Blogs are individual, each one being an outlet in some fashion for the owner. Some are diaries of personal accounts, others for news. Like clothing, some extroverts enjoy wearing raincoats over hot pants on hot summers days, while others slap on a good old khaki pair of shorts and the always plain t-shirt. In the same vain, some creators are not after attracting record amounts of hits, after all, who’s to say their web server will cope with the traffic. A quick mention on slashdot.org could bring the site to a grinding halt, a symptom now called the slashdot effect or Slashdotted. Still, its wonderful to think that what you have to say is valued by the world. Without some type of advertising your unlikely to end up with a single hit.
This is a guide for Blog owners on how to gain exposure. It’s not suggested that these are hard and fast rules. It’s also not suggested that these are the only ways to attract precious eye balls. Dancing hamsters or a game of shoot the Microsoft Word Paper Clip can do wonders. This is a simple guide that will get you started, some simple methods that are the foundations for site traffic.
Unique Blogs.
The most important technique for attracting an audience is your Blog’s uniqueness and the level of interest it holds for the reader. There are literally thousands of Blogs, and with the recent popularity and the kamikaze blitz by the media, the number is growing rapidly by the day. Personal diaries, unless you are incredibly creative or an amazingly interesting individual, are unlikely to gain much popularity beyond friends, family and the occasional voyeur straying past for a quick glimpse of teenage webcams. News sites, without interesting and unique information are likely to have the same undramatic effect, begging to become the latest casualty in the 404 Not Found memorial cemetery. This isn’t to suggest that these sites are bad, and unwelcome. Quite the opposite, since that is what makes the Internet and Blogs such a great culture. We publish what we want. It’s just very unlikely that you will sustain any degree of notoriety and large number of site hits.
Neuroprosthesis News is a very unique site. There aren’t too many sites on the topic, so as far as the Internet goes, it makes it a major resource on the topic of neuroprosthesis. In a June 2002 post, the owner of the site pointed out some very effective links it had gained from some major news sites. All due to its uniqueness.
?Six Degrees of Separation
Blogger
“
I’m not suggesting that unique means a unique topic. Since a unique sense of humour can also make a site popular. For instance, Rage Boy’s EGR Weblog, uses some irreverent humour to set himself apart from other Bloggers. OK, he also has some very successful books, but why read his Blog if it isn’t an interesting and unique read.
Links.
This brings us to the second most important way to advertise a Blog. Why second you may ask. Surely links are the single most important. In a way they are, but, to steal a business term, without a unique value proposition, your unlikely to inspire the links in the first place.
As well as the Unique Blog, the sure fire way to attract links is to create an interesting and original post. Regurgitating other peoples post, or simply linking to news will only encourage the visitor to become a passerby and travel straight to the original source more often. The one exception to the rule are sites that collect relevant news in one easy access location. slashdot.org for instance is a repository for ?News for Nerds”, and adds value allowing readers to submit news and add comments.
It’s also worth noting that a Blog creator shouldn’t feel shy about requesting a link from another Blog that has a common interest. After all, that’s what the Internet is allowing, the ability for communities with similar interests to meet. Blog owners are, after all, there to be involved in a community.
Being involved in a community means you too should create links. Creating links will encourage linkage in a wonderful form of Karma tag generation. Using web site statistic tools, such as CQ Counter, allows the site owner to keep an eye on where their web traffic originates from. There are also scripts, like Sean Nolan’s Link Feedback, that allow this information to be posted on your web page. It’s likely that if you start generating significant traffic one way, they will reciprocate by linking to you.
Google.
If you have only been blogging for a short time, you’ll be amazed at the amount of hits you receive from search engines such as Google. What you might find more bizarre are the search terms that are used to find your site. Recently I received a hit to my site from a search on Google with the words ?flesh movie maker tool, free download“. At the time my Blog was ranked number one for the search. My Blog focuses on technology, not movies or masochistic tools. Google just collected the group of words from my site and made me top of the list.
It’s important to understand how Google ranks pages, and how Google responds to queries by text-matching techniques. It can mean a lot to the number of hits you receive, as well as what the web surfer is looking for when they arrive.
‘A very important criterion is how many people link to you and how many people link to them. It’s a recursive definition where your “quality” depends on the quality of links that point to you.’.
‘You can look at the distribution of keywords in the document. You can look at the distribution of other words on the page. You can look at words on similar topics on the page. You can look at words that other people use to point to this page, and how related they are to the keywords — things like that.‘ (Google à go-go, Salon).
