What's your best tip on marketing your programming blog?

Question

I've just started freelancing and with it I have created a blog which I will write about open source projects I'm involved in, tutorials etc.

Why I started the blog market myself as a freelance developer. So I'm sitting down now and thinking about ways to market yourself.

Here's what I have come up with: Join forces with other bloggers - comment their posts and contribute with ideas and such. In this way people who reads your comment might be interesting reading your blog. The other thing I was thinking about was starting open source projects or contributing to others.

That's pretty much what can think of right now. I was thinking about putting my blog's adress here but I thought that would be kind of a "cheap shot". So let's hear it, what is your tip?

Answer 1

i think your idea is right on - if your other people like your writing they will potentially link to you from there blog. Some of their readers will come over to your blog to check it out. Also, getting incoming links from other sites will help your visibility on search engines. Also, try to do different promotions that will keep people coming backs.

Answer 2

• Write alot. before you can even expect to have any meaningful traffic to your blog it must have a substantial amount of material. If I get to a new blog and all I see there are 3 posts from the last week I'm not going to return to it. Ever.
• Advertise in the programming sub-reddit. You can post anything there and it actually has some chance ending in a place where people might click it.

Answer 3

Get on the social networking sites.

If you have a personal twitter, tweet about some of your popular stories. Just be careful, as a flood of cross-site spamming can annoy your followers.

Also, if you start like a congregation of bloggers, get some facebook or linkedin connections happening. You'll be amazed at how many people will stumble across your site.

Answer 4

Write interesting and unique things on your blog, so other people will link it. This way you'll get readers by direct links, and by search engines, which will put you higher if you are linked from many places. Be visible also in real life - attend conferences, maybe be speaker on some. It gives a lot of visibility and respect at the same time.

Answer 5

Some tips: Starting a Programming Blog

Answer 6

learn Search Engine Optimization techniques to help get better hits from search engines.

My tip would be that whenever you have a progamming problem that takes >1 hour to solve or search for on the internet, BLOG about it. Chances are that someone somewhere will also have this problem and you will save them hours and hours of time and pulling out hairs. Over time, this will also give you a good resource to look back upon if you ever run into the same error years down the road.