I reference Blendtec and its Will It Blend series so often when I speak that I can’t resist putting up this latest video in which the “Will It Blend?” question is asked about Apple iPad. You know the answer!

*****

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One of the things I do when I send out the Hedgehog & Fox newsletter each month is include a small list of high-value links. This time around, I want to highlight two of those links on the blog because I think they are of exceptional value.

First, check out Seth Godin’s rundown of the promotional efforts for his must-read new book, Linchpin, at The 2.0 Media Tour. I’ve noted in the past that your could do a lot worse than studying the ways of Copyblogger Brian Clark if you want to learn how to launch a product successfully. The same goes for Seth – and how. Seriously, if you were to set aside a few days just to study how these two guys go about launching and promoting products, I wager you would learn many multiples of what you get from the average MBA program.

And speaking of Brian Clark…

A while back Brian and the highly-insightful Sonia Simone started up a newsletter series called Internet Marketing for Smart People. If you are serious about mastering the fundamental of Internet Marketing in our new social media-driven world, it’s hard to think of a better source – especially at this price (Free!). Really. Sign up today. I mean it.

Finally – for the bonus – you may notice that one of the places that Seth promotes his new book is on Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits blog. In roughly two years, Leo went from zero subscribers to more than 150,000 – that’s way more people than read most magazines or newspapers! He knows what he is talking about when it comes to building a blog, and because I know he knows what he is talking about, I enrolled in his A-List Blogging Bootcamp last fall to study at the feet of the master. Now you can too.

This one will cost you, but in return for what I feel is a reasonable fee, you get access to Leo’s tremendously valuable knowledge and insights and you get to connect with a great network of other bloggers who will be one of your best resources going forward.  On top of that,  you get to interact directly with Leo himself and his Bootcamp partner Mary Jaksch (also a highly successful blogger).

Like most things of this sort (or at least ones run by people who know what they are doing), you get lots of great free learning content simply by signing up to get more information. Even if you don’t sign on for the full Bootcamp, it’s worth at least signing up to get the freebies. If you want to grow your blog in 2010, head over to A-List Blogging Bootcamp today.

Jeff

P.S. – If you want to see the rest of what is in this month’s Hedgehog & Fox newsletter, sign up to automatically receive the most recent edition.

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I work with a lot of clients who are focused on doing things like re-designing their Web sites, creating new sales collateral, improving search engine optimization, or diving into social media. These activities all have their place, and for most organizations, are essential for long-term success.

9 out of 10 times, though, there is a much simpler move the client could make that would have dramatically more impact on the bottom line both now and in the long term: pick up the phone.

Pick up the phone and call your best prospects and customers. Offer them something of value – free. It doesn’t have to be something big. Just something that is meaningful to them. You’ll find out what the something is as part of the conversation. You almost certainly already have something that fits the bill.

And if you aren’t sure who your best customers and prospects are, this exercise will force you to figure it out. To make the list that you need to work your way through. It’s one of the most valuable things you will ever do for your business.

Now, I am betting that for many people, this is a daunting, possibly a scary prospect. I’m a died-in-the-wool introvert myself, so it certainly isn’t comfortable territory for me. But there are really few things that are more effective.

We tend to fall back on activities like tweaking the Web site, or improving SEO, or signing up for the latest social media tool because these feel valuable – and they often are – but also because they feel safe.  We do them, for the most part, at arm’s length from actual clients or members.

It’s a new year. Time to drop the safety net, roll up your sleeves – and pick up the phone.

Jeff

P.S. – If you enjoy what you read here on Hedgehog & Fox, I’d be grateful if you would subscribe to the feed or use the form at the upper right corner to subscribe by e-mail.

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If you aren’t already familiar with the “Help! My Business Sucks!” video podcast, I highly recommend you check it out as a potential resource. It’s both entertaining and highly educational – a great combination of qualities, in my opinion – and a recent episode illustrated very well one of my favorite mantras: marketing begins with product.

