This post should have been the very first of the series about Marketing Your Blog. This post falls within both categories Marketing and SEO at the same time because it is a very, very important point in these topics. Believe me, you can’t start blogging better than having your own domain name. This is like your business card. Which of the following options sound better?:

• binaryant.wordpress.com
• binaryant.blogspot.com
• www.binaryant.com

I hope you chose the last one, other way we have a problem… No, I’m sure you chose the dot com domain. If you have a blog and you don’t have your own domain I can only think that it is because you don’t know how cheap are the domains nowadays. For example you can register your .com in BlueHost for only $10/year. How much do you spend in sweets every year? Surely more than these $10.

Are you still thinking of you don’t need your own domain? Ok, listen. Imagine that you have your amazing blog under a free sub domain like a .wordpress.com or a .blogspot.com, something like myreallycoolsite.wordpress.com. It is really good so you increase your visitors month by month. You start to rank high on Google and on other search engines because people link your content due to its quality. And suddenly, one day, you realise that you are so good to be hosted under a free, too long, and ugly sub domain. What happen with your ranks, with all those links pointing to your blog, with all the traffic coming to it? That day you will remember the advise someone told you about buying your own domain and start working on it, and also you’ll remember that it only cost $10.

It is true that with some work,effort and time you can redirect the traffic and the links to your new domain name, but as I just said some work, effort and time are needed. So why don’t you save energy and time working on your own domain name from the beginning?

When I started to write this post I told you that it is good to market your blog because it shows a more professional and serious picture of you, but also I told you that it is good in SEO terms. Search engines put more value on domain names that on free sub domain names. And the older the domain is the more value they put on.

I hope to have changed your mind about free sub domains, but if not I’m sure you’ll see it as time goes by and your site grows in popularity.

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Hello everybody. I’m going to start a series of Blogging Marketing. The objective of this series is to put in practice the advices I’m gathering from the most important bloggers out there and at the same time try to help other bloggers in a similar situation I’m placed. What is my situation? I’m starting a blog and really is a hard task to make it work.

It is said that the most important keys to succeed are: Marketing and Content, but as the target of this series is Marketing Your Blog I’m only deal with the first of these keys, the Marketing.

For this first lesson let’s face a very easy task:

Leaving comments in some popular blogs of your niche

This is a very basic step, but it doesn’t mean you have to write crappy comments in every blog you find, because in that case nobody will pay you attention so you will never get some traffic from the comments you leave.

What are we looking for with these comments we leave?

First of all we get some back links to our blog with them and this way other bloggers who are also reading or commenting in the popular blog could visit us. On second place but not less important, we are looking for establish some relation with the popular blogger. I don’t mean an special relation, we only want him/her to know us, and perhaps one day he/she find something interesting on our blog and we get linked. This would assure a big slice of traffic.

How should be these comments?

I think it is not necessary to say that they must have some value. You must add some information, or add another point of view. You can also ask doubts because popular bloggers usually like to help, if they have time.

Having said those things you should take the habit of leave comments every day on popular blogs. Some people advise to leave 10 or 15 comments in different blogs every day. I let you decide how many comments you prefer to write, because it takes some time to make good and valuable ones.

Will you be able to complete this task? You can start commenting here

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