posts were the first and very important step in the direction of reaching out to the target audience. It provided the foundation on which all your online marketing activity will be build.

To reach out to the target audience, you can use seek help of

• Article marketing
• Social media optimization
• Social media marketing
• Social bookmarking
• Search engine optimization
• Search engine marketing
• Twitter, plurk, identi.ca and other micro-blogging platform
• RSS
• Forum participation
• Blog comments
• Guest articles
• Media sharing, etc.

You must always remember. The goal of every online marketing activity is to bring traffic to your website.

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