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Archive for the ‘Blogs’ Category

Blog Interviews: A Surprisingly Traditional Way to Build Massive Blog Traffic

Written by Brandon on December 22, 2007 – 10:36 pm -

Probably one of the biggest boosts that you can create for your blog is by conducting interviews with people in your field. You are probably thinking, “That’s so traditional, how could this such a successful method to build traffic?” In the next few paragraphs I hope to prove to you that interviews may potentially be the best way to build traffic. (Just as a quick example, interviews I’ve done in the past have usually grown my audience by a bump of fifty sustained visitors to the blog which adds up over the course of twenty interviews.) And after I’ve convinced you of its benefits I hope to give you a road map of how to conduct and leverage your interview into a continuous moneymaker. But now, for why this method is so powerful:

photo by laffy4k

People want to read about real world case studies because it inspires them.

I know when I hear an interview with an entrepreneur in my field that has made a successful and established business of what he or she created I am listening intently. This information is gold not only because the interview can give me new tips and ideas, but also because I learn what the interview subject went through emotionally to get where he or she got.

Your interviewee will enjoy the PR boost that they get from your interview, and in turn, let all of their friends, customers and potential customers know about.

In basic terms, doing interviews is also about trading audiences. You give the interviewee your audience, and the interview subject gives you her audience when she sends out an email to all of her contacts telling her audience to listen to or read the interview. It’s really a beautiful marriage.

An interview creates a more intimate relationship which you may be able to leverage in the future.

Speaking of beautiful marriage, if the interview is well received and generates business for the both of you, then you will feel like you’ve both given and received something valuable which is a great way to establish a strong relationship. This relationship may in the future lead to sponsorship of the blog or other favors.

An interview is a solid piece of data that you can incorporate and repackage into several forms.

Interviews can be used to make a podcast and a blog post, but of utmost importance is it can make multiple podcasts and blog posts. Interviews can often be extended into four or five parts with each new part gaining greater and greater anticipation by the audience. Give the audience a taste with the first podcast, and keep them wanting more by telling them what they’ll miss in the next podcast. Beyond this, interviews are great material for case studies in books or ebooks.

An interview helps create a legitimate brand.

If your brand is not established, an interview with someone whose brand is established will start to legitimize your blog. For instance, if I ran a small political blog, and I somehow landed an audio interview with Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House in the U.S., then I would surely be on my way to creating a legitimate brand, and seen as someone who has access to important people. If your niche is very narrow like sock knitting, then legitimizing your brand would include interviews with famous yarn manufacturers whose brands your audience would be familiar with.

photo by Matt Forsythe

Now you know why you’d want to do an interview, what about how to perform an interview? I’ve create a list of five short points that will get you on the road to making an interview with an eye for creating maximum traffic for your site. I don’t tell you how to improve your interview skills or how to record an interview, but at the end of the article I will list a number of resources to help improve your interviewing skills and techniques.

• First, identify your interviewee. You should speak with her at least once to evaluate her a two main criteria: authority and personality. You want to evaluate does she know what she’s talking about and can answer in an engaging manner. Now, Let’s say you’ve identified your first interview and she has agreed to the interview. What next?
• Second, prepare a list of questions. These questions should, in my opinion, be biased towards the subject, focused on the interviewee’s area of expertise, and be framed from the perspective of your audiences interests. I would start with a list of ten questions, but if you’re familiar with the interviewee then you can develop more detailed questions as well. Definitely email these questions well in advance of your interview to give the interviewee time to prepare. As well, I suggest you ask the subject to create any of her own questions that she might find pertinent to the conversation. Make sure, as well, that the subject know who your audience is and that she should frame her answers specifically for your audience.
• Third, conduct the interview. There are two styles of interviews I like and only two: The recorded interview and the email interview. I do not prefer the face to face interview where I take notes because of the amount of work and the accuracy which I can record. The recorded interview is the best type of interview because you can distribute this content in several media types, and it’s really the simplest method for the interviewee to participate in. All they have to do is show up and talk. The email interview, however, takes much more writing commitment on the part of the subject, but it is much less work for you. This is a great type of interview, though, if you just want a quick, short bit of information. I list a bunch of resources at the end of the post.
• Fourth (this is crucial), urge your interview subject to email all of her contacts to be sure that they read your interview. You may even want to craft a letter for them as a go by. Also, ask the interviewee to please do a press release announcing their interview as well as publishing it on their own company newsletter. What you are aiming for is to get maximum exposure to an audience that is completely familiar with the interview subject but may have never heard of your blog or podcast.
• Fifth, keep in contact with the interview subject. I would ask her if you could put her on your email mailing list. If you maintain the relationship then you may want even ask her to become a sponsor of the blog at some point. At this level in your relationship, the interview subject may even be a booster for your website and could be much more easily convinced to become your sponsor.

