In an earlier post, I spoke about the importance of having a Content Strategy – but never mentioned exactly what my strategy for this site actually is.

Well, part of that strategy is expressed in the tagline at the top of the page: “Musings on Life, Business, and the Online World”. But that doesn’t really mean anything.

In part, what I want to do is talk about the process of not just creating a blog, but growing it into a successful, often-visited site that’s above all else, useful.

One of the key considerations is therefore How To Encourage Visitors to Visit.

Now, many people talk incessantly about Search Engine Optimisation. It’s a legitimate strategy, but it’s certainly not the only one – and, if you were to choose just one strategy,  it might not even be the best.

You see, optimising for Google is exactly that: optimising for an online application. It’s one step removed from optimising for people. I’m not saying that optimising for Google won’t attract people to a site. I’m just saying that there are other ways.

Let’s talk about Site Promotion. What is it? The art of promoting your site directly to people.

How do you do it? One way is by tapping in to established networks and letting them know you exist. Those networks might include Facebook groups or Twitter users or forums or community sites. The idea is to write interesting posts and get active, and pique people’s curiosity enough that they follow you back to your blog.

Another way is the tried and true: article submission. Either to a directory, or as a guest blogger, or to a specialist site that might actually pay you for an article.

Another way is also starting to emerge. There are informal networks of bloggers, linked through a third party, that share their posts on each others’ sites. It’s like advertising, but a bit different. The idea is that a blogger writes a post related to what you’ve written about, and a summary of that post appears in the sidebar next to your post. Your post also appears as a summary on someone else’s post. Your audience will naturally grow when people stumble across your site and find it interesting enough to linger. (If you want more information, check out this site.)

Yet another way is to get your posts submitted to a social bookmarking site like Digg or Delicious.

I’ve experimented with most of these in the past, and made good use of some of them within specific marketing campaigns. The question is, what’s right for this blogsite? What will be the most effective in the shortest time? After all, the goal of most sites (this one included) is to get noticed – and I’ve never done it for a blogsite before.

At the moment, I’m using a combination of Twitter and social bookmarking (see the Share/Save button down below?). I’m also about to reactivate an old profile in a couple of communities, and yes, I’m gonna do a bit of search engine optimisation as well (after all, it can’t hurt), but at this stage it’s all a bit experimental. I’ll keep what works and discard the rest, and who knows what might happen?

I’ll keep you posted. If anyone has any ideas, let me know. Write a comment and tell me about them.