The first thing you can try and remember is that if you are going to use any link text, try and use the keywords for your blog in the text.  Seem SIMPLE?  Well, it is, but for some reasons you still see people linking to other pages with “click here” or “you can go to that one page that’s over here”.  What you should be doing is stating that you can get more information about affiliate marketing from my older posts.

You can see that in the 3rd example I used the keyword, affiliate marketing, to link to a post from a earlier date on my blog.  This allows people to venture deeper into my blog knowing what they are in for.  It also allows search engines to follow back into your blog to find deeper pages.  When you are linking back to your blog, use keywords that describe your blog, it’s that SIMPLE.

One of the next things is that you want to be using your keywords throughout your post.  When you are creating a post about your latest affiliate promotional product you are promoting, make sure that you include keywords that match the post content back to your blog.  Say I was going to do a post about blog hosting.  Well, throughout that post I would use keywords like “blog hosting”, “hosting plans”, “web hosting” or even “cheap hosting” to keep the reader focused on the topic at hand.

It will also look real pretty to search engines and people searching for those terms.  SIMPLE, right?  Again, it seems that way, but you will still find bloggers or webmasters that are talking very unprofessional throughout a post or page and that will turn a reader off right away.  Besides getting the reader to go away, not using keywords or terms in your post will turn the search engine spiders away.  Keep in mind that the search engines are going to being you traffic, so you want to keep them happy.

After you have those two marketing tips mastered, then you can work on getting subscribers.  Some people, most that just started blogging, want to have a contest that requires people to sign up to enter.  Well, this isn’t as good as it sounds.  It is more simple than that even.  All you have to do is put a notice at the top AND bottom of your post single page reminding the reader that if they liked that post, they can subscribe to get email updates.

That is SIMPLE, right?  Trying to run a contest will get you entries, but it will not get you long term readers, that is for sure.  Most will enter the contest, your numbers will look good for awhile, but they will slowly unsubscribe from your blog because they weren’t really interested in the first place.  If you keep up with the content, like regular posts, your subscriber counts will rise in due time.  If you don’t see the numbers going up, change your strategy.

I market this blog in many ways and they are all free.  First off, I have it listed in any free directory that I can find.  It’s in all my signatures, search Google for “sukosaki.info” or “sukosaki” to find them, and I get traffic to this blog that way.  I also comment on other blogs that I find interesting.  The search engines might not “see” the link, but human eyes always see the link.  I created a myspace.com account just for this blog.  Joining groups about blogging and gaining friends will help you network your blog as well.

That is just a quick overview of how I market this blog for free.  There are a lot of ways you can pay to market your blog, but why do that when there are just as many free ways?