If you are able to follow these five steps, then I think you will really be able to maximize the interview to its fullest revenue potential. To recap, I’ve broadly covered why interviews are important and how to maximize interviews for your podcast or blog, the next step would be to look at some of the skills needed to create a good interview. The resources listed below should be a great start:

• General Guidelines for Conducting Interviews
  
• How To Conduct A Successful Phone Interview
• Get the great book: The Art of the Interview
• About.com’s Guide to Conducting a Podcast Interview
• Podcasting Made Simple

Tags: advice, blog, blogging, Blogs, internet, interviews, podcasting, questions, search engine marketing, sem, SEO, tips
Posted in Blogs, Building Web Traffic, Fundamentals, Podcasts, SEO | 11 Comments »

Building Blog Traffic: Using Facebook

Written by Brandon on December 16, 2007 – 6:48 pm -

Facebook is yet another monster social networking site. This website allows you to market your blog in a vast number of ways, so I only intend to discuss a couple of the ways that are very traditional and straight ahead. And, maybe at the end of the article I will name a few more clever marketing techniques. But before we get into the details, we should discuss building your network first.

The simple fact is this is not rocket science to build up your network. First, you find friends you already have, then you look through all of your friends of friends to see who you know. Hopefully by this pint you may have 100 people you know. Next, you join as many groups as you can find on your topic of choice. Then, look through all of these people to find people who fit the demographic that you are seeking. I run a design website, so I’m always looking to make friends who are designers or architects.

Inviting more friends becomes very crucial. You need to write as personal invitation as you can without sounding too “marketing speak”. This is one of the toughest things to do to build traffic, quite frankly, but I think it’s worth it to create a bit richer social connection. In the invitation letter, write who you are, what your do, and why you’re contacting them. This may be enough to get them as your contact. (HINT) I like to write maybe a dozen short, well thought out invitations and keep them in a text file. Then I pull them out and customize them a bit.

Let’s say you’ve done this for a few hours each week for 4 months, and you now have a contact list of 8000 people (it’s possible, trust me). How do you get them to come to your site? You have to offer something they really want. You can’t just say, “hey, come look what I did!”. So, what do people really want? besides sex, there are three things that appeal to people:

• Free Stuff. Run a contest with a great prize. You can show off this contest by first writing a post on your blog. This contest on your blog should require the person to give a valid name and email address with an opt out button to be included on your email newsletter. Next, post a link to your facebook account using Facebook’s awesome “share on Facebook” button that you can add to your Firefox tool bar. Make Sure you include an image of the prize or some attention getting image in your link. You really want people to notice because this image and writeup will show up in all of your contacts’ new feeds. This may manage to get a bunch of people to the site.
• Challenge Your Audience... or, at least let them know about exciting challenges. As I’ve mentioned, I run a design site which covers architecture and product design. Young designers, including myself, can’t resist entering or at least reading about design competitions. It’s simple human competitive nature. If competitions don’t exist in your niche, then create your own competition, and offer a prize that would be really desirable. I would suggest that if you don’t have money for a prize, no problem! Just partner with a business who will give you a prize in return for some promotion on your blog. This may sound difficult, but it’s not. It’s as easy as asking. Again, use the Share on Facebook button to link to your site.
• Appeal to People’s Vanity. I think the most highly effective form of marketing on Facebook is to start looking at your contacts and finding out which ones are doing something exciting and interesting in your niche, and then writing about those people doing things you’re interested in. The key here is to choose people that you like that also have large networks in the range of a few hundred or so. Make sure your post is extremely professional, cordial, and glowing. Send a personal note to the contact letting he know you are going to publish this, and ask him if he wouldn’t mind sending this profile out to all his contacts. Having him notify his contacts personally is key. You might also ask his contacts to leave comments on the blog about their thoughts on this person you’ve profiled.

by Jon Rawlinson: Appealing to people’s vanity must be lucrative.

