Tips | chrisbrogan.com

Growing Your Audience- Some Basics

June 10, 2008

My friend and former coworker, Mike Desjardins asked me about how people go about growing a blogging audience. It’s a great question. I run into tons of people who have wonderful blogs that deserve much more attention than they receive. So what gives? What can one do to grow your audience? If you want to grow your audience, you need to know who they are, give them easy to consume chunks of content, promote your work effectively, and be persistent.

Let’s Start With Audience

First and foremost, who are you writing this blog for? If the answer is “myself” and you have more than one RSS subscriber, congratulations. You’ve done it. If the answer is, “Anyone into _____,” like “anyone into tech,” and you have more than 10 subscribers congratulations. Be clear about the audience. If I’m going to bother giving you some of my time, I want something back.

Let’s take Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation. This is a top shelf blog, with clearly written content, that speaks to people looking to better understand the future of digital influence. Brillant work, considerately written, and created in such a way that I come away thinking about how this impacts me. Perfect. Spot on.

Other great examples of a focused blog that targets its audience well:

Problogger (I’ll send a few posts over shortly, mate.)
Web Worker Daily. I miss Anne Zelenka, but the rest of the team are doing great.
Copyblogger. I miss Brian posts, but the one I linked to shows you how to add subs.
Livingston Buzz

Technically, I could give you links all night, but the point is this. Look at how the content is focused on a specific audience. Look a few posts forward and back. Except for a few exceptions, you can tell exactly who the audience is.

When my audience dips, it’s because I lose my focus. But there’s more to it than that.

Your Content Needs to Be Well Chunked

First off, journalists know this, but I’ll tell you: start with the best stuff right up at the top. Don’t do it as a build-up. Second, make it such that people can read it in chunks. Look up at this. I’ve got headings that break up the post. I’ve got bullets that break up the post. I’ve led with a graphic. I could pull out a graphic or a pull quote to keep it looking better.

Break things up so that human eyes can read them easier. Dense posts and super long posts are a turn-off. Oh, and that’s another thing. Brevity. It rules. Pass it on.

Promote Your Blog Effectively

First, make sure there’s a very prominently displayed link for folks to subscribe to your RSS feed for your blog. The bigger and more attention-drawing, the better. Second, add an email subscription option to your blog. I prefer using FeedBurner to manage all that.

Second, be sure your blog’s URL is loaded into pretty much every social network where you belong. Add it to MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Flickr, and wherever else you can bring awareness. Make sure you submit it to directories like Dmoz.org, and Yahoo and Google. Get that URL out there where people can find it. I’ve had lots of interesting moments where someone has found my blog via Facebook or LinkedIn.

Third, add it to your email signature and your business cards. If your company doesn’t give you business cards, go to Overnight Prints or Vista Print or Moo and buy some. Thirty or so bucks and they help people find you (and your blog!).

In services like Twitter, promote your blog posts from time to time. Not EVERY post, but ones where you feel you’ve done well. I never use automatic post-to-twitter links. They just don’t seem to net decent conversations. Instead, try using a conversational tone. For instance, when I’m done this post, I will send to Twitter something like this: “I shared my thoughts on growing your audience. What are YOUR ideas?” and then the link to this post. You don’t have to follow, but you’ll know exactly why I asked for your attention.

One quick note: it’s not always about your blog. Don’t be that guy.

Be Persistent

I could also say “be consistent,” but in this case, I want you to persist in not only putting out your content, but also making it better. EVERYONE can make their stuff better. I could do to focus on my takeaways. You might need to pare down the word count. There’s always room to do better work.

Further, do lots to try new things. Stretch out the medium. Think of new ways to ask the same old questions. Decide on challenging approaches to blogging in ways that powerfully reveal the information your audience seeks from you. Persist in such matters, never accepting that your work is flawless, but instead analyzing your responses and uptake or downturn in traffic, and giving more effort accordingly.

And Now, the Bonus Round

Other ways that I’ve built traffic to my blog include the basics: comment on great blogs. Write and submit guest posts to top blogs in your similar space (but be careful of HOW you guest post). Add occasional links to your blog posts in places like Flickr. Consider contests. Participate in other people’s events. Find groups of bloggers you like and see if you fit their circles of friends. Write series so that people want to participate and come back for more. Make your URL memorable.

