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This article is part of a case study series. It is the third installment of “Building A Profitable Niche Blog With Minimal Effort“

With the blog created, and content being added on a regular basis, it is time to start working on the promotion. Because I’m creating a low maintenance income stream, I want to focus on long term promotion efforts that don’t require much up front time and don’t require any long term commitments. All of the promotion will focus on link building.

What I like to do when promoting this type of blog is set up a to do list of goals so that I know what I need to accomplish every day. Each day’s work should take no more than 30-45 minutes to complete and should be productive. I will continue with this promotion schedule for about a month, or until I feel that the blog has sufficient links and popularity to sustain itself long term (most links will be permanent).

I also don’t want to spend much, if any, money on promotion. I’m not trying to develop a high profile website, I only want a small sum of monthly profit. Content development will be my only recurring expense (aside from the domain name and hosting, of course).

Anyways, I will now show you the latest revision of my promotion to do list, created specifically for this case study…

Note: While reading this list, keep in mind that this is NOT ongoing promotion, I will only promote this site for its first month of existence. After that first month, I will do nothing but auto-post content and manage advertisements.

One Time Promotion Tasks

There are a few things that I am only going to do once. They are either difficult to do uniquely more than once, or doing so would cause severe diminishing returns. These tasks include:

  • Create a Blogger Blog - This will be created under a new blogger account and will contain links to the main blog. I will also be creating weekly “roundup” posts for the purpose of getting deep links to the main blog.
  • Create a Wordpress.com Blog - Exact same principle as with the blogger blog. You can repeat this idea on as many free blogging platforms you want, but I think two is enough to manage.
  • Create a Squidoo Lens - Even though Squidoo Lenses have been losing their Google rankings lately, I still feel that having one with links to the blog is beneficial. I will create a lens and add some background information about personal finance as well as some excerpts from and links to the blog. I will update this lens as more content is added to the blog during the promotion phase.

The idea behind these one time tasks is to create pages on other free platforms. It is very easy to set one up and link to some of your pages from it, especially if you don’t have any ads on the blog yet ;-)

You can expand this list by creating these “micro-sites” with any other free services that are available.

Weekly Promotion Tasks

Next up are the tasks that I will be doing on a weekly basis. These could be done more regularly, but that would take too much effort.

The tasks that I am limiting to once per week are those that take time to write and submit content. Doing them too frequently can become a real chore.

  • Write and Send Press Releases - Many links can be gained from press releases, even if your news isn’t heavily syndicated. There are websites that just grab and publish all the press releases that are announced. To get the full benefit, you need to submit to a few different PR services. Here is a great article on Shoemoney.com about writing and submitting press releases. I will be submitting to the following sites: PRLeap, I-Newswire, PR9.net, PRUrgent, and Free-Press-Releases.
  • Review Related Websites - I got this idea from College-Startup.com and have decided to try it out. It seems like a viable strategy for getting noticed in a niche and possibly gaining some links. Although CS suggests added nofollow links within your reviews, I am going to play nice and give related sites the same love I hope they will give me.
  • Update Micro-Sites - With new content being added to the blog each week, I will be creating a short weekly summary post to be used as new material for Blogger, Wordpress.com, and Squidoo. This will help to create more pages with links to the main blog.

Daily Promotion Tasks

There are far too many daily tasks for me to do every day in the alloted time (30-45 minutes), so I will be breaking them up into an alternating schedule. Since I already have content loaded into the blog, being automatically published every other day, I will define my alternating days as “publish days” and “off days”.

Publish Days

  • Submit latest post to social bookmarking sites - I will use OnlyWire to submit the post to 12 smaller social bookmarking sites. Even though the chances of them getting attention from these sites are extremely slim, I should at least pick up a few links directly from the submission pages.
  • Submit latest article to blog carnivals - This is a sure fire way to get links to a new blog. The problem is that not all topics have multiple (or any) active carnivals. The personal finance market does, so I will be submitting all new posts to related blog carnivals and will likely get some good links as a result.
  • Request 3 reciprocal links and guest post opportunities from related blogs - For this task, I will be finding related blogs and emailing the author. I will put a post-level or blogroll link on my site pointing to theirs before sending the email, and will ask for link on their site in return. I will also ask them if they would be interested in having me publish a guest post on their blog.
  • Manually submit blog to 5 directories - Submitting to directories is very boring, but if done properly can generate some valuable links. Here is a nice list of general directories as well as a list of blog directories that I found in a post by DoshDosh.

Off Days

  • Rewrite a post and submit to 3 article directories - I will rework one of the previously published articles to avoid the blog being seen as duplicate content and to include a resource box with thinks. I will then submit that rewritten article to EzineArticles, GoArticles, and ArticleCity. This will give the blog some links directly from the article directory as well as from any websites that may publish the articles in the future.
  • Make 1 post on a related forum - I will find a few message boards that are related to the blog and will make a post or a new thread that contributes to the discussion. The benefit for my blog is that I will have a link to it in my signature. Before doing this, make sure you are allowed to have links in your signature and check Google’s cache on one of their forum posts to make sure signatures are shown to search engines.
  • Leave 3 comments on related blogs - Finding blogs without the nofollow tag would be best, but that is unlikely. Leaving comments isn’t hard anyways and will help get the blog noticed. The search engines might even decide to give the nofollow links a small amount of weight.
  • Make a post on Yahoo Answers or Google Groups - I will ask a question or formulate a reply to be posted on one of these websites, making sure to include a link back to the blog. As long as the postings are high quality, they won’t be regarded as spam, and we won’t have any problems.

Conclusion

There it is. My complete promotion plan for this PrsnlFinance.com case study. I will continue to do these tasks for about a month, or until I have exhausted all available “sources.” After that, I will simply sit back and wait as WordPress continues to automatically publish new content to the blog and the search engines find all of the links.

As soon as I start seeing a decent amount of traffic or the site is given some PageRank, I will begin to collect revenue from it. Because of this, I will now take a break from this case study. I will resume it when I have some results to share and/or can start showing how I will be monetizing the site.

Index of This Case Study

Here is an indexed list of all the posts in this particular case study. It will be updated as more posts are added to the series.

  1. Case Study: Building A Profitable Niche Blog With Minimal Effort
  2. Initial Steps For Building A Low Maintenance Niche Blog
  3. Promotion Goals For A Low Maintenance Niche Blog

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