Blogussion » promote

The 2 (and a half) Golden Rules of Blogging

Eric C — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:21:50 +0000

Eric shares 2.5 Rules that have changed his blogging in a guest post. Want to write for us too?

A year ago, my brother and I made the decision, we were going to start a blog. Gulp…..

I barely went to blogs. I didn’t know anything about the form or blogging culture. I barely read blogs, knew a smidgen of HTML, and that was it. Needing to know more, I went out in search of tips on blogging.

As soon as I began my search, I became inundated. I found advice from blogs I already trusted, from blogs I would come to trust, and advice from blogs I would never go to again. I read blogs on writing, web designing, and SEO, on marketing, editing and social media.

You want it, you got it, it’s out there, and it’s overwhelming.

Learning the Golden Rules of Blogging

I had an Economics professor in college who told me that to know Economics, you only needed to know two things: supply and demand. The rest was, in his words, all details. Through all my research–many books reads, many blog archives scoured for tips, many videos viewed–I’ve found blogging is like economics.

To be a successful blogger, you only need to do two (and a half) things:

1. Publish Good Content (Regularly).

2. Tell People About It.

Everything else is, as they say, all details.

Now I’m not saying becoming a successful blogger is easy; I’m saying understanding the formula is. If you work at figuring out how to do the above–and trust me all the information is out there, free and open source–eventually you will be successful.

Rule Number 1: Publish Good Content

This is the first part of the equation. You need to give your audience something to enjoy. How do you define good content? Well, this is a matter of debate. Many think good content addresses a need. Others think it means providing a service. I tend to fall into the “inform and entertain camp.”

So write good content, improve your language, love your topic, and you’ll succeed. There isn’t much more to it. In fact, outside of a few grammar books, if you love your topic and write about it for two years, your writing and content will improve. (I wrote a “Golden Rule of Writing” for Writetodone last month if you want some more ideas.)

Publishing Content: Writing Great Headlines; Don’t Let SEO Kill Your Content; Importance of Writing Great Content

Rule Number 2: Tell People About It

People need to know your blog exists. So tell the world. Tell friends, family, strangers, advertise, comment, guest post and above all join the community (I almost made this the rule). There is a lot of advice out there, but mostly it is simple. Go to other blogs, engage other people, and guest post as frequently as possible. Simple, right? (I hear some people saying, well, what about SEO? Guess what, it comes a lot more naturally than you’d think. My blog still has crappy URLs, and we get plenty of Google traffic.)

If you want some good marketing tips, Seth has 169 great ones right here

Blog Promotion: How to Market Articles Without Leaving Your Blog; Reaching New Customers By Expanding Your Vision

Rule 1/2: “Regularly”

That pesky adverb is no accident. Virtually every guide book will tell you to post your content regularly. How do you do it? Here are 4 tips for how I do it.

Whether you post once a week or three times a day, make a goal and stick to it.
Don’t become the blogger who keeps writing, “Sorry I haven’t posted for a while.”
Don’t post too much, or you may overwhelm your reader.
Stick at it. For my blog, my co-blogger and I have given ourselves a three year plan to gain success.

Regular Publishing: Does Your Posting Frequency Bring in the “Best” Results?; The Power of Recycling Posts

In Closing

It’s a shame, in a way, that there are so many blogs on blogging out there. With so many programs out there offering “The Secrets” to blogging success, people are getting suckered.

There are no “secrets” to blogging success, except hard work and tenacity. These are the only rules you need to know.

This is the blueprint, the rest of it is all details.

Build Your Community, Stop Begging for One

Seth — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 05:00:54 +0000

Recently I house sat a small dog named Louis (Looey) for a couple of weeks. He was an incredibly well trained dog that never once made a mess on the floor, ruined my furniture, scratched my door, or barked all night.

By the end of the week I realized that Louis was a one in a million kind of dog. He waited until I took him out to go the bathroom, he was ready when I put him to bed, and the best part is that he never begged.

Now what I learned from Louis can help everyone with their blogging. Except for what was absolutely necessary Louis, strangely enough, was a self-sufficient dog.

Stop Begging for Hand-Outs

Depending on other bloggers that are bigger than you to drop you scraps from their over-abundant plates is one of the biggest signs of failed blogging.