Too often when I hear someone use the term “marketing” when what the person really means is “promotion” – which is just one part of the traditional “marketing mix” of product, price, placement, and promotion. The conversation is inevitably along the following lines:

“We’re really not doing all that well with [fill in name of product or service].”

“Oh, really? What’s the problem?”

“Well, we’ve got a great product, but we just aren’t very good at marketing.”

If you ever hear yourself or someone else saying this, resist the temptation to respond with “So what are you doing to get the word out,” or something similar.

Instead, ask: “How do you know you have a great product?”

Thing is, for business purposes, a product is not “great” unless it is the right product for the right audience – and that audience is large enough to be a viable market. When these conditions are met, promotion has a tendency to become significantly less challenging.

I’m not saying that promotion will just take care of itself, mind you. It won’t. But as a recent “Help! My Business Sucks!” episode on In n Out Burger (see below) illustrates, a great product has a way of acting like a magnet for customers.  In other words, it has a tendency to confirm its own greatness. For In n Out Burger, this translated into people being willing to wait three hours to buy a burger at a newly-opened store in Utah.

Wow. Three hours. For a burger!

Now, I am sure that In n Out ran plenty of ads, gave out coupons, and did all of the standard promotional stuff.

But 3 hours?

Nothing but a great product makes that happen.

So, here’s the question I am asking myself – and I challenge you to do the same: What would be the equivalent of a three-hour line for my products or services, and what do I need to change about them to make it happen?

Figure out the answer to that, and a great year lies ahead.

Jeff

P.S. – Here’s the “Help! My Business Sucks” video:

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We’ve just launched a new survey on Webinar marketing over at my consulting and research firm, Tagoras. If your organization markets Webinars – whether you sell them or use them as a freebie to attract prospects and educate customers, members, or volunteers – we’d really like your input. In exchange, we’ll share with you a summary of the data and also enter you in a drawing to win an Amazon Kindle, the hottest thing going this holiday season. We’ve already given away the Kindle, but you can still win one of five $50 Amazon.com gift certificates we’ll be giving away during the month of April!

• http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/8X6R9M3

Here’s a bit more info:

• This survey is intended for organizations that are already offering Webinars or Webcasts to members or customers (it covers both nonprofit and commercial organizations).
• It should be completed by the person in your organization who knows the most about your Webinars. If at all possible, only one person in your organization should submit a survey.
• It is a relatively substantial survey designed to collect substantive information. So, don’t expect to just find 3 or 4 questions when you go to the link. That said, we have designed it so that it should not take more than 8 to 12 minutes to complete.
• The data we are collecting cover things like how organizations promote their Webinars, how they price them, and how they decide which Webinars to produce. It should be quite valuable to any organization serious about Webinars.

I expect to keep the survey open for a while, but you need to complete it by Thursday, December 31 to be eligible to win the Kindle.  (At this point we plan to keep the survey open until at least the end of April.) The link, again is:

• http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/8X6R9M3

Thanks,

JTC

P.S. – Please help spread the word by Tweeting, e-mailing to others, etc.

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You could rack up a pile of debt attending a top notch MBA program and then try to land a job in a classic product management position somewhere like Proctor & Gamble

Or, you could fork over thousands to an Internet marketing “guru” like Jeff Walker to get access to his formula.

Or you could buy Dave & Naomi’s book. (Which at $97 really is a bargain.)

But why not just learn for free?

Study Aid 1

The guy over there to the left is Brian Clark, founder of Copyblogger. If you want to learn how to launch a product successfully, it would be hard to beat simply studying him closely in his native habitat – the Web.

And you can do this for free.

Study Aid 2

Currently, I’m most concerned with what Brian is doing with Teaching Sells, which at the moment is in stealthy, pre-launch, lots-of-great-stuff-for-free mode, but I should back up for a minute to where I first came across Brian. It wasn’t even on Copyblogger, which now sports an enviable subscriber base of 73K+ in its Feedburner ticker.

