Of course you can hide all your blog stories, but mostly you want your blogs to be read by your relatives, family and if you write about a perticular subject, you want people that are interested in that subject to read the story and comment.

Before you start to promote your blog
1. start blogging! an empty blog (or with only two or three postings) will give the visitors a whole other ‘first impression’ than when you have blogged for some time.
2. personalize and design. To stick with the ‘first impression’, try to create a blog that personalizes who you are and what your blog is about. It’s like a package of a product in the supermarket. Be predictable and absolutely clear what your blog has to offer. Also add RSS feeds, links, widgets that represent who you are, and what you offer the visitors on your blog.
3. find ways to interact with the readers of your blog, start polling, sharing, asking and suggest. With Wordpress plugins that you can add within a code to your blog (Presentation-Widgets-Text-Add the code) you can also use services of other websites in order to get the interaction started. Interaction provides you information about who your visitors are, what they want, their opinions and more!

Promotion
1. Use your personal network! Talk about your blog on family-meetings, a birthday party etc. Your family and relatives are the best ambassadors to spread the word. Use your digital network (Facebook, AOL, MSN, Skype etc etc) to let people know your blog excists.
2. Look for linkpartners. Start4all.com offers a great opportunity for you to trade links with related sites. Think about how you would search to find your own blog (or check other blogs and analyze what they did to generate visitors).
3. social bookmarkers are free to use and, with a little luck, help you to reach a brand new group of visitors. There are a lot of social bookmarkers. Check these great articles at Mashable.com about social bookmarking.
4. keep on blogging…
5. read the following articles to get an overload of suggestions. See for yourself what promotiontool suits your blog and give it a try!
10 articles about online promotion: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

The strip in this article was created by Georgies’s Strips. Check out all of Georgie’s strips at www.beingfive.blogspot.com. You can also add a daily Georgies cartoon to your RSS reader!!