Instead of sitting by and waiting for someone with lots of traffic, a high-pagerank, and more than the average amount of generosity to graciously link, tweet, or stumble your blog, do it yourself. You have to get out there in the blogosphere and stop begging for someone else to get your goals for you.

Imagine how different the world would be if we each lived out our own dreams and stopped being an imposter in someone else’s. @prosperbydesign

To break down how we depend on big bloggers for everything I would like to take a look at the sources of traffic for your blog. I am sure you know your statistics because if you are anything like me you wake up, get on the computer and either shout “Hurray!” or put your head down gloomily in shame all based on the numbers.

Evaluating this data, how much of the traffic came from efforts you made to bring it their? Where you the one kicking everyone’s trash by producing a new product? Did you come out with an incredible resource? Did you manually submit your best content to social media like Digg, Stumbleupon and Delicious? Or are you taking an active role in Twitter. Maybe you say yes to the social bookmarking but are not sure about the other questions. I am not trying to tell you that referrals are bad in any way. In fact they are the best form of traffic!

The point I am getting at is whether the traffic you now have is because at some point, some blogger, some where found your content and liked it enough to link to it. Or is it because you were out making the most of your time and really promoting it.

If you are like a lot of bloggers I am sure you do not like promotion. It’s long and can be tedious to build backlinks, comment, and do “regular” begging to the bigger bloggers. So let me fill you in on what you can do to drastically alter your traffic.

How to Increase Your Traffic

The key to building your own traffic is providing something worth networking for. I mean the big bloggers will come to you if you have something they need or want to share with their readers.

They will come begging to you if you put the time into coming up with the right product and strategy for marketing it.

For example, Blogussion has seen incredible traffic recently due to lots of promotional efforts being made. We are now reaching our once lofty expectations for pageviews, length of visits, and subscribers.

Most importantly we worked for it. Building excellent content was the first step. We provided something for our visitors to both enjoy and learn from.

Next we got people outside of our own blog administration pages to actually look at it! This is how we did it.

2 Guest Posts at Problogger in the same week.
Stumbling Articles as they are published.
(BIG) Stumbling older posts in our archives which could easily go viral!
Emailing a few of our fellow Bloggers to Stumble our posts as well.
Commenting on a VARIETY of blogs both in and outside our niche
Emailing bloggers to collaborate on future projects
Helping our current subscribers and commentators with personal questions and responses.
Guest posts every week somewhere!
Developing our Twitter profiles to maximize exposure through sincere tweets, honest RT’s and lots of real @replies.
Helping Big bloggers when they are busy by asking them what we can do for them… occasionally its with a guest post!

Old Dogs Can Learn New Tricks

If you are still wondering if you can do this, just know that it is completely possible. All the things we are doing are so easy to do when you actually sit down and do them.

Another great way to help is by building a community of smaller to medium sized blogs. Start paying attention to the needs of other bloggers you know. Help them with a guest post, link to one of their stellar articles, email with a useful link to an article you know they need for a future project, and of course tweets, stumbles and diggs!

If everyone starts going out of their way to do things for others, they’ll notice a pattern that will start working for them too! People like helping people that help them (confusing enough ). So to start it out right, start subscribing to others stumbles by going to their profiles, adding them as followers, and subscribing to their blogs.

After doing this you will find a very well respected and helpful community that is starting to be built all around you. So stop begging, and start building the blog you want to have.

Time for Action

To get things started right now, here is a list of things you can do before your leave this page to build a community around you. We wont do this very often (for fear of spammers), but its a great way to build your community. Just make sure to be BRIEF:

Put a brief description of your blog (1-2 sentences) in the comments below. Let us all know what your blog is about. You don’t need to link to it because commentluv does that for you.
Let others know your favorite social media site
Tell everyone how you can help them.
Tell us how we can help you.
Determine to help someone on the comment list every day until you have completed the list. After some time you will have made a lot of friends and built some good traffic.

Here is an example for you to follow:

1. Blogussion is a resource for bloggers to get targeted blogging tips, tricks and design help.
2. StumbleUpon
3. Email with an honest critique of your current blogging
4. Stumble this post!

