What are some good ideas for how to market a new independent blog?

[john]

I assume you have first conducted your online and offline market research (secondary research mostly is fine) into:
- your market niche
- identifying worthwhile keywords including long tails
- a site architecture that the search engines will love
- your policy on guest blogging to attract authority to your blog
- your content creation strategy

This should give you a blog where there's an audience which will lap up your content and which will be easily found by the search engines. This is the essential groundwork or marketing strategy for your blog.

What I like to do is then to seek out PR opportunities so that major publishing and niche magazine sites feature your writing or content and generate authority back links for your own blog.

You could also create videos around your keywords and publish those on Youtube. Viewers should be encouraged to visit your blog in the video description perhaps with an enticing chunk of premium content.

Social signals area really important to the search engines nowadays so featuring your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and relevant Yahoo Answers should be 'de rigueur'.

Encourage people to leave their comments on your blog as interaction with your readers is picked up by the same search engines. Watch out for spam though as you'll need to sort the wheat from the chaff.

And lastly don't forget to gather readers contact details so that you can remind them when you have a new blog post or a juicy offer!

Best Regards