No, where I found Brian was in my native habitat – online learning. Brian helped launch the Articulate Rapid E-learning blog and take it from 0 to 6000+ subscribers in a single day. Subscriptions are now north of 40K and the blog and its launch have become a standard case study in my presentations about doing business on the new Web.

I found the Articulate blog before I found Brian, but it didn’t take me long to discover who was behind the launch, and I’ve been on Brian’s trail ever since.

Study Aid 3

Which brings me to Teaching Sells.

When Brian, with the Articulate triumph in his pocket, announced that he was launching a site that would teach people how to create and market successful, revenue-producing learning communities…well, I was intrigued.

But intrigued is one thing. Actually forking over the $197 (if I remember right) that Brian and his partner Tony wanted for a charter membership was another.

Articulate alone would not have done it for me. But Brian provided so much more. First of all, Copyblogger in itself represented a wealth of information. I’m a subscriber to this day.

And on top of that, Teaching Sells offered up some really valuable content before so much as a penny was asked of potential members. Wow – hadn’t encountered that before.

I started to feel like Brian was a trustworthy guy who was willing to give plenty to make sure it was clear he knew what he was talking about. In fact, I felt like the Teaching Sells community he offered promised knowledge I simply would not be able to get anywhere else.

Hmm…what a great value proposition for a member community.

Study Aid 4

And so, I plunked down my money, and here I am today – a passionate member of the Teaching Sells tribe. And like many other passionate members, I am now evangelizing you on the prospect of joining.

That, ladies and gentleman, is A+ material in the world of product launches.

And the fact is, you can stop there if you want to. Take what you have read here. Take the highly valuable free materials that Brian is offering over at the Teaching Sells site. Digest it all, and go forth and prosper. You almost certainly will.

But…

Study Aid 5

If you want more excellent content. If you want a community of peers to support you as you venture forth. If you want additional input from Brian himself. In short, if you want a complete road map and support system for building a successful, revenue-producing online learning product offering (!), I’d recommend you get over to the Teaching Sells site up for early bird notification of the official re-launch (you will have the chance once you register at the site). In the meantime, you will receive – absolutely for free – the following great content:

• A 22-page report Forget Everything You Know About Making Money Online (And Start Making Some)
• A bonus report about building quick and easy membership sites with licensed content.
• A 20-Step Process Map to building an online training business.
• An instructional video that reveals the solution to the “traffic dilemma” every online entrepreneur faces.
• And a complete course listing of the entire Teaching Sells program.

Odds are very high that Teaching Sells will sell out before the official launch ever happens sometime later this week. You could hold out for the next time around. I’m sure there will be one, but it’s not clear when – Teaching Sells was closed to new enrollments for months before this current re-launch. In the meantime, there’s a pretty good chance you are looking for way to add or increase revenue.

Seems crazy not to at least check it out, eh?

Jeff

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How many times have you visited a Web site, poked around a bit, and then left when you were presented with a form to “sign up” for something? It must happen millions of times every day. Lost opportunities scattered all over the information highway.

Many organizations, if they are even aware of the issue, will assume that the problem is with the form itself, or perhaps with finding the form in the first place. Often these are problems, but usually there is also something deeper: the visitor has no real motivation to fill out the form. This is a failure of strategy, a failure of marketing, a failure of design – not a failure of technology.

The graphic in this post (click through if you don’t see it) is clipped from an excellent slide presentation on Designing for Social Traction that Joshua Porter has posted over at Bokardo. In it he addresses what he calls “the usage lifecycle, or the stages people go through as they use and adopt software over time.” While focused on software, most of the presentation can be applied to other types of products and services. Getting people to sign up is only one aspect of it – it just happens to be the aspect that jumped out at me most immediately.

The presentation is long, and like most slide decks, you will have to do a certain amount of extrapolation and filling in the blanks, but if you are serious about converting, engaging, and retaining customers on the Web, it is well worth a look.

Jeff Cobb
Hedgehog & Fox

P.S. – If you enjoy what you read here on Hedgehog & Fox, I encourage you to subscribe to the feed or use the form at the upper right corner to subscribe by e-mail.

