Subscriber and long time friend Janice Willingham has left a question on our Just Ask page. There’s a wealth of experience and knowledge in our subscribers and site visitors. I’m hoping you can help Janice by answering her questions or giving a little advice.

Here’s what Janice wrote:

I have a blog about dental care. PersonalDentalCareInfo.com I am a member of a social bookmarking site where the members are responsible for bookmarking each other’s websites. I recently found out from one of the members I should be bookmarking my posts from the blog and not the actual blog. So, I changed that. I also write articles to promote my site. I’ve submitted six. I am going to do four more and I guess just promote the articles and continue with the bookmarking.

My questions:

1. How many articles are enough? I was thinking 10 should suffice.
2. What do you do next to promote your site. At what point do you promote and start on another niche. I feel as though I am missing a step in promoting my site.
3. Although, I’ve done all this I have yet to sell any of the  affiliate products located on my blog. One guy stated I should just focus on one product. However, I have a choice of products all focused on the dental care niche.

Any suggestions?

This post is all about blog post promotion questions and your answers. The answers will come from your comments. I want to know your immediate routine after posting to your blog. Answer as much or as little as you like. Your answers will help others promote their blog content and together we can increase our blogging success.

1. What steps do you take after posting to your blog?
2. How do you promote your blog posts?
3. Do you submit it to social networking sites? Which ones? (Feel free to link to your profile or page in your comments)
4. Do you hit the bookmarking sites? Which ones? (Feel free to link to your profile or page in your comments)
5. Do you start commenting on other blogs? What are you looking for when choosing which blogs? Friends, CommentLuv, Sez-Who, Top Commentators widget, Do-Follow, Page Rank?
6. Do you Digg it? Tweet it? Stumble It?
7. Do you shoot your friends an email?
8. Do you log into a chat room to discuss it?
9. Do you post it on forums?
10. Do you send the link to your list?

Ok, I think you get the idea. Please list every and any form of blog post promotion method you use. Don’t worry if it’s already been mentioned, list it again. That will add more weight to the tactic. Explain why you take these steps if you like.

A visitor from our Just Ask Someone page left a common question about using an FTP program. Here’s my attempt at a decent answer. Feel free to add to it or answer in your own way by leaving a comment. Any help at all is always appreciated.

QUESTION #2: Skye () wrote: “I’m a newbie who wants to get started as an affiliate marketer. I have several products to sell, and I need someone to walk me thru a page set up to FTP to my hosting company.  Can anyone walk me thru these preliminary steps?“  Dec 27, 2008

Hi Skye. Thank you for allowing us to tackle your question. I have found a pretty straight forward video tutorial on YouTube called ‘How to Use an FTP Program’. In the video Lisa uses FileZilla’s free FTP client. FileZilla is a very popular and free FTP program.

I’ll add a couple of tips before I show the video and hopefully others will add more in the comments below.

Adding products to your site for download is a simple process but it does come with some risks. Without getting too technical right now, you need to hide the actual files the best you can. There are programs out there that will help the process but they can get expensive. One is Easy-Download Protector™ by Michael Green but it sells for $147.00. Personally I wouldn’t recommend anyone spend that kind of money until they are actually making money but that’s just my opinion. You can download a free report on this site at Free Report: “How To STOP Digital Product Theft”.

Always have an index page (index.html, index.php etc.) in your download folder. This helps prevent people from seeing a list of goodies to grab. Some people like a simple re-direct to the main page of the site while others put a big note stating that access is restricted or something to that effect. Personally I like the idea of adding another sales page in that space.

Another thing I might mention is never put your products in a simple folder named products, downloads or anything like that. Something impossible to guess like hG-UL45g_ytt4k might be a good folder name. The same with the product. Name the download something like GJU_45jK4b1d_uy.zip instead of speed_reading_ebook.zip. Also protect those folders and files from being indexed by the search engines. This should be covered in the report I mentioned above.

One last thing. If you are a YourAdTracker.com member then take advantage of the trackers and use the cloaking feature. That way when someone downloads your product they go to http://4u2bn.com/xxxx for the thank you page rather than www.YourCoolSite.com/hG-UL45g_ytt4k. Do the same with the product. Let them download http://4u2bn.com/xxx2 rather than GJU_45jK4b1d_uy.zip. If you use the cloaked feature it helps hide the actual URL. The trackers will also give you an idea if a bunch of people are downloading your products without paying.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3DudpEMPiY

We’re going to try something new. New, at least, for us. I’m going to call it ‘Just Ask Someone‘. We have setup a special page where visitors can ask a question and/or answer a question.

Selected questions/answers will make it to blog posts and may even be featured on the Extreme Ezine. This is a fantastic way of to get one-way links to your site. So go ahead, Just Ask Someone!

UPDATE: The 800# and audio feature has been removed for now. We’re working on something better.