Where To Submit Your New Blog

Once your blog is ready, you will need to submit to many places to promote it. They are 2 major ways of gaining traffic: Search Engine and Directories.

Search Engines

You want to be on Google first. But the major mistake that people do is to submit their blog to Google. This is a bad ideal because it can take weeks. What you want is to be index faster. I wrote this article to help you:

How to get your new site index by Google in a few days

Looking at my Google Analytics, 44.31% of visitors in the last month came from search engines with 85% of that from Google alone. Don't forget that Google has many localize versions but I was indexed by Google.com only.

I also paid a third party to submit my sites/blogs to other minor search engines. The drawback is it will take some times and you may get "spam" with faster paid inclusion offers. I used another email for that and only submitted the blogs I wanted.

Again, the main goal is to be on Google first and faster.

Directories

They are 3 kind of directories: Free, Mixed and Paid.

Free: The major one is Technorati. In the last month, I got 7 visitors from it. It's not much but many advertisers/paid review services will use it to rank your blog.

The major drawback of free directories is they are over crowded with "dead" blogs. Those are blogs that are no longer updated. They can also be spam or scrap blogs.

Mixed: The one I used is Blogarama. In the last month, I got 13 visitors from it. It's almost twice the visitors than above. I paid $10(one time fee) to have my account upgraded to Premier Service. Doing so, all my blogs are shown at the top of their respective categories.

It's free but I took the optional paid option to be seen above the rest of the other blogs. I can only have 1 category for each blog and my blog is rated by users. Blogarama will check the blog first in any case(Free or Premier).

Paid: The one I used is 1 Cool File. Okay, it's mine. In the last month, I got 51 visitors from it(few blogs).

The number will be higher because you will have less competition IF the directory is popular. Some directories offer just a listing on an high PageRank and nothing else. You may not have much traffic in that case.

For 1 Cool File, I offer more like the affiliate program, paid review services and files(freeware, shareware, blog tools). Both things will make it even more popular in the next few months. I liked the ideal of unlimited blogs for a one time fee($11,50) that Blogarama offer and you can have more than 1 category per blog on 1 Cool File. But I also offer a per year option at a lower cost($2.50).

Conclusion

This is the basic steps to start you out on you way to be read by others.

If your main goal is to blog about something that you really love and make money at the same time , then a few dollars invested could go a long way over time. If you don't blog for money at all, then don't pay to be included in paid directories. I know, I'm shooting on my own foot by writing that.

In any case, blog for the love of your subject first.