Four offline marketing tips to promote your blog

If you’ve read the papers today, the Philippine Daily Inquirer’s Super section has launched Blog Patrol, which is a weekly feature of well-written blog entries that is republished on the dailies by the Super editors. Today’s feature article was from a really long blog entry of www.redjeulle.blogspot.com.

We at Super love how blogs have exploded. We love it even more when blogs are well written. To encourage better blog writing, we will spend time online looking for the best blog entries that we can lift and publish in our own pages. If you think your entries are print-worthy and we’re taking too long in making our way to your blog, send smoke signals to [email protected].

Here are four simple offline marketing methods to get new readers:

1. Making the dailies is just one way to get your blog noticed by new readership niches. Based on experience, it is much harder to get yourself published on the dailies. The easiest way to gain more exposure is to self market yourself in magazine articles. Editors are more than willing to credit your author blurb where you can plug your blog. There are dozens of local bloggers who are also regular contributors and editors to magazines. Ask around and you might just begin your print publishing career!


N.B. From experience, some editors tend to forget to put your blog URL and author bi-line because it was located in a separate paragraph at the end of the article, for lack of space. If you are a gifted copywriter and by chance, writing a column (it would be weird to plug your blog in the middle of a product review), you can plug your blog within the article itself.

2. If you are a talented photographer, offer your services to the broadsheets, publicists, ad agencies and commercial publishing firms. If you are starting out, offer your services for free in exchange for real world links to your blog or online gallery (photo credit goes to so and so … you can view his portfolio at so and so URL). This is a good ex deal, as what you are really doing is buying real world links. If the magazine’s circulation is say, 2,000 copies total, get 40% of that (800 copies) and you have a conservative estimate of how many readers will see your photos. You will be “buying” at least 800 links. An events photographer can get paid P3,000.00 per shoot so assuming you use this cost as a benchmark, you bought 800 links for P3,000.00 which goes to about P3.75 per link.
3. Improve your business card. Make sure your blog address and email address are present. Make your offline link lead directly to your online portfolio and resume.
4. Attend blog parties. Amidst the link building and initiations of newfound friendship, this is really a networking opportunity. But should you just attend, eat and talk? Bring a camera. Take pictures of everyone, even people you don’t know — so that when you post these pictures online, everyone who was there will link back to you because they were in the picture. This is called vanity. 🙂 I didn’t bring a camera to the Taste Asia II blog party. I actually brought the Nintendo Wii so we could Boogie. Sadly, the projector was fixated onto the ceiling so I couldn’t attach the console.