Blog Promotion with 27 free Web Directories

A nice possibility to build up a link network and to gain more visitors are Web-Directories. There are a lot of directories, that charge a submission fee, but there are also many free ones. Here is a "small" list of them:

Completely free
http://dmoz.org
http://www.rukhnet.com
http://www.qango.com
http://www.yeandi.com (temporarily disabled)
http://www.jayde.com
http://www.directoryworld.net
http://www.infowebworld.com
http://www.netzoning.com
http://www.tygo.com
http://www.webxperience.org
http://www.hedir.com
http://www.worldsiteindex.com
http://www.spheri.com
http://www.landoflinks.com
http://www.sezza.com
http://www.profitextremeteamsearch.com
http://stormer.net
http://www.seekon.com

Only free if you link back
http://www.onebigdirectory.com
http://www.searchsmarter.co.uk
http://www.abizdirectory.com
http://www.4intrepid.com
http://www.direct-o-ry.com

Only links to top level domains
http://www.internet-web-directory.com
http://www.webworldindex.com

You have to register
http://www.zeal.com
http://www.allthewebsites.org

Blog Promotion via social bookmark services

These days everyone talks about the great benefits of social bookmark services. So why not use them for promoting your blog? Those sites accept every submission you make since in most cases they were built to keep your own bookmarks and share them with others. Of course you need some luck and really good content that other people add your site, too, but it's not much work and it doesn't cost a cent.
Most of the social bookmark services have Lot's of technical interested visitors which may be good if you're providing technical content.
The biggest of them are digg and del.icio.us. del.icio.us doesn't look very nice, but it's clean and simple and that's what i like pages to be. You can use some greasemonkey scripts to make it look nicer or to even add some functionality if you're using Opera or Firefox.
Furl and Linkfilter are a bit smaller and less known, but that means better chances of getting discovered for you.
You should definitely give them a try and see whether it works for you or not.

Blog Promotion - Keywords for your Blog

The most effective way of getting more visitors who are interested in the topics you are writing about is

Create a list of at least 5 up to 10 keywords for your blog. These keywords should be the ones people are entering to google when looking for the issues you're writing about.
I have a German poker blog and i want to use it as an example. My keywords for this blog are:

poker
Texas holdem
free
hands
strategy
online
tournament
money
winning
bankroll

Try to use your keywords in the topics as well as in the articles. But don't use them in every sentence. Google could think that your blog has no content and is only a keyword farm if the keyword density on your page is too high.

Don't use keywords that don't match your blogging issue just to attract visitors. A visitor who isn't interested in your blog won't come again. What you need are regular visitors.

The smaller the niche you're blogging about is, the better are your chances of succeeding. If you're blogging just about everything it's really hard to optimize your blog for search engines. If your niche is small you can concentrate on few keywords and you have few competitors. These facts you can use for your advantage.