By Theodore Odeluga (www.ebizdynamix.com)

Blogs are all the rage these days and they’ve added an extra dimension to the distractions we can enjoy online. Appropriately because everyone seems to be writing one, they’re as interesting and vast in their variety as people are all over the planet. However, as a result, getting people to notice, let alone read your blog is becoming increasingly difficult. I suggest then that the ways of promoting your blog should be as interesting and unusual as people are.

The rest of this article is going to describe some ideas which you may think are inspired, ridiculous (and so crazy they just might work) and some which are actually quite sensible. At the very least, they may well inspire a few ‘wild and whacky’ ideas of your own.

Busking

If you’re a musician, I’m willing to wager you’ve already thought of this one. But how about writing a song telling the story of your blog then singing about it? If you performed every day for a month across the London Underground tube network, shopping centres and large public spaces like Leicester Square, not only would you earn a nice few quid but people would be thinking of your blogs URL as they quietly hummed your infectious tune.

If you’re not a musician, you could always ask a musical friend to write a song about your blog and perform it (they would get to keep the royalties of course –fairs fair innit?).

Organise a Student Union debate

Studying at college or university? Student Union clubs offer an excellent way to express your opinion and tell other people about yourself. Why not organise a Student Union debate on the subject of your blog (that is, not the blog itself but the stuff it rants and raves about) –and then incorporate the blogs address into the discussion? You could offer to continue the debate online and of course provide the URL where other passionate discourse could take place.

Visit writers workshops

You’ve probably heard about such events advertised in listings magazines and newspapers. Many take place in London and are staged up and down urban centres all over the country. They usually take place in a pub or at a community centre or similar venue where professional, semi-professional and amateur writers go to recite and discuss their work. You’re a writer if you’re a blogger and there’s no reason why you can’t go to one of these events in your capacity as a blog author and talk about your work as well as the blog itself. Again you could invite further discussion online by supplying the blogs website address.

Wear your web address on a T shirt

This is a fairly obvious one and not particularly new but then the best ideas are tried, tested and used again. Better than simply wearing the URL yourself, you could get a number of T shirts printed up for all your friends and family to wear. Another extension of this would be to get into a deal with a local fashion store (or even a chain of fashion stores) to sell the T shirt. Perhaps you could enter into a reciprocal advertising arrangement where you promote their store or stores at your blog.

Organise pub quizzes for charity

You could try this as a good deed as well as a bit of self promotion. Stage a pub quiz on the subject of your blog for charity. Every time someone wins perhaps you could give them one of the above T shirts – or you could just buy them a drink. All of the proceeds would go to your favourite charity of course but the benefit for you would be to spread a little publicity about that special section on the web containing writing on your favourite subject. On the subject of talking about yourself in pubs, why not get some specially printed beer mats? You could give them away for free to the landlord of your local. Again, the trade off would be a little money spent but the up side would be that you also get people to know about your blog.

Another similar idea would be to print a load of mouse mats and give them away to your local internet café or a bunch of customised coffee mugs and donate them to your favourite café – all proudly displaying your blogs web address.

Put your URL on cards in phone boxes

Hey, if it works for certain types of professional, it could work for you. I guess you’d need to demonstrate a little discretion here. Do this in too small a number and it won’t generate much interest but do it too much and the telecommunications company that owns the telephone box might get a little irritated. The best thing to do would be to distribute a fair number of cards (but not too many) and spread their distribution out across a wide area. This would have the twin advantage of not making your cards too conspicuous while at the same time still spreading awareness of your blog (by phone so to speak) much further.

Spreading your blog by mobile

As I mentioned, there’s potential in promoting yourself by landline. But there’s not half as much potential as there is in promoting yourself by mobile. Using the not so humble mobile to Big Up your blog would be conspicuous by it’s absence if I didn’t mention it. Here’s a quick and fun idea. Why not create some mobile phone wallpaper featuring your blogs website address and text it to a bunch of random numbers? True, some poor hapless stranger would receive this baffling text message and go “huh?” but the other recipients might look at it and think it’s a laugh and be curious enough to see what all the fuss is about to do with this website address. Or you could just get a bunch of public mobile numbers and send messages to them.