Now, that you’ve built up your contacts, then you might want to try creating a group. I almost don’t think at this point you will even need a group, but you may want to make one just the same. The focus of the group should be completely on the site. You may even want to have several links on your site that brings people to your profile, your group, and your group discussion. You may even consider using the forums in your group as the main forum for your site. The advantage of this is gathering a larger and more focused audience is possible. The disadvantage is that you cannot add any advertising. You’re better off keeping a forum on your own site, for sure.

This has really been one way of marketing your site on Facebook, but the most powerful traffic building exercise is for the advanced Facebook marketer and goes into territories that I’m not even quite sure how to explore. That is developing your own Facebook application. For what I do which is run a design blog, an example of a potentially highly effective marketing tool would be to create a Hot or Not for design products. Based on which products people thought were hot this application might be able to help people narrow down style compatibility. For instance, people that really like stark, modern design of a certain kind could find each other. Of Course, the results of the hot or not could show up in a compelling way on your website. Although this has the possibility of driving tens if not hundreds of thousands of users to your site, you will first need to find a competent developer to make the software and come up with a specification that is fun for the users, but also exploits the virtues of your blog.

Please contact me if you want to share any thoughts on how to improve this article.

Posted in Blogs, Building Web Traffic, SEO | 3 Comments »

Building Blog Traffic: Using Flickr

Written by Brandon on December 16, 2007 – 4:48 am -

Flickr is an online photo sharing website that also has a strong social element to browsing photos. Like most social websites, Flickr has strong social tools such as Flickr’s Contacts, Blogging Capabilities, Groups, and Tags. Using these capabilities to their fullest extent is paramount to gaining traffic to your site from Flickr. I can say that if the content and posts are well done, then you may be able to drive hundreds if not thousands of visitors to your site in no time. I will explain exactly how to drive traffic to your site, but first I wanted to give you a scenario: Let’s say your site is on the subject of architecture and you use Wordpress. Also in this scenario, it’s crucial to use a plugin called FeedWordPress which is a tool that lets you post RSS feeds as individual posts on your blog. I’ll explain why a tool like this is important in a moment. Now that we have a premise, let’s use Flickr to the Max!

• Before you start blogging, I suggest you put up a bunch of photos on Flickr that is of your blog subject. Then join as many groups as you can find when searching for your subject. Keep in mind that your subject may fit within literally dozens of groups and will be seen by thousands of people. I also like to start making everyone in groups I like a contact of mine. When these people are contacts, it means your photos will show up on their page and they will check out your stuff. So, in the end, you may have thousands of contacts.
• Then: Uploading a picture and writing out the tags. I’m going to assume you already have an account on Flickr and that you’ve already managed to figure out how to upload pictures. During the upload phase is probably the most important phase of this exercise. When you upload a picture you are given two forms: tags and description. (HINT) In the tags form, I like to write as many tags to describe a photograph as possible. This will make it much easier for people to find your photograph, which they will. You are allowed up to 75 tags and if you can use them all then do that. You might not want to write all these tags out every time, so I use a text file to keep all my most used comma separated tags. Finally, don’t forget to add one tag with your website’s name. You’ll know why you add this in a moment.
• Next, there is the description form. This description will eventually become the text of your blog post. I tend to write a description that is maybe a couple of hundred words long with many keywords to describe the photo. At the End of the description I write “you can find more photos like this at www.mysitename.com” which will show up as a link in the description.
• Now that the photo is uploaded, tagged, and described, you will want to add the photo to the appropriate groups on Flickr. Let’s say you have an architecture blog, for instance, there are possibly dozens of groups you could add your photo to. Add this photo to as many groups as possible.
• If you would like to go one step further, you could even add a location to your photo which will make your data that much more easy to find. I personally don’t tend to see much benefit from this.
• Now, you’ve possibly created a great deal of buzz for your photo or at least exposed the photo to potentially thousands of viewers. Next, you want to get the photo on your blog as a post. I do this by using Flickr’s awesome and very flexible RSS feeds. With Flickr, you can literally choose an RSS feed for one of your tags. Here’s an example of a feed for my “baby” tag. So, all photos for your website should have a tag with the name of your website. Then, you can create an RSS feed just for the photos for the website.
• Using the plug-in mentioned before called FeedWordPress, I can import each feed item as an individual post on my website. What happens is that the website just updates itself. Pretty Spiffy!

