What are the best and most ethical ways to promote a new coding blog?

Question

I am having a go at blogging and would like to get some discussions going instead of just yelling into the void. So I was wondering what are the some recommended ways to get my posts noticed without becoming a nuisance to the internet at large?

Answer 1

One way that I can easily think of is to do link backs to other blogs that have interesting articles. That way your blog can be a little bit of notice on the linked-to blog via a trackback.

Answer 2

1. Write desired content.
2. Use a blogging tool that supports PINGing big blog directories. WordPress is fantastic for blogs.
3. Add plugins that will allow readers to easily "share this post" on social networks like Digg.
4. Hunt down information relating to your posts, and comment on their blogs with a link to your articles.
5. A little bit of Google AdSense doesn't hurt anyone.
6. Don't spam on your own site. :)

Answer 3

I have also published a mini-size coding/technical blog. Here are what I find helpful in blog promotion:

• Join the social blogging network such as MyBlogLog, Technorati.
• Post links to your posts to Digg style website for programming such as dzone.com or dotnetkicks.com. If people find your posts interesting they will give you an "up vote."
• Submit your URL to search engines. This may take long time for new website before it get indexed and can be found from search engines.
• Tag your post clearly and correctly.
• Post good contents.

Answer 4

There's nothing wrong with building a few links for better visibility. While many directory websites can be sort of a dustbin for spammers to hang out in, there are quite a few that are free or inexpensive and are worth the effort and/or few bucks to get listed. All the data that is elicited when you make a listing is actually some pretty valuable stuff for future ontology-building on the net. (In fact, not to toot my own horn or anything, but you can read up on my opinions as a computational linguist on directory websites and paid link-building here: http://www.apogee-search.com/Blog/index.php/the-scientific-value-of-paid-link-submission)

If you're looking for a fast turnaround time, don't expect it. Even if you start getting links immediately, optimization is an investment. Expect to spend some money to streamline the process. With the amount of submissions these days, the review fee is worth it. Look for sites that have a cheap human review fee and high pagerank. These editors deserve the small change probably close to as much as a research assistant building a corpus maybe a few people might use to get a few publications, but not really push any specific scientific limits (which seems to happen a lot).

While incoming links aren't as good an indicator for search optimization as they used to be, you can counteract this declining trend by choosing quality sites. Pagerank, of course, is a decent indicator of this, as well as the number of incoming links, which you can see on sites like Yahoo! Site Explorer. Other things you can aim to work on include making sure your site is totally valid HTML, reducing the amount of text rendered in JavaScript or Flash, regular site updates (as far as a blog goes, this is pretty easy to do even for all pages, given the need for a decent sidenav), and a good XML sitemap.

You definitely need to get yourself on the Open Directory Project, http://www.dmoz.org . It's pretty well regarded as one of the best and more "whitehat" versions of link-based knowledge engineering around.

Make sure you're writing interesting content that really addresses up-to-date issues. Make sure you've got informative title tags, meta keywords and meta description tags, and headline tags which have the words you'd like to be found for in a search. If you're looking at a competitive keyword, try getting more specific at first until you build a bigger reader base.

Finally, note what I did with my blog link. If you find another blog or forum where your writing has something valid to contribute to a discussion, don't be afraid to share! That way, you're not hawking your blog, but offering your informed opinion. Good luck!