Get a real blog: Promoting the new domain name at Facibus On Blogging

This is the eighth in a series of get a real blog posts, designed to help you make the jump to self-hosted blogging (if that’s what you want to do).

You’ve got the blog, you’ve got content, it all looks slick - now you just need to tell everyone about it.

There are two big reasons for this:

You need to keep whatever readers you’ve gathered to date, and
You need to bring your blog to the attention of a lot of new potential readers.

Here is a list of promotional activities I’ve undertaken over the last week for my case study example, Intrapreneur Blog:

Claimed the blog on Technorati,
Created a Squidoo Intrapreneuring Lens,
Added Intrapreneur Blog to the BUMPzee Australian Blogs Community,
Added a post that linked back here, and
Added posts here that link back to Intrapreunering Blog.

There is a lot more that is possible in blog promotion - I’ll cover this in further detail shortly.

Note: Intrapreneur Blog is new - if it were an established blog, I would have also done the following:

posted about the new blog on the old one,
posted about the old blog on the new one, and
possibly put a server or HTML redirect onto the old server.

A note on redirects: this series is about moving away from a Blogger or Wordpress.com hosted blog - if you have one of these, chances are you will not be getting server access to be putting in a server redirect. That said, you might be able to change your old template to include a simple redirect as follows:

<html>
<head>
<title>redirecting to my new blog domain</title>
<meta http-equiv=“Content-Type” content=“text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″>
<META HTTP-EQUIV=“Refresh”
 CONTENT=“5; URL=http://intrapreneurblog.com/”>
</head>
<body><h1>Intrapreneur Blog has moved!</h1>

<p>Intrapreneur Blog is now at

<a href=“http://intrapreneurblog.com/”>”http://intrapreneurblog.com/“</a>.</p>

<p>Please update your bookmarks accordingly.</p></body>
</html>

The above code will redirect your readers to the new domain name in 5 seconds. Please note that this does not redirect inbound links that go beyond the blog’s front page - if someone has linked to a specific article then that will keep pointing at the old domain structure.

Next: well, we’ve reached the end of the eight-part series. Please stay tuned for What Happens Next to continue the conversation we’ve started here - can you guess?