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This is the third and final part of a three part series. In Part I of Marketing and Growing Your Blog, I discussed the importance of content and making it easy for visitors to engage. In Part II, I talked about connecting with other bloggers. In this installment, I’ll cover spreading the word about your blog and building links.

Spread the Word

If you have created great content, paid a reasonable amount of attention to using the words and phrases your desired audience is most likely to search on, and have started to connect with other bloggers, you will almost certainly see the amount of traffic to your blog and your subscriptions begin to rise over time. If you really want to jump start things, though, you need to be more proactive.

Tell Your World

I know there are readers who will cringe at the idea of self-promotion, and if you just aren’t comfortable with the following steps, that’s fine – just know that it may take a bit longer to really get your blog off the ground.

E-mail friends, family, colleagues, and customers
In other words, tell the people you know that you have a blog. Provide a brief description of what you are writing about and what benefits they (or people they may know) might get from it. Provide a link to the blog, explain the subscription options, and directly ask them to subscribe. Finally, ask them to forward the e-mail to others who may be interested. Keep in mind, this e-mail will probably need to be a bit different for each of the audiences to which you send it. Your message to family, for example, is probably going to be different from your message to customers.

(I realize your family and friends may not be your target audience, but they may know people who are, and besides, it’s helpful to know that someone is reading!)

Keep working the e-mail channel
Include a link to your blog in the signature are of your e-mails, and consider also including a very brief message that highlights a particular post. This should be changed from time to time so that it remains interesting to people who hear from you frequently by e-mail.

Make use of social networks
If you have built up friends, followers, or connections on one of the various social networks (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), you can leverage these to attract traffic to your blog. If don’t currently participate in a social network, now is a very good time to start building up a presence on at least one of them. And if you aren’t quite clear on what social networks are, I recommend taking a look at Commoncraft’s excellent Social Networking in Plain English video, and possibly also the Twitter in Plain English video.

May sure you include a link to your blog in the profiles you maintain on any of the social networks. And, make use of status updates to notify your network when you publish a new post. Naturally, use your judgment when doing this. If you post multiple times a day, your network may not appreciate getting an update every time. Also, if all you ever send out on your status updates is links to your blog posts, people may start ignoring you pretty quickly. Make sure you are sending out other interesting content as well.

Don’t forget the offline world
It’s easy to think that blog promotion is something that only takes place on the Web, but of course there is still a huge part of your life that takes place off line (right?). Don’t forget to mention your blog in face-to-face conversations, and be sure to include the address for it on your business card.

Listen and respond
Take the time to monitor your brand and track topics that interest you on the Web by using various listening tools, and respond appropriately whenever you “hear” something of interest. And again, don’t forget the offline world. This entire series of posts came about because of a need expressed by a group I spoke to recently.

Tell the World

You will already be stretching yourself well beyond your usual network if you take some of the steps above, but consider taking it one step further and use a service like PRWeb to issue regular press releases related to your business and your blogging efforts.

The way the Web now works, press releases are no longer meant only for attracting the press. In fact, they are not even mostly intended for attracting the attention of the press. They are an avenue that can lead directly to the browser of your potential readers and customers. To get a better understanding of what I mean, take the time to read David Meerman Scott’s excellent, free eBook on The New Rules of PR.

Given that Web PR will inevitably lead to links to your blog (because you include them in the press release), this last point is a good segue to my final point:

Actively cultivate links

Links from other sites – particularly sites that are popular themselves – are one of the most important factors in ranking high in the search engines. And even if you don’t care that much about attracting gobs of traffic to your blog (really, we should all care about quality, not quantity of traffic), links can help make sure that the people most likely to care about you will find you.

Like so many of the points in this series, even mentioning “link building” is like pulling at a thread on a sweater – there is much more to be said about it than can be covered here. Nonetheless, there are simple steps you can take.

