So I’ve been doing a little reading on how best to promote your blog. I’ve recently set up another blog for Young Irish Film Makers, which should hopefully generate more traffic for their site and organisation – once its promoted properly.

But how do you go about promoting a blog? What does your reader want? Do you actually have any readers at all? Its more and more the way to go (blogging that is…) so where’s best to start? I found two places this week that are helping millions of other blog users so I thought I’d try them out and see if they can help me at all!

First off is Technorati. If you take a look at the end of the page (way down at the end) you’ll notice a new Technorati link. They’re busy pushing themselves as the authority on blogging.

The Pew Internet study estimates that about 11%, or about 50 million, of Internet users are regular blog readers. A new weblog is created every 7.4 seconds, which means there are about 12,000 new blogs a day. Bloggers — people who write weblogs — update their weblogs regularly; there are about 275,000 posts daily, or about 10,800 blog updates an hour.

Technorati displays what’s important in the blogosphere — which bloggers are commanding attention, what ideas are rising in prominence, and the speed at which these conversations are taking place. Technorati makes it possible for you to find out what people on the Internet are saying about you, your company, your products, your competitors, your politics, or other areas of interest — all in real-time. All this activity is monitored and indexed within minutes of posting. Technorati provides a live view of the global conversation of the web.

Second is FeedBurner. This little ditty I only found this morning (shows how much attention I’m paying to the blog…). FeedBurner are bringing it all together and will most likely turn out like the Firefox of the browser revolution. No more worrying about XML, RSS2.0, RSS.92, Atom etc. Feedburner makes your blog feeds user and browser friendly, while also providing great ways to promote and publish your blog. Want to podcast with your blog? Make it available as a mobile edition? Improve pings? Email subscriptions and general reader usage? No problem…

Enter FeedBurner. We offer a full range of services to help you build awareness, track circulation, and implement revenue-generating programs in your feed(s). A slew of publishers (90,000 and counting) currently take advantage of FeedBurner’s services, many of which are free and have been called “awesome” by these same customers