153 Places to Market Your Blog

Wanna spice up your blog marketing? Bloggers can use this list to gain some relevant backlinks to help SEO and boost your exposure through RSS feed promotion. Or if you’re an ecommerce marketer, check out these sites to find bloggers in your niche.

(Hyperlinks to sites no longer in service have been removed).

51 Free Blog Directories That Pass Link Juice

My favorites are in Bold…

61 RSS Feed Directories

Added October, 2008: FeedBees
Added April, 2009: RSS001

27 Paid or Reciprocal Link Directories

14 Blog Directories (That Don’t Pass Link Soda)

Benefits of Blog Directories

1. Backlinks – The editorial nature of directories give them a degree of weight with search engines (although how much weight each directory pulls depends on many factors).
2. Traffic – Directories typically don’t send much traffic, but you never know.
3. Research – You can use blog directories to research other bloggers in your niche to network with or subscribe to or build your blog roll. Or you can find bloggers to “pitch” to if you don’t have a blog.

Benefits of RSS Marketing

1. Be Found In RSS Search – Submitting to RSS search engines like Ice Rocket can get your content discovered by people looking specifically for blog or news content.
2. Get Found In Portals – Many online users are unaware that they’re even accessing RSS content when they subscribe to news through MyYahoo, MyMSN and other news reader services. Adding your feed to these services expands the reach of your content.
3. Be Syndicated – Webmasters who can pull snippets of your blog stories and post them on their high traffic news and niche content sites, linking back to your site for the full story. They can find you through RSS search or surf the available content from news reader services you’ve submitted to.

Tips for Submission

1. Make sure to include your main keyword somewhere in your title – for example “Greenthumb Home and Garden Blog” or “Gardening Blog – Greenthumb.” Switching up your titles not only helps keep your backlink profile looking more natural, you also have a better chance for ranking for variations of “keyword + blog” rather than putting all your eggs in one basket.
2. Use variations of site descriptions to keep things looking natural.
3. If you’re paying for a submission, make sure the page you expect to appear on is indexed by Google. How can you tell? Copy the URL, head over to the search engine, type in site:http://example.com/categories/yourcategory/page.php and hit Search. If a clickable listing appears, you at least know the page exists in Google and has a chance of passing some link kool-aid. If it doesn’t, keep your money!
4. Other directories will offer you a free link if you add a link to their site first. Yes, reciprocal links are very outdated, and even risky. However, if you download the Blog and RSS Directory List HTML Code and post it somewhere on your blog, you’ll satisfy that requirement in a way that makes sense to your readers too (hint). However, I would only recommend this technique for personal blogs and Internet / marketing blogs, not for a corporate or ecommerce site as a big page of blog directory links can look tacky. If you repost this list, we really appreciate that you link back to us using to code at the bottom of the list.
5. Some directories won’t link to you with a link that search engines will credit you for, rather they’ll use a rel=nofollow tag, redirect or “jump.” It doesn’t hurt to submit anyway, especially if they rank well in search engines for “your keyword + blogs” and might send you relevant traffic. But if you’re pressed for time, you might want to pass. But don’t worry, I’ve separated those directories into their own list so you can be sure the 50 Free Blog Directories below give real links.

About nine months ago, I compiled a list of blog directories based on posts from Robin Good and Lee Odden, and posted it on my personal blog. The other day I went back to it to make sure all the links were working and discovered many had disappeared off the face of the ‘Net! So I went through with a fine-tooth comb and revamped my list, and I want to share it with the blogger and ecommerce community. If you want to repost this list on your own blog, you can download the HTML code here.