First, make sure you include a link to your blog pretty much anywhere you maintain a “profile” on the Web – i.e., a page in which you provide basic information about yourself. Arguably, profiles on sites most related to the topics you cover on your blog are more valuable than those on more general sites, but there is seldom a good reason not to have a link to your blog in one of your profiles.

Next, ask for links. You’ll already get some through commenting, but it’s much more valuable if people will link to you from the body of their articles or Web pages. In most cases, links in the places previously mentioned (profiles, blog comments) will be “no follow” links, meaning that the search engine spiders that crawl the Web will not follow them to your site. So, while they are great for potentially leading people to your site, they don’t help move you up in the search engine rankings. On the other hand, a link from the body of a blog posting or Web page usually will be followed. If it happens to be from a highly popular page in a highly popular blog or Web site, all the better.

To complement the links you seek out (or attract through your great content – again, see Part I!), also consider submitting your blog to some of the better Web directories and blog directories. These are places where you can create links that will get followed by the search engines and searchers in the directories themselves may be prospective blog readers who would otherwise not find you.

Finally, don’t overlook internal linking on your blog. If you have written about a topic in earlier posts, be sure to link to these posts in any new entries. And even consider going back to earlier posts and linking forward to new posts. Among other things, internal linking helps the search engines make sense of your site, and it makes your site more “sticky” by helping visitors find other parts of the blog they may want to visit. (Many blogging platforms have “plug-ins” that will automatically display a list of related posts at the end of a blog entry. These are great, but it is also important to link to other posts from within the context of your entries.)

The Sixth Discipline

I have covered five key areas in this series of posts, but there is a sixth area which is more important than all of them – keeping at it and continuing to learn. Like just about any thing else that matters in life, success at blogging takes work. Take a close look at some of most popular blogs out there you can tell pretty quickly that these are not casual affairs – the people behind them are working hard.

For most bloggers, generating huge amounts of traffic like these blogs do isn’t really a primary goal, but even the effort of simply reaching your desired audience on a regular basis with content you are willing to put your name to should not be underestimated. Blogging is easy; blogging successfully is not. It takes time and practice to figure out what works, both for yourself and your audience.

As someone who has been at it for a while, though, I have found the benefits of consistent blogging to be extraordinary. The blog you are reading attracts more visitors to this site than any other part of it. And for my purposes, that really does not have to be a huge amount of traffic to result in enough customers for me to run a viable business.

On top of that, I continue to develop my own thinking and skills by continually writing about the topics at the center of my work, and I have formed invaluable professional connections through doing the things described earlier in this series. This is the side of blog “growth” that really has little to do with numbers – and for many bloggers, it can be more important than anything else.

Bonus Segment: Monetizing Your Blog

After I posted the second part of this series I received a comment asking whether I planned to talk about monetization – i.e., making money from your blog – in the final section. I had not really planned to, but I’d hardly be worth my salt if I didn’t at least respond to the comment at some level here. I’ll offer just a few brief notes and then perhaps do a dedicated post on the topic in the near future.

Direct vs. Indirect Blog Monetization

For most bloggers, the main question is whether you can generate significant income directly from transactions on your blog or whether your blog is a path to other sources of revenue generation.

Direct monetization typically comes through pay-per-click advertising placed on your blog, sponsorships, or donations. To generate any significant level of income, all three of these generally require a larger amount of traffic than most bloggers will ever see. And in many cases, they may be off-putting to your audience, and thus not worth whatever marginal income they produce.

A fourth option, which I see as somewhere between direct and indirect income, is affiliate marketing. As an affiliate marketer, you place links and/or ads on your site – often on distinct landing pages – that promote specific products and then earn a commission whenever a visitor clicks on the link and purchases the product.

