For every example of successful blog promotion that I see online, I see a dozen examples of people making terrible mistakes in an attempt to promote their blog. To help you avoid making those mistakes, here are the seven worst ways to promote a blog:

1. Blog Comments: If you are only leaving comments with a couple of words, or adding links to every one of your comments, don’t be surprised when bloggers start flagging all of your comments as spam.
2. Directory Submissions: Not only will submitting your website to 100s of low quality directories fail to result in generating any traffic, but doing so could actually result in a penalty from Google.
3. Forums: Telling others to “Check OUT my sig link” in every forum post you make won’t help you gain new readers, but it is a quick way to get banned from participating in a forum.
4. Link Requests: Although there are effective ways to send out link requests, if you are sending large amounts of generic “Dear Webmaster” requests, you will quickly get a reputation as an email spammer.
5. Social Icons: With the exception of The Huffington Post, social media users are only interested in a blog’s top posts, so there’s no reason to cram your posts full of icons that link to every social media website on the Internet.
6. Social Media Websites: While it’s acceptable to Digg or Stumble a few of your best posts, submitting every post you write to these websites is never going to get you to the front page or bring in a flood of traffic.
7. Twitter: Unless you are a well-established blog like TechCrunch, no one is going to follow you on Twitter if you are only using your account to drop links to your latest posts.

(Photo from dweebydude5)