And beyond all that? Be as human as humanly possible, only do that in the most interesting senses of the idea. Make sense?

What else did I miss? The part where I ask you questions so that you help add YOUR personality and ideas to the conversation?

Photo Credit, Chel Pixie shooting for Financial Aid Podcast

Article

Join the conversation - 59 Comments

audience, blog topics, blogging, howto, socialmedia, socialmedia100, tips, writing

Basic Business Blogging Suggestions

May 27, 2008

You’ve decided you’re going to take the recommendations of the office evangelist and start writing a blog. The word still bothers you, but you’ve been told that it’s just like a newsletter or an article for a magazine, only faster, and online. But what comes next? How should you approach it? And what will make the difference between a blog that people read, and a blog that people ridicule? Here are some basic ideas and suggestions. (None of these are rules. There are a hundred ways to do things. My associates will fill the comments section with variations on the theme.)

Above All Else, Be Human

If that advice sounds familiar, it’s not unlike the very first post in the Social Media 100 series: Above All Else- People. The advice is the same. People are who read blogs (okay, we could argue that Google also reads your blog, but let’s save that for another time). To that end, present yourself as a human. Write with the first-person (”I”) perspective, and write as if you’re telling me something, not a faceless mass.

Also, pay attention to that previous post and be attentive to people’s attention constraints.

Commenting Is Just as Important

Remember to visit other blogs in the space and comment on stories and posts that appeal to you. Do NOT be “that guy” (or “girl”) and reference yourself and your company on all these comments. Instead, be sure to seem human and comment on things that have interest to you. Commenting matters, and we know if you’re part of our community by how and where you comment.

Blogging Policies

Your blogging policy shouldn’t be any more complex than your email policy. Look over your company’s policy documents and see if you can replace “email” with “blog” and “blogging.” If yes, and it makes sense, that’s probably fine. It should go without saying that company strategy as well as financial data is not especially good to put on blogs.

If you must have some kind of process in place where more than one set of hands has to touch a blog post, keep it simple. Anything more than two sets of eyes beyond the author, and I believe you’ve already killed people’s interest in blogging.

Does This Tie to Strategy at All?

Remember that your business blog has more requirements than a personal blog. Why did you start it in the first place? What’s the GOAL of the blog? What are you hoping to do with it? Think this through and check your efforts against it regularly. If you can set up metrics of any kind, these might help.

For instance, if your goal is engagement, measure number of comments, web hits, RSS subscribers, inbound links, and a few other criteria. But if your goal is customer service, maybe the blog itself doesn’t get measured as much as overall sentiment in the marketplace gets measured.

My point, simply, is to pay attention to the strategy behind why you’ve bothered blogging in the first place.

Platforms Aren’t THAT Important

But you should consider whether the blogging platform you’re using is easy enough to keep it enjoyable, that it has RSS subscription capabilities, tagging, the ability to add plugins and external code, and a few other details that I’m happy to share, if this is a big concern.

Mix it Up

We don’t want to read only about your company, your product, you. We want your take on the industry at large, on events that might be resonant with us outside of your organization, on other forces that might impact our relationship with you and your products. Try to have that in mind when you write. Yes, it’s a blog for your company, but it’s also a source of information, and has to reflect the world around us.

Don’t Sell, but Don’t Be Shy

A blog isn’t about the hard sell. Let’s accept that. Yes, we’ll be suggestive. Yes, we’ll be persuasive. We’ll give you tastes of what you might receive if you buy the whole deal, but if it’s just a place for selling, we’re not reading. There has to be passion and interest and information flowing through there. Sure, you can help us find where to buy things. But maybe try to mix it up a bit. Don’t pretend like you’re not selling, because that can seem awkward, too, but if you can, consider the last few posts you’ve written and see whether or not it’s time to sell to us again.

Build a Workflow

The mood to blog might not always strike you. It might be helpful to keep a notepad file of topics and ideas so that you can tap into these when you’ve a moment. Also, don’t be afraid to write into a text file, and then dump it into your blog software when it’s all done. This will enable you to write anywhere, with or without the web, and when you have a moment. (Note: there are plenty of great tools for this, as well, including Windows Live Writer for PC and Mars Edit for the Mac (Any good offline editors for Linux? No, besides vi!)

