Starting ventures or projects online have their rewards and difficulties.  One of the major hurdles is to create a space for oneself amongst all the competition.  How to get noticed when there are literally billions of websites out there?

The subject of this entry is not to discuss how, but “when.”  Most projects start with a hope.  A hope to make it someday…  That hope, however, becomes reality when from “soliciting” attention, people come to you to offer partnerships or to present themselves.  Of course, your responsibility as the owner or webmaster is to always increase the visibility of your site, but as people came to me, that was the triggering point for me in telling myself… “well, this project of mine is starting to show potential.”  Potential because others, in addition to myself, are starting to see “something.”

When you receive validation, that is a real morale booster.

Promoting a new blog is hard. Why is it so hard? Because it’s an uphill battle. You are competing against other blogs that are already established. As most webmasters already know, one of the key ways to gain visibility online is to have inbound links - meaning having other sites linking in and, hopefully, linking in with relevant keywords. That is hard to do because why would another site go out of its way to help you gain visibility? You would just represent additional competition to them… That’s one of the reasons why webmasters enter into “link exchanges.” They try to exchange links of equivalent value in order to benefit both sides.

From experience, the easiest way to promote a blog/ site is to start with the objective of building something good, as opposed to something spammy. Writing good content will bring added value to those who visit your site and, if some of those people happen to be webmasters, they might link back to you or include you in their network.

That said, one of the main things when starting a blog is to try to get the attention of other bloggers/ webmasters that are writing on the same subject(s) as you. How to do that? Two simple ways are:

1. participate in forums and have a link in your signature directing people to your site/ blog; or
2. comment on established blogs (most of them allow a link back to your site as an incentive to encourage people to comment).

There are many other ways to get other bloggers/ webmasters’ attention, but the above is very easy to implement.

One last word of wisdom. Don’t try to actively promote your site too early. It is not good to promote an “empty shell.” Patience is key. Let your blog/ site grow and, as it gains a critical mass, you can start with more active promotion.