1st Step to Growing Your Blog Readership

Blogging…it’s exploding into quite a phenomenon these days.

Blogs are really great tools to add to your social interaction.  They can be used for all sorts of things, from promoting your business, to voicing your opinion about a current event, or simply to keep your friends and family updated on family affairs and vacations.

Any form of advertisement, whether it’s a TV ad, radio ad, newsprint ad, internet pop up (we all love those don’t we?) or a blog, is only as good as the amount of views it receives.  That is clearly demonstrated by the difference in price for the various types of advertisements.  For instance you might pay $50 for the week to run a classified ad in your local paper or you could pay upwards of $3 million to place a 30 second TV commercial on this year’s Superbowl broadcast. 

Today there are literally millions of blogs.  According to Pingdom’s latest statistics, there were more than 152 million blogs at year’s end 2010.  With this many blogs available to read, how does the average blogger drive traffic to his/her blog?

There are loads of ways to drive traffic to your blog and opinions vary across the board on the best ways to do so.  There are several methods that I use but the first and in my opinion (IMO) perhaps easiest method you should try and consistently use is to create backlinks.

What is a backlink?  According to Wiki, “Backlinks, also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links, are incoming links to a website or web page. In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a web node (web page, directory, website, or top level domain from another web node.  Inbound links were originally important (prior to the emergence of search engines) as a primary means of web navigation; today, their significance lies in search engine optimization (SEO).

So how do you start creating backlinks to your blog?  Here’s where the opinions start to vary and hopefully my readers will supply some feedback on their techniques.  You can use any number of free or pay per use programs on the web which will create these for you.  Some seem to work (www.yousaytoo.com is one I use) better than others or you can start creating your own by simply reading other authors blogs and posting comments on them.  When you leave a comment, be sure to leave your name as the author of  your blog appears (I use “The Business Outsource Guy”) and most importantly, leave the link to your website where your blog appears under the URL field.  Once you've followed these simple steps, congratulations! You've created your first backlink to your blog.

It takes some time to get the backlinks going but if you follow your blogs statistics (and you should be!), you will gradually start seeing the hits rise on your page, indicating you’re expanding your reach and growing your blog.

Try to spend some time each day, reading blogs and posting comments and in a very short time, you’ll begin to reap the benefits of your new blogging strategy.

Have other ideas on creating backlinks or promoting your blog that have been successful?  Please let us know how so we can all reap the rewards

Let's Talk Blogs

Let’s talk blogs today………

Years ago the idea of individuals publishing regular articles on the internet was crazy.  Today, the number of personal blogs is estimated to have exceeded 100 million.  WordPress alone has more than 47 million blogs and counting.  There are more than 300,000 new posts written per day and more than 250,000 comments generated.

There are some simple tips to starting and maintaining a successful blog.  First step is to select a hosting platform for your efforts.  Wordpress.com is a popular choice but there are many others to choose from.  Spend some time “Google-ing” free blogs hosts and you’ll find a vast selection to choose from.

Next, you need to decide on a topic niche.  You’ll want to stay pretty focused on a particular topic so you can engage your readers and develop a following.  It’s ok to stray once in a while if you have an issue of great interest.  I wrote one about Derek Jeter joining the Red Sox when the Yankees were have contract trouble with him last winter.

Here’s a tip I highly recommend you follow.  The blog host you choose will have an option for you to compose your post directly within their software.  Don’t even think about doing it this way. After learning the hard way, I now write my posts in Microsoft Word and then copy and paste into the blogging software.  You’ll understand why if you ever have lost your internet connection.  You lose all of your previous work and have to start all over.

Next, you have to be sure to keep your information relative and accurate.  Use links where possible to support your statements and try to use hyperlinks rather than shortened url’s.  It gives your posts a cleaner look.  You can find it under the insert menu in Microsoft Word. (another free tip……hyperlinks work great in emails too!)

Start distributing your blog posts to your close friends via email.  If they like your writings, ask them to share with their friends.  You’ll start building a distribution list which will grow as you become more active.

It is essential you use social media to advertise and promote your writings or it will be nearly impossible to grow your following and get the visibility you’re looking for. Post new entries on Facebook and Twitter.  There are also lots of free publishing sites you can use like Slashdot.com and yousaytoo.com

Follow these simple steps to get started on your blog and remember to have fun with it.  It can be an enjoyable pastime once you get started.  If you’re doing it for business purposes, remember to stay focused on your readers interests and don’t make your blog a constant sales pitch.  Delivering useful information is the key to developing a successful blog.

Let’s hear about your tips for a successful blog program and see if we can get some great ideas going forward…..

Social Media vs. Social Intelligence

I’m sure we’re all getting bombarded by Facebook and Twitter information from people calling themselves “Social Media experts”. If you’re like me, it’s getting to the point where you ask yourself how much “social” is too much “social”?

This brings us to today’s topic: What exactly is “social media" and what does it do for me?

“Social Media” is defined by Wikipedia as “the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into interactive dialogue”. In other words, everyone using Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, Linkedin, etc are using and contributing to “social media”. If you’re a bit more advanced and are “blogging”, then you’re contributing to the social media explosion.

Today’s businesses are just beginning to realize the role social media is currently playing and will continue to evolve into in the future. Where in past years, if you had a bad experience with a merchant or ate a bad meal at a restaurant, you’d tell a few close friends and relatives and that would be the end of it. Very little real effect took place on the business reputation, good or bad.

Today, people may have thousands of followers on Twitters, making it as simple as picking up their Blackberry or iPhone, logging into Twitter, and writing a quick one sentence review of their experience. This review quickly reaches all their followers and with “re-tweeting”, there’s no way to count how many people are notified of an experience with a business, good or bad. The results can be devastating to a reputation or fantastic for a company, depending on the temperament of the Tweet.

Here’s where “Social Intelligence” comes in. Businesses need to more than just follow their reputations with free services like Google alerts, or Trackle alerts. The business may or may not capture all of their social mentions with these services, but the bigger question now becomes what do you do with them?

The consumers must be engaged in order to gain value from the social media explosion. Social intelligence is the knowledge of how to handle the conversation about your business.  It includes having a  plan in place to respond immediately to comments once you find them, both positive and negative and requires many companies to employ a full-time staff to address this. It includes developing pro-active campaigns to improve or direct the conversation about your brand.  It may drive business to your website. There are many components of social intelligence. Far too many to address here...

It’s a fact in today’s tight economic market that many companies can’t (or won’t) expend the resources to hire additional personnel to handle this aspect of their business, and their current group of employees is either too busy or not trained to deal with the social media explosion.  It’s the current and next generation of employees (recent college grads and those students still in college, high school, and middle school) who will be coming into the workplace fully engaged with the need and skills to work in social intelligence.

Think back 10 years ago…..pre-requisite for employment may have read something like “working knowledge of MS Word, Excel, & Powerpoint a plus”. Today’s job listings might include something like..”at least 5 years of Twitter, Facebook, and blogging experience a must”.

Scared? You’re not alone.

There are solutions available today to help you through attaining and successfully developing and using social intelligence to help your business profits move forward as technology continues to evolve.  If you’d like more information on how to manage your company’s social intelligence programs, please contact me.

I’d enjoy hearing any other solutions or comments you may have so please leave your comments and forward to any friends or colleagues you may feel are interested in “social intelligence”.