I’m speaking on a panel here at Bloggers Connect titled Marketing Your Blog. I’m sharing the stage with 3 other great panelists:

I certainly don’t feel marketing a blog is rocket science, but as a way to get my own thoughts organized prior to the panel, I thought I’d document some of my thoughts on the subject ahead of time. Hopefully, you’ll find these tips useful as you think about your blog marketing plan for 2008.

Social networks – Create profiles on as many free social networks as possible. This will give you both inbound links to your blog as well as make you reachable should someone come across your profile. I think everyone realizes that it’s impossible to actively contribute to all the social networks, so pick 2-3 sites that allow you to reach the largest consumer base and focus on being active on those sites. Participate by helping others and providing value to the conversation. For more on the SEO benefit, take a look at Peter’s post.

Comment on other blogs — genuinely. When you comment on other blogs you leave a link back o your own blog. Interesting insights will attract people back to your blog but note that a self promoting comment is 10x as bad as no comment. Also remember to answer comments left on your blog. For tips to attracting comments, David Gibbons wrote a good summary on Zillow Blog.

Social Bookmarking – I’ve seen the largest traffic increase as a result of StumbleUpon, but that’s just one of the many social sites that you can utilize for free traffic. Others include Del.icio.us, Digg, and Sphere. Make it easy for readers to bookmark your site using whatever social bookmarking site they prefer (consider using the AddThis widget).

MyBlogLog – I simply love the MyBlogLog widget. It’s a great way to both see who has been reading my blog recently & get some free traffic in the process by leaving my mark on every MyBlogLog enabled blog I visit.

Links – Linking your blog post to and citing content from other blogs is an effective marketing strategy for promoting your blog to other bloggers. One of the best posts on this topic is this one by Dustin Luther.

Guest Blogging – One way to ensure you keep your local real estate blog focused on local issues of interest to consumers is to utilize multi-author blogs. Guest blogging is a way to gain additional exposure with a broader audience while still not getting off topic on your local blog. Many real estate professionals love to talk about industry issues (just look at the success of active rain), but chances are good that the consumers reading your local blog don’t really care to hear your take on the Loudoun County Assessor (unless your target market is consumers in Loudoun Couty). In addition to this blog, there are a number of multi-author blogs in the real estate space, depending on what topic you’re interested in writing about.

Print Materials – This is a really simple one: put your blog URL on your business card and all your marketing materials.

Finally, realize — your blog IS your resume, particularly for generation X & Y. Make sure to think of it that way. Don’t throw up crap on your blog just for the sake of adding content.

Good luck marketing your blog in 2008!

ConnectNYCO8