Greg Hartnett

If you happened to catch my presentation at PubCon, hopefully you were able to walk away with some useful information. For those of you that didn’t attend, or were in another session, I have provided the accompanying text below. Is is a pretty long post, so I’ll end the preface here.

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So the Big Question - How can I get the most out of the blogosphere?

My short answer to you - the more you put in, the more you’ll get out. The more active you are, and the more you contribute to the Whole, you more you will flourish. You will find a direct correlation between what you put in and what you get out.

Now, it’s not an easy undertaking, and any successful blogger will tell you that it takes a LOT of work. Probably more than they had expected.

So assuming that you have the fortitude, let’s discuss the first step in the journey - Laying Your Foundation.

Your readers are going to judge you by the quality of your writing. So… brush up on your writing skills. You don’t need to be William Shakespeare, but if you want to be taken seriously, you should have a pretty firm grasp of the language. Pay attention to grammar and spelling and don’t be afraid to use the dictionary and thesaurus. You are bound to lose credibility with consistent misspellings and other grammatical errors. Two books on writing that I have recently read, and would recommend, The Book on Writing and The Dictionary of Concise Writing.

Now for step two of laying your foundation - Optimizing for Performance

As is the case with managing any online marketing campaign, you need to optimize your blog for peak performance. Pay attention to proper title and descriptions for the blog, making sure that they will help you pull for the terms you are targeting. I would recommend that you do a URL rewrite to remove the script, and replace it with title of the post - all things being equal, it will help. Categories and archives should be created - the more the better. Both from a usability standpoint, as well as for the engines. Bill Hartzer wrote an article for Search Engine Guide last month covering blog SEO tactics - some useful nuggets in there. Mare sure that you set up your pings - Setting up your ping services is a quick and easy way to mass distribute your blog.

The Corporate Website Marketing Blog has a nice list of ping services for WP blogs, and Elliott Back has a pretty comprehensive list as well.

Now that you have your blog optimized, and ready for action, it’s time to Get on the Map.

Start by submitting to Blog directories and search engines. Yahoo and DMOZ both have blog specific categories where you can submit for free (those links will take you to the appropriate categories). BOTW has an entire directory for blogs, and there are other smaller and niche directories that you should consider as well. Top Rank Results has a great list of places to submit your blog. Make sure to head over to Technorati to claim your blog, and set up your blog to ping them each time you update. Getting your blog into Technorati is a great way to drive some initial inertia, and get on the radar - there is a good read at Technology Evangelist of some “lesser known tips” on how to optimize for Technorati.

Don’t forget to submit your RSS feeds - it is becoming more and more adopted by the general public, and will only continue to do so. There is a pretty comprehensive list of places to submit your RSS feeds at RSS Specifications.

Now that you are on the map, and you have good content that others would surely enjoy, it’s time to spread the word.

Immerse yourself in your area and read voraciously - get your feed on. Subscribe to as many feeds as you can manage. Find out what other bloggers in your area are saying. When you come across good resources blogroll them - the benefits are twofold. First, your users will benefit from, and appreciate exposure to other valuable resources. And secondly, it helps to get you in front of those bloggers. Bloggers tend to be a vain group - frequently performing ego searches, and checking their backlinks. Blogrolling them, or posting about them, is a sure way to get them to check you out. It is a nice, unobtrusive way, to show up on their radar.

I know of one instance in particular, where this strategy worked wonders. Shimon Sandler posted about a bunch of high profile bloggers, who in turn came to check out what he had said. Shimon provides some good SEO related content on his blog, so these readers tuned back in. Shimon followed up with a killer post a couple of days later on the latest Google app, got mentioned by a handful of said A-listers, and his traffic has skyrocketed. Without the quality content though, the post would have been for naught.

Another important aspect of being social is Participating in the Conversation.

