If you are a blogger than you already know blog needs to promote. There are some bloger out there who don't care too much with promotion just crear content. What do you think which one is more important?
If you don't have quality content, you are promoting nothing. It's like trying to sell and empty vessel. You need to do both. It's not an either or thing and it's not do one first and then the other later. You need both. If you can't do both, then you are kidding yourself. The hardest part is producing consistent, quality, well presented content. SEO tips are everywhere..everyone is doing the same thing It's no big secret. Creating a nice website that people actual want to visit and keep coming back ? That is what takes skill.
Here is an excerpt from an article on Mashable yesterday that pretty much sums it up: http://mashable.com/2010/06/21/principles-viral-media-site/ This is what people keep trying to beat into the heads of noobs everyday, yet, there is still an overwhelming desire to ignore conventional and experienced wisdom and SEO for traffic above all else and it's the wrong way to look at it. The web is not a popularity contest. who can have the most Twitter followers, The most Facebook Fans, The lowest Alexa rank, Page Rank and Stats. You can't fake that stuff. The websites that enjoy all of these things, do so because of their content. People actually like them. Not how well they can manipulate mathematics. You can't trick people into liking you no matter how many places you drop a link.
if you write good unique content, you don;t need to promote it in general sense of this word. You rss feed gets picked up by other sites and you receive backlinks automatically. if you have bunch of sales pages - this is where promotion is needed.
I run a pretty successful blog and this is very true. You have to find a balance. Content and promotion are both very important. It can be argued that one is more important than the other but in the end if you promote, promote, promote and you don't have good content, readers aren't going to stay long.
You can be successful with great content and mediocre promotion because great content finds readers and readers promote great content to others. But you will never be successful with great promotion and a mediocre blog. Let's face it, 90% of the blogs out there suck. Heck 70% of my own blogs suck, mostly because they are half finished projects. Many of the successful blogs out there ( not SEO or Webmaster blogs) didn't know or do a lot of back braking SEO and link building like I see so many bloggers here killing themselves for. They got popular because they were good and word spread. There are so many crappy blogs out there, that the good ones really stand out. It's actually a great opportunity if people would stop obsessing about back links and page rank and create a good product.
So true!! And creating the content is the much more fun part, at least I think since I like writing, so that means you be more likely to stick with it and create a successful blog.
Blogging is about content. The content is for your readers. You need to write for your readers. The way I look at blogging is like performing for an audience. You are presenting yourself before the largest audience ever. But, you need to only bring in those that are fans of what your doing. If you an Opera singer and you start to bring in country music fans, they might not stay long. You need to bring in Opera fans. You need to be presenting something that will bring them in and keep them there. Sure your going to get the stray reader, but those are not the ones your after. Content will help with this. But, promotion to the right people will help weed out the ones you don't want. Not sure if thats a good analogy but it is how I look at it. You have to blog for those that are going to be reading it. You have to blog for the ones you want to read it. This is the content part. You use promotion to help keep the ones that you don't want out. This is where the targeted audience part is. You can have a huge party...and invite no one and tell no one and no one will show up. Throw a great party and start telling your friends and family and you have guests. Blogs are the same way. So your blog will not survive without good quality content (must be interesting also) and good promotion techniques. Traffic is not just traffic.
Content, content, content! You've got to have that in place first and it must always be top priority whether it be a blog or a content site or an off-line newspaper. "If you build it, they will come" promotion is something that goes hand in hand with content but you've got to have the content before you can promote it.
The needs to be a balance between both. If you have the content but not promotion, how is anyone ever going to find it? If you promote a lot yet have very little content, you aren't going to get repeat visitors and only a small trickle of traffic to your site. Both complement the other - without one or the other, success will never be produced.
Well for starters if you have content eventually the search engines are going to find you. If you rank high enough in the SERPs you will get found that way. But that can take a very long time. A faster way to get traffic is by promoting your site. You need to build your backlinks by using forum posting and blog commenting. Now you can hire someone to do this for you, or you can do it yourself. A lot of webmasters and bloggers tend to lean toward the outsourcing of this because it frees them up for other things. Not to mention that most forum posters are pretty affordable (I prefer not to use the word "cheap").
I also heard the phrase "content is king". After many trials and errors...I can honestly tell you that it is true! Content is more valuable then promotion. All you need is one person to see a good content site to have success. That single person could help spread your site to the world.
The whole point of having a blog is to keep adding content. But some people experimented with having a large number of blogs with average content, and just kept promoting them, to earn money. I don't think that works out in the long run, because the mediocre content repels the genuine reader.