Promoting Your Blog Offline

Most of our promotional effort goes, quite rightly, into making sure our blogs rank well in search. But think about search readers for a moment. We're answering their questions and giving them help in the hope that they'll stick around, read more and keep coming back. Some do, most don't.

Using SEO to promote your blog can be effective, but it is a scatter gun effect. This site, for example gets plenty of traffic from the search phrase "Get Google Voice in Europe." But the people coming here to read about that could be anyone - motoring journalists, ex-pats wanting to stay in touch with home, people who can't get a phone line - literally anyone. Only a tiny proportion might be bloggers who are learning to create an online income, and may therefore be interested in continuing to read Mike's Life.

So to support our activity in SEO, we need to add some more direct promotion. We need to target the people who have an interest in our topics. It's harder to find them, but when you do, you tap into a rich seam of people who will almost certainly become regular readers.

We've covered online promotion to these groups many times. I'm talking about things like:

• Guest posting
• Commenting on other blogs
• Spending time in forums
• Being available for interviews

But today, I want to consider offline promotional work.

The same principles apply as to online stuff. You need to go to where your audience is hanging out. So start with your niche and try to work out where you can find a large group of people who might be interested in what you write about. But you need to get out and about to meet those people. Let me give you a couple of examples:

For this blog, the obvious place is somewhere like Blog World Expo, where a huge number of bloggers will be attending several days of conferences. I'll be there to meet existing readers, sit on a panel and meet some of my heroes. But I'll also be there to expose what I do here to as many people as possible by giving the right people business cards and spending some time talking to them.

For my travel blog, we attended a huge triathlon event over the weekend, and we talked to hundreds of people. Every one of them is a potential reader of our site, because they either live on the island, or are on holiday here. By sponsoring the event, our logo was seen by them all, and we dished out dozens of business cards. Just walking around talking to athletes, volunteers and spectators was fabulous PR for us. And I know many of them will become long term readers of the site.

As well as attending functions, there are other ways to reach your readers:

• Advertise in magazines that relate to your topic - you may even be able to do a reciprocal deal that involves no cash! I did this with my scuba diving blog.
• Ask shops that sell products your potential readers might use, to keep some cards or leaflets on their counter or notice board. We have cards for the travel blog at outlets all over the island.
• Ask clubs that relate to your niche to recommend you to their readers. This is something that worked really well with triathlon clubs.

So don't stop thinking about SEO, but do start thinking about adding some offline promotion to your armoury.

Where might your potential readers be hanging out offline? How can you get a message to them?

Here are some more you might like:

1/ How I'm currently using social media sites

2/ Are you writing for your audience?

3/ Analysis of a blog - one month old