Fused Nation - UK SEO Blog

Tony Hung over at Problogger has written a great list of ideas for marketing your blog in 2007.  I’ve seen quite a growth in traffic to Fused Nation over the past few months using some of these techniques (albeit passively) and they are well worth noting.

Anyone have some more top blog marketing tips to add?

I kinda go through phases with this blog - I started off just working on content, but I was little unfocused - I didn’t really write much early on that was original - I just really commented on industry news and stuff like that.

I then moved on and started to find my own groove to work in - which meant I mainly focused on topics that were of interest to me (so I knew I could write reasonably well about them) and have taken it from there.  From time to time I do go through re-design phases where I’ve changed the Wordpress theme or messed around with the current theme.  I think when you get to a certain level of content and exposure, your image is more important than it was - so a good, clean design can help keep visitors coming to the site.

Right now, I’m in a kind of an expansion phase - I’ve just made a few tweaks to the site and now I’m going to be working on expanding the content.  Fused Nation will have another author onboard soon and I’m still looking for a few more folks to contribute as well.  I’m not posting here as much as I’d like (bit busy just now), but hope to free some time up next month to work on some content (feel free to post suggestions for anything you’d like to see).

I’d say one of the key techniques that’s helped with the growth of Fused Nation is linking out to other sites.  Not only do you create a more informative article, but it is also a subtle way of letting other bloggers know you’re there (most folks check their logs and Wordpress lets you see via technorati almost instantly who’s linking to you).  I’d say this has attracted more regular readers, commenters and links from other sites than any other marketing technique the average blog could use.

I think the success of this is down to the fact that it isn’t forced upon people (unlike comment spam, forum spam, web spam, link requests, etc) - it’s a more subtle form of marketing.  I like this approach.  It doesn’t ask anything of anyone - it’s not intrusive - all it does is send up a small flag saying “hey, I’m here!” and leaves it to the judgment of others.  This is why I think content and image are important at different stages of your blog’s life.  Both of these factors play a strong role in encouraging repeat visits to your site.

For example, there have been random debates on forums and blogs about pay per post services such as ReviewMe.  The problem with this is that paid reviews impact both your content and your image and as these are key conversion factors for your blog marketing campaign people should be looking at the long term impact.  Perhaps sacrificing some repeat visitors to make some money now isn’t the best approach in the long term?  I know Aaron did a good post somewhere covering some of these concerns and the approach ReviewMe takes, but I can’t find it offhand.  Worth a read if you can find it though (and an excellent example of a company taking a proactive approach to dealing with potential problems).

So what has worked for you in the past or is there anything you are trying out just now that has a unique approach?

MG