11 Effective Ways You Can Promote Your Site Offline

Janith — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 13:30:03 +0000

It’s clear that the whole purpose of running a blog and investing time on it revolves around the fact you want to share your opinion with other people. That’s pretty straight forward.

Regardless of your niche and writing style, every blog is opinionated. Simply because two people can blog about the same exact topic yet approach it in two quite contrasting ways. So, taking that into consideration let’s take in a general assumption ”all blogs are opinionated” for sake of my point;

That makes you wonder… what good is an opinion that doesn’t receive criticism?

As a blogger, you should give your opinion the opportunity to be critiqued and the only way you can do that is by exposing it to the public-eye. Without this exposure, the bitter results lay in the daunting loneliness of those hundreds of thousands of Blogger/Wordpress blogs that seem barely maintained, let alone thriving as a community.

Well, following up on my earlier post, on 45 ways to build back-links – which covered ways of spreading the world online, I want to share with you 11 ways in which you can spread the word in the offline world.

1) Get a T-Shirt

The most saturated method of promoting your blog in the offline world is to get custom designed T-Shirts and get people to wear them. Whenever I think about this method of promotion, ShoeMoney is the first thing that follows that thought. In fact, his dedicated section called “Friends and Fans” explains it all.

2) It’s Not Just Only T-Shirts

Don’t get disheartened if you can’t get yourself a bunch of T-Shirts. Other promotional items can include cups, mugs, pens, paper weights, freely distributed calendars, magnets, and even car bumper stickers which I’ve explained in more detail below.

3) Print Posters, Pin Posters

If you belong to any communities or societal groups, it is more than likely for them to have “bulletin boards” where members can advertise/share information – depending on the appropriateness of your site and the organization. A well designed eye-catching poster can definitely grab some attention, but don’t forget that you aren’t limited just to bulletin boards!

4) Sponsor a Charity

I’ve repeated this technique over several of my earlier posts too, but the significance of sponsoring a charity can never be over-appreciated. Especially, because blogging is all about connecting to people, so helping out others and being naturally courteous is one way of making connections.

5) Get a Car Bumper Sticker

I’m hoping to get one of these for Blogussion within the month, and just stick it on the family car. Personally, I think it’s a great for promoting your site on a local level but you have to be very creative, because you only have matter of seconds and its unlikely people will have pen & paper with them, whilst driving. Make sure it’s clear, simple and unforgettable!

6) Video Killed the Radio Star?

Who says radio advertising still doesn’t pay off? I know this method can be quite costly, but try to seek out channels that are offering advertising within your budget. Just make sure that the radio channel is appropriately matched to your site; mentioning your SEO Blog on a 1930s audio-’films’ probably won’t do you much good.

7) Business Cards and Letter Heads

This technique is pretty selective in its effectiveness, because not many people carry around business cards and letter heads with them. Just in case you do run into an acquaintance and want to exchange details, head over to VistaPrint and order your free batch of contact cards!

Your Voicemail

I actually picked this up a few years ago from one of ProBlogger’s post, where he advices you to include your site details on your voicemail. It seems like a great idea, just to throw in that URL link but be careful that your attempt to make notice of your site doesn’t overshadow the primary source of a voicemail.

9) Promotion Flyers

If you can design a small (preferably half an A4, if not smaller) and print out a few hundred copies – then just get on a bike and go around to your neighbors post boxes and start filling them in. It’ll give you a taste of what it might feel like to be a Postman, so it’s a win-win situation. I’m eagerly awaiting my school holidays, so I can do the same with Blogussion – but first I need to make sure I can legally do that… better check with your local council first!

10) Newspaper/ Yellow Pages Advertising

There are many companies (mostly offline) that advertise their services on local newspapers and the Yellow Pages – there’s absolutely nothing that says you can’t do the same. I’m not sure about pricing, but some local newspapers can even get you featured if you talk to the right people – in the right way.

11) Word of Mouth

Lastly, you can just tell your friends and family to help you raise “[Your Site] awareness”. This can be a very strong technique to get your site noticed, and especially if you speak to the right people – it can snowball into a viral market.

Fin.

Those are just some of the ways you can promote your site offline, but I’m sure there are many more.

Perhaps you have an idea that I haven’t mentioned above? If so, leave us a comment!