Comment on other people’s blogs - that’s what the comment section is there for. By commenting on other’s people’s blogs, you are able to piggyback on their distribution. Commenting on some quality, high traffic blogs, will expose you to thousands of potential visitors daily. Now I am sure that some would disagree with this, but I will assert that nowhere else is what you say more important than in other people’s comments. A comment is typically a sentence or two, so you have a small window to grab the reader’s attention. Additionally, your comment is bound to be one of many, so you need to say something that not only contributes to the conversation, but is insightful, witty, or compelling enough to grab the reader’s interest, and prompt her to see what else you have to say. By participating in the conversation in a productive manner, you are, in essence, beckoning the reader to come to your blog.

I am not inferring that you need to agree with what the author has to say. Feel free to present a dissenting point of view - they are often the most interesting. However, keep your insults to yourself, and ensure that what you have to say propels the conversation in a constructive manner. If you don’t have something smart to say, keep your thought to yourself.

Now that you are part of the community, it’s time to tap into the power of the Community Sites.

Unless you have been living under a rock, you have undoubtedly heard of these community-driven sites. Tapping into the power of these community sites will bring your blog to the next level. Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us are a great way for you to share your blog with others that have similar interests.

If you haven’t yet developed a strategy to exploit the traffic available at MySpace, I would highly recommend it. They are currently doing 1.5 billion pages views daily. That’s a lot of traffic - some of it could be yours. For free. Roger Monti, Martinibuster, recently wrote an excellent article on the MySpace land grab.

I had never really bought into the power of Digg, until I got dugg. It drove thousands of visitors to my blog in a matter of hours, and I didn’t even make it to the front page. While Digg tends to favor geeky, tech, or science related news, you don’t need to have a masters from MIT to write for the Digg crowd. The Wolf Howl blog has two very interesting posts on Digg - one about the Digg userbase representing the perfect storm of mavens and connectors, and another with some tips on how to write to help get your non-tech blog dugg. Another tip for Digg - there is a feature that let’s you “blog this story” onto your blog. Doing so places a link to your blog in the right hand column of the Digg story. Doing this alone will help to bring hundreds of visitors to your blog. As long as you are providing valuable content, some of those visitors will grab your feed, bookmark your blog, or make a mental note to return. Incremental steps like this over a period of time equate to thousands of visitors daily.

Next let’s discuss some multimedia - The Power of Pictures

The beauty of pictures is that they appeal to a user’s emotions. An emotion that you are trying to convey make take paragraphs of text to transmit, but can be easily captured with a snapshot. Additionally, pictures cross cultural and language barriers, exposing your content to users that may be otherwise inaccessible. Flickr is a fantastic social tool. Huh - you may be asking yourself. How can uploading some pics of my kids bring be traffic?? Flickr allows you to insert hotspots, notes, and links within your picture and descriptions of the picture. So by joining a couple of groups within Flickr that you are interested in, and making sure that you place your links into the picture or description (I recommend a note in the pic with a link, and a link in the desc) you will drive additional visitors to your site. Once you get involved with the community, you will learn how to tell which types of pictures drive eyeballs.

YouTube and Google Video take it to the next level. Nothing will attract eyeballs more than some video. With the proliferation of digital video, and the advances in technology and broadband, the current climate is a multimedia marketers dream. With some creativity, and a little bit of time you can reach tens, or hundreds of thousands of visitors. While neither of them allow for hyperlinks within the video, with a basic multimedia editor, you can enter your url or any other credits you’d like to add, directly into the video. Also, of course, include your blog url in the description. Once again, this should provide some incremental traffic, and will help to grow your userbase.

I recently had a great experience with my video camera, one that has brought me tens of thousands of visitors. I was able to take my son to hockey parctice, and capture some hilarious video of him brawling with some of the other four year olds. I brought it home, threw in some System of a Down fight music, added my url and credits at the end, and submitted the clip JR Hockey Brawl to YouTube and Google Video. Since doing so, I have attracted tens of thousands of visitors via those channels.

In closing, follow the steps I prescribed here, mix in some time and persistence, and you are bound to get heavy volume to your blog. Ensure that you are providing valuable content, and now you are not only poised to get a ton of traffic, but you have positioned yourself to retain those visitors once you reel ‘em in. And that’s really what it’s all about.

So hopefully, you have seen that if you give to the blogosphere, she will repay you, tenfold.

However….be careful what you wish for. With all that traffic comes a ton of comment spam. But that’s another conversation…