blogging

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!

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!

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

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