FeedWordPress Screenshot: Adding a feed to your blog

To recap, I’ve shown you how to:

1. build an audience on Flickr for your photograph
2. link that photograph back to your website
3. turn the photograph and description into an automatic post using Wordpress

I also wanted to point out that you can track your photo’s popularity because Flickr tells you how many times your phot was viewed. So, you can kind of figure out a photo’s click through rate by checking your referrals from Flickr in your stats compared to Flickrs “times viewed” stat. Some more great resources include:

• DoshDosh’s Flickr Tutorial
• SEO Roundtable’s Flickr Experiment

Tags: blogging, building traffic, flickr, web traffic
Posted in Blogs, Building Web Traffic | No Comments »

Starting a For-Profit Blog Part 1: Research Your Niche

Written by Brandon on December 14, 2007 – 3:52 pm -

As I mentioned in a previous article, there are a number of online businesses that you can build your wealth from. I’ve listed the businesses from least risky to most risky, and today I’m starting with the least risky which I will call the media company. Media Companies would be composed of such businesses as blogs, podcasts, video blogs, news agregators, and even things like how-to sites and fan sites. Their primary money making opportunities include:

• Advertising
• E-book Sales
• Premium Content
• Fan Sales
• Affiliate Sales

Let’s take the most common business as the very beginning starting point: the blog. How do you start a business? I will give you broad steps at first, and then cover specifics in later articles.

Phase One: research your niche topic

Before even starting the blog you should choose a handful of niche topics that you are interested in. Let’s say you’ve chosen bicycling. Now, you will want to start to search for bicycling in Google’s Blog Search or at Technorati to find out what bicycle blogs are popular. Next, you will want to write down a number of blogs on your topic.

I then like to go to Alexa and compare blogs in my niche to blogs in very popular niches to see how they stack up. So, for instance, here is a link to two very popular design blogs and Engadget which is arguably the most popular blog in the world. What this might start telling you after doing a bunch of searches is that tech gadgets are more popular or that Engadget has some features that could be better done in your niche. There is a lot to infer which I can help with in future posts.

Also, I highly suggest using Google Trends to start to see if your niche is a heavily searched topic compared to other topics. A simple starting point is to check the trend on “cycling” versus a random topic like maybe “jewelry” and a topic you know must be popular like “ipod”. What you find is that iPod is, in-fact, a much more popular search term, and surprisingly, jewelry is much more popular than cycling. This might give you more insight as to what topic you want to blog about based on its overall popularity. Maybe jewelry is better than cycling. This might also clue you in on topics that people often search for, but no good media outlet has developed for that topic.

Regardless of what your searches begin to tell you, do something you like. Again, this is just scratching the surface of how you might prepare for your blog, but I will cover more in the near future. AT least this gives you a simple base for how you might choose your topic.

Tags: blogging, Blogs, business, entrepreneurship
Posted in Blogs, Creating Wealth, Fundamentals, Starting a Business | No Comments »

Essential Wordpress Plugins: Subscribe to Comments

Written by Brandon on November 3, 2007 – 3:56 am -

There are several essential items missing from Wordpress that you will want to add if you want to build a strong audience and revenue stream. Today, I want to discuss what’s missing with blog comments. Blog comments have no simple way for commentors to keep track of any responses to comments they’ve made. That’s where the Subscribe to Comments plugin comes in extremely handy. What this plugin provides is a simple check box below the comment form that allows commentors to receive email updates on any future comments. In a sense, this plugin creates a miniature forum where everyone in the conversation is updated.

From a business perspective, this plugin becomes a way to maintain a long lasting contact with readers that may not visit your site again.

Tags: best practices, comments, marketing, plugin, wordpress
Posted in Blogs, Building Web Traffic, wordpress | 2 Comments »