Another trick to building a good blogging flow is to have a good blog reading habit. Use a tool like Google Reader and subscribe to sites and relevant searches that will keep you in quality posts.

Link Out

We pay attention to where you link. If every link in your blog is to your own stuff, we discount you as self-referential. Consider pointing out other great posts in your space, and give adequate links and credit. Don’t sell the store, but make sure you’re building a healthy linking habit. Otherwise, links will rarely flow inward as well.

Frequency is How Often You Have Value to Add

If you blog on a monthly basis, your traffic will likely be dismal. Unless you’re Donald Trump, and then, I imagine you’d still pull it off. For the rest of us, try to stick to a weekly-at-worst and a daily-at-best standard for your blogging. Don’t feel frustrated if you can’t do daily right away. Blogging takes practice, and it can sometimes fall to the bottom of our priority list (as it should). But if you build a decent work flow, this effort should become more natural over time.

Pay Attention to Design

I wrote recently about blog design, and so I won’t reinvent the wheel, but in brief: make sure you have easy-to-use contact information on the blog. Put up a very human About page, including information on the blog’s author as well as the company you serve. We KNOW it’s a company blog. We want to know about you, too. Finally, make sure the blog has all the social sharing tools built into it, such that people can bookmark sites easily, share in popular places, and provide this information easily to others.

Encourage Conversation

How do you build blog posts that last and add value? You encourage conversation. One way that I do this often is by asking questions of the people who read this blog. It’s a great way to tap the expertise of the people in your space. No experts in the crowd? Then consider writing your posts in such a way that your most likely audience will have something upon which to comment and add their own value. Making a post too rock solid is just an invitation to have nothing said about it after the fact.

What Else Would YOU Recommend?

Until now, I’ve written this as if you were the prospective new blogger, but I know that the folks reading [chrisbrogan.com] are professionals in their own right. This post will certainly be shared as advice to others considering starting up a blog. What would you add to the advice I’ve already given? What have I missed? Your comments make this post dozens of times better than what I write on my own. How would you advise a newcomer to business blogging?

The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.

Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.

Photo Credit, foundphotoslj

Article

Join the conversation - 27 Comments

blogging, business, howto, socialmedia, socialmedia100, sugestions, tips, writing

Best Social Media Advice From This Site

May 12, 2008

I’m passionate about how certain strategies married to certain technologies allow individuals and companies to build things: reputation, trust, personal brand, community, relationships, and even marketplaces. My efforts to cover larger stories, tools, strategies, and more over the last several months have given you quite a bit to consider. But blogs are a tricky method for learning and reflecting. They’re like a running stream, and if you step out for a moment, a certain point in the stream will pass you by.

To that end, I’ve collected some links to the posts that I think might be helpful to you. Peruse these at your leisure. I’ve grouped them a bit for you. Feel free to pick and choose the topics that matter to you. I hope this proves helpful. If it does, please consider blogging a link to this post, and/or feel free to pass it on to any who might want more of this type of information.

There’s a lot here. Feel free to bookmark it for later. (And if you want even more to read, sign up for my free newsletter, which is even MORE original content.)

Thanks!

Community Development

Social Networks

Social Media

Twitter

Personal Branding

Making Media

I’m writing new stuff all the time at [chrisbrogan.com]. If you’re reading this for the first time, please consider subscribing for free. If you’re a subscriber, don’t forget to get the completely-different content published at least twice a month in my newsletter. And thanks for your attention and time.

Special thanks to Alexa Scordato for compiling this data on my behalf. It was a lot of work. Thanks!

Article

Join the conversation - 83 Comments

blogging, chrisbrogan, howto, socialmedia, socialmedia100, socialnetworks, tips

Free Tips for Your Blog

April 9, 2008

Yesterday was my birthday. Today, I’m giving you a little gift in the form of a free PDF to download: Building Community Around Your Blog. Feel free to send copies to anyone you like.

Some of you might be practicing this stuff already, but maybe there are one or two tips that will be useful.

I wrote this up originally for my new friend, Nina Simonds from Spices of Life, a video show my friend, Steve Garfield helps produce. We were talking about ways to further develop community and build audience.

What else? How are you building community around YOUR blog?

Article

Join the conversation - 15 Comments

blogging, blogs, howto, socialmedia, tips