Mobile phones again – Flash mobs

This is a crazy idea which could only have come about in the 21st century. Why not stage a flash mob? You could again utilise texting to spread the message by sending it to random or listed numbers and ask the recipient to pass it on. In the message you’d provide a time, date and location for some silly random event to take place (how about a mass pillow fight in a crowded public space – perhaps pillows printed all over with Your Name.com)? Similarly you could get on to Twitter and tell your friends to spread the word.

Wear your URL all over your car

This is another obvious one. If you felt so inclined you could permanently pimp your ride with the customised logo of your websites URL. Similarly you could put on some temporary stickers and drive all over town with your in-car stereo blaring out that song your friend wrote. Or you could just do a spoof political canvass by car telling everyone by loudspeaker to ‘vote for your blog’.

Speakers Corner

If you’ve got the conviction (and the balls) why not do a ‘live’ version of your blog at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, London? Look at it this way –if the abuse and heckling you received was especially severe, it would mean that someone’s interested in your blog (and of course they’d be more likely to get online and visit it when they arrived home – well, they would if you hadn’t upset them too much).

Wear a sandwich board

Okay, this is a bit 20th century but again, like many of the best ideas, it’s tried and tested. Wear a sandwich board (or carry around a placard like you’re on a demonstration (better still, do something cheeky and turn up at a real demo carrying not the slogan of the protest – but your URL)) and walk around town with it. You could maybe shout out something at regular intervals like ‘The End of The World Is Nigh Unless You Visit Me At So And So.Com!’ Again, everyone will think you’re crazy but that’s not the point – if everyone can’t ignore you, it means you’ve got their attention – which means they’ll remember the website address of your blog.

Give out CD’s containing information about your blog

A more staid version of the above might be to simply stand in the town / city centre and distribute free CD’s. If you’re feeling really ambitious, you could even set up a stall with a TV screen (sound turned on loud) showing a video on constant rotation promoting your blog as you give out the discs. You wouldn’t have to appear in the video, indeed you could make it quite snazzy using good editing software, adding special effects etc. You could similarly place the video on YouTube and direct people to it (maybe you could even create a different video each week, uploading different versions again and again to continue generating interest with the added novelty).

Place book marks featuring your URL in the library

This is another cheeky one but it would be so much fun to do. Why not visit your local library (or a number of libraries) and surreptitiously place specially printed bookmarks featuring your blogs web page address at the back of each book, then leave it there? You could single out books on the same subject as your blog and of course avoid being caught by pretending you’re browsing through the book first (if you did get caught you could always claim that you’re conducting some clandestine love affair with a fellow book worm by leaving messages in various publications (hey, it might work, it sounds silly enough to be true)).

Put posters featuring your URL in bookshop windows

Again, you’ve had the whacky idea (above) and this is the sensible version (I try to please everyone). Similar to the fashion store and T shirt idea, you could enter into a reciprocal advertising deal with a local independent bookshop (it’s better if it’s an independent one because larger bookstores which are part of chains might not go for it or would be overly bureaucratic) and place posters in the window of the store advertising your URL. This could work for two reasons. One, usually bookstores don’t attract or receive any kind of advertising in their windows –so something in the interest of a small business like this might sway them in your favour. Two, the kind of educated, opinionated people you want to visit your blog are also the types who visit bookstores.

Create a fake news website

You may have done something like this already with your existing blog or are perhaps thinking about it. Why not use the free web space provided by your ISP (usually Internet Service Providers provide free web space to their customers) to set up a quick, cheap (but convincing) news website on the subject of your blog where every story is about your blog (and of course has a link to it)? You could tell everyone about a really scary, fascinating, funny, infuriating (delete according to preference) story you read online at this news website (if they don’t know you’re the author of the blog, chances are they’ll visit as a neutral and curious observer – or you could just try to make out you’re really upset by some ‘big news network’ that misrepresented you). Finally, you could simply be boring and set up a bunch of reciprocal links between your blog and other websites – but where’s the fun in that?

Either way, whether you’ve chosen to be sensible, wild and whacky or somewhere in between, I hope you’ve found something above which might be useful. Or at least entertaining enough to inspire you to do something you’ve never done before. Now go forth and bloggify and may the internet gods be with you (and buy the rights to your video game). I salute your brave efforts and all the best you.

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