If you feature affiliate products that are highly relevant to your audience, you are likely to get at least a few purchases, and the commissions can be quite generous. I’ve earned a fair amount as a Teaching Sells affiliate, for example, which is a program that I see as very relevant to visitors to this site. If you want to learn more about affiliate marketing, I recommend the Wealthy Affiliate University program (yes, that’s an affiliate link;-)

While all of the above are options, the reality for most bloggers is that your blog will support other revenue sources rather serve as a revenue source itself. There is nothing wrong with this, though – it’s really hard to think of a better avenue for generating Web traffic, providing value to your prospects, and highlighting – tactfully – the paid products or services you can provide. As I have noted in a previous post, I think a powerful approach to indirect monetization can be to curate your catalog with a blog.

Wrapping Up

Like I said, I’ll write more about monetization at a later date. In the meantime, I welcome your comments on this series of posts. My goals have been to provide some help to new bloggers I have met recently as well as to engage in a bit of personal learning by thinking through and articulating some of the aspects of blog marketing and growth that have been most important for me.

I know experienced bloggers will read this and feel there is any number of things I have left out or perhaps over simplified. I have, no doubt – and that has been on purpose to try to keep this to blog length rather than book length! That said, please comment and tell me and other readers where you think there are gaps that need to be filled in.

And if you are a new blogger and have questions about anything you have read here, please comment as well. At the very least it will help alert some people to your blog, and I’ll try to provide whatever guidance I can.

Jeff Cobb
Hedgehog & Fox

P.S. This series is an example of what I have called a “perennial” post in other places and an attempt at what what blogger Yaro Stark has called a “pillar article.”  If you like this post, please vote for it on Association Jam!

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This is the second part of a series (inspired by a recent speaking engagement) to help new bloggers take the most essential steps for marketing their blogs effectively.  For seasoned bloggers, these are also good points to review.

As noted in my previous post, I don’t typically write these sorts of “how-to” posts, but I am realizing that, given my own belief that blogging is an amazing learning tool, I should do more of them. There is no better way to learn than to try to coherently articulate what you think you know.

Anyway, here’s the third imperative for marketing and growing your blog:

Connect with other bloggers

In my personal experience, building relationships with other bloggers has been one of the best ways to boost exposure as well as to make blogging more rewarding in general.

Simply by reading other blogs, commenting on them, and linking to them I have gotten to know some interesting people, learned a lot from them, and greatly increased the chances that they will point others my way. Even in cases where I have little or no dialogue with the other blogger, I can still make sure she is aware of me, develop new ideas for my own posts, and potentially attract traffic to my blog by commenting on or tracking back to posts on her blog.

Finding other bloggers

So how do you identify other bloggers with whom you might want to connect? There are a number specialized blog search engines and directories on the Web where it is possible to find blogs for just about any industry or topic. Technorati and Blog Catalog are two well-known options. My personal preference is Google Blog Search, and I recommend trying it first.

Try searching on words or phrases that are relevant to the types of things you blog about and see what comes up. If for example, I search on the phrase “learning 2.0” – a topic I happen to write a fair amount about – Google returns a list of related blogs as well as popular blog entries on “learning 2.0.”

In this example, Zaid Ali Alsagoff, a Malaysian blogger who writes at ZaidLearn shows up at the top of the list – suggesting that he is someone who has some authority when it comes to “learning 2.0.” And there are also many other interesting blogs listed in the first two or three pages of the search results, any of which might represent good possibilities for connecting with another blogger.

The next step is to pay a visit to these blogs, read some of the entries, and identify a handful of bloggers with whom it seems most valuable to establish a connection. (You’ll want to expand the list over time, but start with just a few.)

Commenting on other blogs

This part of my post is a bit like one of those cooking shows where the host whips together all the ingredients, puts the dish in the oven, and then pulls out a fully cooked version from a second oven.

As it happens, I found Zaid – from the example above – in my early days of blogging at Mission to Learn and one of the first things I did was subscribe to ZaidLearn and comment on some of the entries. When I say “comment,” I don’t just mean leaving a quick message like “Nice post.” – though even that can be effective if done well. Rather, I attempted to add something of value to what Zaid had already posted.

