I’ve been remiss in the past few days, because of the Easter holidays, but I’m determined to catch up by the end of the upcoming weekend. This challenge is very engaging and I am learning a lot about blogging. I really count on having built better blogs (as most of you know I have two) by the end of the 31 days, but part of it is staying on track, so back on track I get!


I just want to remind everyone that i am chronicling my own Challenge in order to encourage those who either already have blogs that are perhaps languishing, or small, nascent blogs like mine, and want to bring them to the “next level,” or have been thinking about creating a blog.
The great thing about this Challenge and about Problogger is that all this great material will still be there after the challenge is officially over. So if you haven’t joined now, no fear. You can take it up anytime you want and just follow the steps one at a time. But don’t forget, this is a challenge for existing blogs, so don’t try to do it at the same time as you are setting the blog up for the first time.
Today’s task is self-promotion, and Darren suggests 11 different ways in which we can promote our blogs. This is a particularly difficult thing for many people, and for me in particular. If you want to have any hope of succeeding as an online entrepreneur or blogger of any kind, you must learn this crucial part of your work: marketing yourself, your product, your content, your skills.
To make this task easier, Darren suggests promoting a particular post, rather than the blog as a whole, and in general I think this is an excellent idea. It’s more focused, so it’s not as daunting as trying to promote the whole blog. Also it allows you to pick one of your best posts, or more successful ones, and draw attention to the “best of you,” as it were. This can be more effective in drawing readers who will come back and read more.
The post I chose to promote is the one on Freelancing and managing our work time, and these are the ways in which I’m promoting it:

• I have “stumbled” the post – this means that I acted as one of my own readers and clicked on the “Share This” button at the end of the post. Then I selected Stumbleupon as the website on which I wanted to share the post. I followed the instructions, once I had clicked on my choice, and it gave me an option to write a little blurb on the post. Click on this link and you will see my favorite sites or posts that I have “stumbled.” If you click on this link, you will see that someone had already stumbled this article because they liked it: my friend Mario from Mario LIVE! So I didn’t have to write a blurb because he had already written it. But the article has now been stumbled by two people, and that raises its popularity.
• I have “dugg” the post – same thing again, I clicked on the Share This button and chose Digg as the site where I wanted to promote the post. If you click on this link, you will see that I did write this blurb.
• I posted a comment on someone’s blog. This is a very interesting thing, because I chose to comment on a post by Caroline Middlebrook, whose blog I love, and who also has installed a plugin on her blog called Commentluv, which automatically inserts the latest post you have published. So in the comment you can click on the person’s name and visit their blog, and you also see the title (which is a link as well) of their latest post, and click on that. Click here and go to the bottom of the post, in the comment section, to see what I mean. You will see a link to this very post you are reading right now.
• I used my newsletter. Last week, because of Easter, I didn’t publish the newsletter, so it’s going out today and I’m going to promote the Freelancer post in it.

If you are interested in reading all the 11 ways in which Darren suggests promoting a post, here is the link to the post on Day 3 of the Challenge. Enjoy!

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