How To Use Technorati To Promote Your Blog

Posted on December 13, 2007
Filed Under Blog Promotion |

TechnoratiGiven the recent relaunch of Technorati, I thought it would be a good time to talk about how you can use Technorati to promote your blog. Since Technorati is one of the more important sites dedicated to blogs, it is well worth your while acquainting yourself with Technorati and learning what it can do for your blog.

What Is Technorati?

Technorati is part Blog Directory and part Blog Serach Engine. Readers are able to search the very latest content on over 100 million blogs world-wide because of the frequency with whichTechnorati indexes new blog posts. This is the search engine part.

Bloggers can also claim their blogs and set up a profile listing some basic infomation about themselves and their blogs. Unlike a search engine, you will have control over the information presented in your blog’s listing. And through the use of tags, you even have a degree of control over how your blog is indexed and on what pages your blog posts will appear. This is the blog directory part.

Make Sure You Claim Your Blog

The first step in promoting your blog with Technorati is to claim your blog. For this, you will need a Tecnorati account. If you don’t have one already, you can sign up for one here.

Next you will need to claim your blog. There are several options here but the simplist is to include a special link on the home page of your blog. Once the claim has been accepted, you can fill in some details about your blog.

Make An Effort With Your Profile

Think of your account and blog profiles on Technorati as mini advertisements. Make an effort to succinctly introduce yourself and describe the purpose and content of your blog. This may be the first contact a prospective reader has with you. Make sure you capture their attention!

Use Technorati Tags

To make your blog posts more searchable in Technorati, make sure you use Technorati tags. Tags help Technorati to classify your content and gives readers a better chance of finding your blog posts. Tag your posts with all of the tags relevant to the topic of your post - but don’t go overboard or your blog might get marked as spam.

Most blog platforms include some sort of category system and Technorati can read the categories in your rss feed as tags. But if you want more control over your tags, independent of your blog categories, Technorati also supports tags through special links in the body of your post. These links contain the rel=”tag” attribute. You can read more about Technorati tags here.

You can also find a Wordpress Technorati tag generator here.

Give Them A Ping

Once your blog post has been written, tagged and published, you will need to ping Technorati to let them know you have something new for their database. Most blog platforms support automated pinging of Technorati (and other services) but if yours doesn’t, you can always ping Technorati manually. Your post should be indexed and start appearing on Technorati within a few minutes (or at least inside an hour at peak times).

Write Something TopicalTechnorati Top Searches

Now that your post has been indexed and appears somewhere on Technorati, is anyone going to see it? The trick is to write about something topical - something current. A quick visit to the Technorati Popular page will give you a good idea of what people have been searching for recently. Check out the Blogger Central page as well. It contains a list of Top Tags - the most frequently used tags in recent blog posts.

Depending on your niche, you may not always be able to find something you feel you can write about within these pages. In this case you might be able to use one of Google’s tools (like Google Trends) to broaden your search for something topical to write about

Where’s The Fire?

The WTF (Where’s The Fire) feature appears to have been disabled for now, but I have included this strategy just in case it becomes available again soon.

Technorati allows you to submit a WTF (or hot topic) and let other readers vote on it digg-style. Using this feature, you can submit one of your posts, write a short blurb and let the readers vote. Apart from bringing more attention to your post, Maki has found you can use a WTF to rank at the top of the search results.

How Much Traffic?

Lets not kid ourselves - Technorati is no Google! And to be honest, I’ve had mixed results gaining traffic from Technorati. But providing you have startegies to retain readers once they visit your blog, you will be able to convert a reasonable number of Technorati visitors into regular readers. The traffic should be well targeted and interested in what you have to say.

If you enjoyed this post, please add me to your Technorati Favorites.

Technorati Tags: Blog Promotion, blogging, technorati




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Comments

3 Responses to “How To Use Technorati To Promote Your Blog”

  1. Chris on December 14th, 2007 9:33 am

    Wow, top job on the setup and theme - how are you finding WordPress?

    Looks great :-)

  2. Brett on December 14th, 2007 12:57 pm

    Thanks Chris. I’m enjoying the extra flexibility of Wordpress. Blogger is great to get started but it has it’s limits…

  3. Successful Blogging: 7 Ways To Measure The Success Of Your Blog | Monetize Your Blog on December 15th, 2007 6:09 am

    […] writing about Technorati in my last post - How To Use Technorati To Promote Your Blog, I started thinking about some of the other things you could do with Technorati. One of these […]

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