Commenting on other blogs in this way achieves at least three things:

• The blog owner notices the comment – in most blogging platforms, the blog administrator is automatically notified when a comment is submitted – and if you have taken the time to say something thoughtful, is likely to visit your blog;
• Readers of the blog may notice your comment as well as the Web address you submit when making a comment. (Most blog commenting systems offer the option of including your Web site/blog address when you submit a comment. Always do this!). If you say something thoughtful, they may decide to visit you.
• You engage in the community – not just the silo of your own blog – and continue to develop your own thinking about the topics central to your blog. Intangible as this may seem, it almost certainly comes back to you in the form of better content on your own blog later. (Refer back to Part I for how important good content is to marketing and growing you blog.)

In this case, Zaid did notice and did visit Mission to Learn, where he has commented on my posts on a number of occasions. He has also been kind enough to reference my posts from time to time and link to me from his posts. Which leads to my last point:

Linking to Other Bloggers

As is true in most human relationships, those who give are more likely to receive. In the world of blogging, it pays to “give” links to other bloggers (i.e., link to their blogs from your blog which, of course, opens up the possibility that visitors may leave your blog and not come back!) for at least two reasons:

• You are more likely (particularly when starting out) to receive a link from a blogger you’ve linked to than one you haven’t;
• You readers are likely to perceive you as offering more value – and thus value your blog more – if you actually are willing to provide them with links to great resources outside your own blog.

In short, don’t be afraid to link out to other blogs. Indeed, it’s really hard to grow a blog without linking  out.

So What’s the Return on Connection (ROC)?

I’m hardly original in saying you should connect with other bloggers, comment on their blogs, etc – you will find that advice in pretty much any post like this. But what I hardly ever find is evidence of concrete results.

One of the reasons I picked ZaidLearn as an example here is that I can see very concrete results from the connection. When I look at my blog traffic statistics, there is a noticeable amount that comes from ZaidLearn – i.e., people who click through from Zaid’s blog to visit Mission to Learn. Not every hour, or even every day, but often enough to make it clear that the connection is valuable. And that’s purely from a marketing standpoint, leaving aside the fact that it’s been a pleasure to “meet” Zaid himself and learn from his blog.

Bottom line – outside of producing great content, connecting with other bloggers is one of the best investments you can make in marketing and growing your blog.

That’s it for part II. In Part III of Marketing and Growing Your Blog I cover promotion and link building and throw in some brief bonus commentary on monetizing your blog.

Jeff Cobb
Hedgehog & Fox

P.S. – Like this post? Please vote for it on Association Jam!

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This is part of a three-part series. See also part II and part III.

I don’t generally write a lot of “how-tos” here on Hedgehog & Fox. Recently, however,  I spoke to members of the National Speakers Association Carolinas chapter on the strategic importance of blogging, and we also did some hands on work to set up and configure a Wordpress.com blog. While all of that was valuable, we didn’t have a lot of time to get into next steps – like how to market and grow your blog once you have it up and running.

The list of steps you can take to market your blog is long, and in some cases complex. If you want to dig deep, you might start with a look at Lee Odden’s 25 Tips for Marketing Your Blog (old, but still almost completely relevant) or Aaron Wall’s excellent collection of resources related to search engine optimization for blogs.

If you are just starting out, however, these can be a bit overwhelming. So, in this post and my next two posts I’m going to cover the five areas I feel are most essential to marketing and growing a blog:

Focus on your blog content first

People tend to forget that the first of marketing’s classic 4 Ps is “Product” (not Promotion)  In the world of blogging, your content is the major part of your product and taking the time to make sure it is consistently interesting and relevant for your target audience will pay off more than just about anything else you can do. Be sure to:

• Write posts that include words and phrases your audience is likely to care about. Put yourself in your prospective reader’s place: What would she be likely to type into Google to find you? Be sure to include similar words and phrases in what you write. (There are much more scientific ways of going about this, but my aim here is to keep things simple! If you want to did deeper into search engine optimization (SEO), you might start with Checking in on SEO Essentials.)

