It doesn’t matter if you are about to launch a blog or already have an established blog network. Every blog needs publicity at some point of time or later and since promoting your blog is a continuous process, you should come up with a robust strategy to promote your blog at every possible opportunity you come across.

Here are some simple ways to promote your blog for free. I have been following these sure shot ways for more than four years and they have been of a great help to promote my blog. But at the same time, it takes time to see the results of the promotional activities that you take up, so please be patient while you begin to publicize your blog.

1. Submit your website to search engines – The first thing you should do, as soon as you launch your blog, is to submit your blog to search engines. This will ensure that your blog is indexed and people find your blog in the search results. Refer to submit your website to search engine for free article which will walk you through some simple steps of search engine submission process.

2. Setup your blog to send pings – Blog pinging is a mechanism by which you can notify various online services that your blog has updated. Pinging is free and it’s very easy to setup your blog to automatically ping different blog search engines and services when you update your blog. Some of the free services that you can use to ping search engines are Ping-O-Matic, Blog Ping and PingMyBlog.

3. Install ‘Email this post’ feature – You must have seen this feature on many popular websites that lets you email the article to your friend on your own mailbox. Once installed, this feature will let people send your articles to their friends and indirectly publicize your blog for free.

4. Setup social bookmarking icons – People often want to bookmark your articles for future reference and even to share your content with their friends. Therefore, it’s very important that you setup social bookmarking buttons of popular social networking websites in your blog to let people share your articles with their friends and others. You may find a lot of plugins for your blog that once installed will automatically setup the popular bookmarking icons in your posts. See ShareThis service that will let your visitors share and save your content with the most used sharing services.

5. Put your blog URL in your email signature – Though it may not sound like a promising way of publicizing your blog, in helps in long term. I use it in my Gmail account and have taken my friends by surprise who didn’t knew that I blogged.

6. Submit your blog to blog directories – If submitting your blog to search engines is important, submitting it to blog directories is also equally important. See best blog directories to list your blogs and submit your blog to them right away.

7. Link to other blogs and authority websites – Linking to other blogs is one of the most simplest ways to attract attention of fellow bloggers. When you write articles, link to fellow blogger’s content which are similar to your topic and they might link back to you. This is one of the simplest ways to get quality links from good websites which will help your blog rank higher in search engines.

8. Comment on other blogs – Whenever you visit a blog and find an article interesting, leave a comment. Most blogs allow you to use your blog’s URL in the comments section, so it’s an effective way of getting links and visits to your blog.

9. Write guest articles – By submitting guest articles in popular blogs, you not only get attention but it also helps you get visitors who will go on to become loyal visitors.

10. Run contests and give away free stuff – It’s a great idea for a newly launched blog to run contests and give away free stuff. Such contests creates buzz about your blog in the blogosphere and you get a lot of traffic. It does not need to be laptops and expensive gifts, you could give books, free hosting accounts etc.

Recommended resources on how to publicize your blog

Promote your blog – Official tips from Blogger.com on how to promote your blog. This is in no way a science or guarantee; it’s simply a few suggestions with which many bloggers have found success.

Ways to Get Your Blog Noticed – An article that talks about some ways of getting attention for your blog.

How to get your blog indexed? – This articles shows you various ways to get your blog indexed in search engines in less than a month. A must read if you want to get your blog indexed for sure.

Best blog directories – A list consisting of some of the best blog directories that you should consider for listing your blog. Most of them accept free submission.

A Complete Guide to Writing Guest Articles – This articles lists a lot of reasons for anyone to consider writing guest articles. A must read on the subject.

7 Reasons Why Guest Posting is Integral to Any Linkbuilding Campaign – An in-depth article on why guest writing is so important and how it helps your website.