If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or get your blog updates by email. Thanks for visiting!

This Guest Post was submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from Piggy Bank Pie Writing Services. To get your own guest post on Mixed Market Arts, please visit the Guest Post page.

There are millions of blogs out there, so how do you make yours stand out from the crowd? There are proven methods you can use to raise your blog’s profile, but it will take months of good solid work - and it starts before you have even written the first post.

Optimization

The first thing you want to do is to make sure that your blog’s content will rank well in the search engines. That means choosing an optimized theme that cuts down on duplicate content (by putting excerpts on archive pages, for example) and that makes sure that every page appears unique.

A good technique is to make sure that the post title appears before the blog title. On a Wordpress blog, you can do this manually by editing the theme, or you can visit Courtney Tuttle’s site to download a theme that has had Court’s SEO treatment. There’s also a handy All in One SEO WordPress plugin that does most of the work for you.

Use tags to make it easy to sort the content you post. This may be built into your blogging software, as in the latest version of Wordpress, or you can add the functionality with a tagging plugin.

Content

Once you’ve got your blog set up, it’s time to post good content that’s relevant to your main theme. If you want readers to keep coming back, they have to know what to expect. This doesn’t mean that you have to stick to a single topic. It really depends on the blog. I have a niche blog for freelance writers where I cover topics such as skills, promotion, resources and so on. On that blog, I generally stay on-topic. On my other blogs, I feel freer to explore a bit, but it’s the niche blog that is most successful.

Coming up with good content every day can be difficult, but you don’t have to write it all yourself. Try a mix of a couple of posts written yourself, a couple of contributions from other bloggers (getting guest posters is a great way to vary the content and take the pressure off you) and a couple of posts pointing to relevant posts by other bloggers. You’ll soon get a good posting rhythm going.

Promotion

When you have some content on your blog, then claim your blog in Technorati. This will make it easier for other bloggers to find your blog - and for you to find those who are blogging on the same topics. Burn your RSS feed in Feedburner to give you lots of options for showing off and promoting your content.

Love Your Readers

Make it easy for your readers to love your blog by loving them. That means doing things like:

• Making it easy to subscribe to your content in a variety of readers or by email
• Making it easy for them to comment (but remember to protect yourself from spam with Akismet and Math Comment Spam Protection)
• Making it easy for them to bookmark your content for later reference by including social bookmarking icons at the start or end of your post with plugins such as ShareThis
• Using a plugin such as Subscribe to Comments so that readers can follow a conversation that they have commented on.
• Responding to readers’ comments promptly.

These four strategies will help you build a solid and popular blog. Do you have other ideas you wish to share? Let’s continue the discussion over to comments.