• Let your strategy drive your posting frequency and length. Don’t get too caught up in supposed rules about how frequently you need to post or how long or short your posts need to be. If your aim is to establish or enhance your reputation as an expert, you may be much better off publishing one substantive post once a week or so than trying to come up with something insightful to say on a more regular basis. On the other hand, if you are trying to be a source of news in your niche, you may need to publish multiple times a day. Use your judgment, and don’t run yourself into the ground – chances are there are other parts of your business that deserve at least as much time as your blogging!

• Pay attention to what works – then repeat it and build on it. On one of my other blogs I once did a posting about “serious” learning games. It was a subject I was interested in, but knew relatively little about. That one post produced many times the traffic, comments, and subscriptions of previous posts. Needless to say, I’ve since done a number of other posts about serious games! I’ve also went back and made sure that, in the body of this post, I asked visitors to subscribe to my newsletter.In general, if you write something that proves popular, make sure you take advantage of that popularity by updating the post to include a “call to action” that will pull visitors more deeply into your blog – by asking them to subscribe, for example, or by providing links that point them to other content in your blog that they may find interesting. For more on this concept, here’s a quick video from Problogger Darren Rowse on how to “Stickify Your Blog.”

• Create an “editorial calendar.” I use quotes here because this does not have to be a highly involved, formal process. Simply keep a list of items about which it makes sense for you to write, and continue to add to it and shape it over time. This will help keep the ideas flowing and it will also give you visibility into how the topics and themes on your blog evolve. Are you consistently developing related ideas, or do you jump all over the place? In most cases, you are going to have more success with the former.

Make It Easy for Your Visitors to Engage

Simply going through the motions of creating regular blog postings can be a great learning tool for the blogger. Personally, I think blogging is worthwhile whether or not you ever develop an audience, but most of us would prefer to know that people are reading what we write and engaging with us at some level. To encourage engagement, be sure to:

• Make your subscription options prominent. Ideally, the “subscribe” option should appear in multiple places on your blog, but it should definitely be visible “above the fold” – i.e., in the part of the browser window that does not require visitors to scroll down. Here on Hedgehog & Fox, for example, you will see that my subscribe options appear at the top right of every page. I also include a “P.S.” at the end of most posts to encourage visitors to subscribe if they enjoy what they have read.

• Include an e-mail subscribe option. RSS may be the backbone of blog distribution, but many visitors still do not feel comfortable with it. You might help move them in that direction by including a dedicated subscription page in your blog with a link to Commoncraft’s excellent “RSS in Plain English,” but having a “Subscribe by e-mail” option is also a good idea. How you do this will depend on what blogging platform you use. In most platforms – including WordPress, the platform I use here on Hedgehog & Fox – you can use Feedburner to offer e-mail updates. (This is a little complex than would ideally be the case in WordPress.com, but worth the effort.)

• Make sure comments are enabled, and unless you really have a good reason for doing so, do not require users to be registered to comment and do not hold comments for moderation. While this may seem a bit scary, nothing will kill engagement on your blog like putting up barriers to allowing people to comment. It’s a good idea, in my opinion, to require comment authors to fill out their name and e-mail, but beyond that, it should be possible for anyone to comment. (In Wordpress.com, you can find options for comments under Settings > Discussion on the left side of your dashboard.)

• Make it easy for readers to share your blog entries by e-mailing them to others or posting them to popular social sites like Facebook or Delicious. Depending on the platform you are using, you may have built in options for including these types of links in you posts or your RSS feeds. Additionally, tools like Share This and Add This make it possible to add a variety of sharing options to your sidebar or to the end of each blog posts. (Note: WordPress.com users are limited in how they can use these tools, but AddThis does provide some options for using its button in the sidebar as well as at the end of blog entries

(For the moment you will have to do as I say rather than as I do on this last one – I am addressing some template issues that are preventing my “share” options from showing up.)

That’s it for Part I. Now check out Marketing and Growing Your Blog: Part II, where I discuss connecting with other bloggers.

Jeff Cobb
Hedgehog & Fox

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