Question
How did people promote their blogs prior to social media becoming popular?
Answer
"Blogging" proper began with RSS. Which means they are part of social media. RSS fundamentally changes your marketing channel mix.
Before RSS, the things you had didn't feel quite like blogging. I used to write on an ezine 1998-2000. There the promotion mechanism was a mix of BBS forums and simple aggregation (many writers on one site, amplifying each other's WOM).
Then as now, email was the most powerful channel.
The biggest difference was retention and repeat visits. Individual writers could not hope to retain readers unaided. You generally had to be a part of a community that had sufficiently fast moving content that the user would get into the habit of visiting regularly (several times a day). A single writer's output could not hope to be on that kind of addictive reinforcement schedule. This is why sites like Geocities ultimately failed.
RSS was the game changer that allowed individual writers to go solo.
For the record, what you seem to consider "social media" (I think you mean Twitter and Facebook primarily) are still not very important to bloggers. Email, RSS and SEO are still the main mechanisms.
Aggregators/social discovery (Slashdot, Hacker News, Reddit, StumbleUpon) do matter though, for inorganic growth via spikes. But they aren't really "social media" in the modern sense. My blog got on the map thanks to Slashdot, but that was founded in 1997.
Everything else hangs off the effectiveness of these three. For some bloggers FB and Twitter matter a lot, but they are still the exception.
Before RSS, the things you had didn't feel quite like blogging. I used to write on an ezine 1998-2000. There the promotion mechanism was a mix of BBS forums and simple aggregation (many writers on one site, amplifying each other's WOM).
Then as now, email was the most powerful channel.
The biggest difference was retention and repeat visits. Individual writers could not hope to retain readers unaided. You generally had to be a part of a community that had sufficiently fast moving content that the user would get into the habit of visiting regularly (several times a day). A single writer's output could not hope to be on that kind of addictive reinforcement schedule. This is why sites like Geocities ultimately failed.
RSS was the game changer that allowed individual writers to go solo.
For the record, what you seem to consider "social media" (I think you mean Twitter and Facebook primarily) are still not very important to bloggers. Email, RSS and SEO are still the main mechanisms.
Aggregators/social discovery (Slashdot, Hacker News, Reddit, StumbleUpon) do matter though, for inorganic growth via spikes. But they aren't really "social media" in the modern sense. My blog got on the map thanks to Slashdot, but that was founded in 1997.
Everything else hangs off the effectiveness of these three. For some bloggers FB and Twitter matter a lot, but they are still the exception.