Promote your website for free

In Part 2 I discussed using Twitter, which is is a very useful tool for promoting your blog posts. Your blogging platform should make it easy for you and your viewers to promote your post via Twitter, Facebook and Google+

For example WordPress.com shortens the link for you and includes the @wordpressdotcom twitter handle which has over a million followers. It also makes sharing links on Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn a cinch.

 

Reddit

Posting a link on reddit is very quick and easy. You don’t need to supply reddit with your email or any personal information to get started. Just pick and username and password and you’re already registered and ready to post your link.

All you need to do it enter a title, paste the link and use a sub reddit such as “programming”.

Once submitted, you’ll see there are no comments yet but you can get the ball rolling by searching reddit for the same topic and seeing what similar posts are available and what people are saying. Here we find someone has been looking for a good blog on IBM Jazz and RTC tools:

It only takes a minute or less to add a comment that can drive extra readers to your site

Finally, remember to check back every once in a while to see what other people are saying.

A bit more info on sub reddits

The programming sub reddit currently has more than half a million readers.
If you are posting a programming tutorial, you may want to use the sub reddit “learnprogramming” which currently has over 130 thousand readers.
If your post is specific to a particular language, it might be better to use that
e.g. “Python”

Also be aware that there are sets of subreddits such as redditnews. Readditnews contains the cssnews sub reddit and you can see some css posts are very popular on redditnews. So use cssnews for your css blog posts.

Stumble Upon

Stumble Upon requires some more personal information to get started, but is a huge source of traffic generation, even overtaking Facebook as the No. 1 source for social media traffic in the U.S. Once signed up you can submit all of your favourite web sites and other users can then stumble upon them.

Digg

Most posts on digg are pretty frivolous, but you may get some promotion via this service. It’s quick to sign up, and then go submit your links.

Other developer’s blogs

An underrated way to advertise you blog is by making useful comments on other developer’s blogs. This requires a bit more of your time but can be very rewarding. Read the blogs and make sure that your comments are relevant to the post that you are commenting on. Only mention your blog if it is relevant to the post you are commenting on and mention it in a way that is of interested to other readers. Avoid spam like comments at all costs – they are likely to do you more harm than good. But even if you don’t mention your blog at all and just leave helpful comments, these can enhance your brand not just in the eyes of the other blogger, but in the eyes of all of the readers of the other readers blog.

Thank you very much for reading this series. If you enjoyed it, please leave me a comment below.

Additional Reading

Increase your traffic with StumbleUpon 

Free ways to promote your blog