The last point is an interesting one. Google Bomb is a term used to describe a concerted effort by a group of web site creators to have a link listed high in Google’s ranks for a particular search. The most famous is the ?talentless hack” bomb. When Adam Mathes created a link to his friend’s web site, and encouraged many others to do the same, the Google search for ?talentless hack” listed the web site for Andy Pressman. At the time Pressman did not have the words ?talentless hack” on his page, but because the link did, Google’s text-matching ensured that it showed up in the search results.
Mathes explains this phenomenon at his web site when he coined the Google Bombing term. ?Google is unique among search engines in that while it almost always shows you pages that have the exact keywords you are looking for, occasionally it will show you pages that don’t have those keywords, but other pages linked to that page with those words.“.
It’s not only important for people to link to your page, but they to link to it in certain ways. You’ll have little control of this. However, by creating a relevant title for the Blog entry and the name of the links that you may make to the entry yourself, you’ll encourage others to use the words that you feel will best represent your entry in a Google search.
You will also find that discussing popular current affairs will have a greater impact on who comes to your site from Google. A great example of increasing hits to Blogs, though perhaps through dubious means, is the post at Robert Loch’s Internet Marketing Strategy Weblog. In April 2002 Loch posted a story to his Blog about Anna Kournikova’s legal action against Penthouse for photos that they published claiming they were her naked on a beach. After several days a second post summed up the impact.
?Google sends me 1000 Anna Kournikova fans in the space of 4 hours
One post about Anna Kournikova and Penthouse, and my site gets flooded. Somehow, my timely post got to no. 1 under the search term ‘anna kournikova penthouse.’ Since then my visitor profile has somewhat changed
Still, from a marketing perspective, this does demonstrate the potential for opportunistically using news events to bring users to your site.“.
Loch took it one step further and changed his Blog Title to include the words, ?Anna Kournikova Penthouse - Marketing Blog - Anna Kournikova Penthouse“, because Google’s search results list the title of web pages, this is the first thing a Google searcher will see. He also made sure that he mentioned Anna’s name, nude pictures, and Penthouse throughout his site for a good month after the first post.
?For 15 days I held the no.1 spot on Google for the term ‘Anna Kournikova Penthouse,’ the 3rd most popular search term. Obviously Google traffic is many times large that Overtures. Whilst that traffic was useless to me, imagine what a site selling Anna Kournikova posters could have done with my 40,000 plus Anna Kournikova Penthouse related visitors. Using a blog to jump on news stories, and then redirect traffic, does appear to me to be a feasible net marketing tactic. Bloggers will hate me saying that, but hey, I didn’t invent the technology, or decide how Google rates weblogs.“.
Although this is an extreme example, because anything to do with naked pictures of Anna is likely to generate a large amount of traffic, it does demonstrate what can be done using topical information and Google structured Blogs.
For more on how Google works, see Google’s site for how its technology works.
Rings.
Web Rings have been around for some time. By subscribing to a ring, and posting a link on your site, your effectively getting free referrals. Most rings are topic related, so you are guaranteed a certain degree of relevance to your Blog. Others are more random, and although you’ll gain some hits, the surfer may not have an interest in the topic of your blog. Still, it gets you started.
BlogSnob and Wander-Lust are two random rings. Wander-Lust is a unique ring because your site will be checked on a regular basis for updates, and the latest headline is added to the Most Recently Updated Sites List. Special HTML Tags must be added to your updated articles for this to take effect. Still, having your Blog advertised on the front page of a major blogging site can add significant hits. If you attract enough hits then you’ll end up on the Popular Destinations list.
There are many more Web Rings or Random Blog Link Generators, too many to list. A quick visit to a dozen Blogs will give you a great variety.
Weblog Ping-Site List.
UserLand has a Recently Changed Weblogs page. If your one of the Blog “elite” it even has a Top 100 that “lists the Top-100 pages linked to by the weblogs who pinged Weblogs.Com in the last three hours.”. There are two ways to be added to the recently changed list. The simplest is to fill in the Ping-Site Form when you change your Blog. Although this is straight forward, it can become a hassle to remember to update the page for every change to your Blog. The most effective way is to have your Blog ping the site by itself by a script. Radio UserLand and Movable Type have this ability built in. If your Blogging Tool doesn’t have this function, then you can find more details at the site’s Specs page. If your not a code warrior, familiar with all things arcane, then you may need to request the facility from your Blog Tool creator.
Blog Related News Search Engines.
There are two incredibly useful sites for those addicted to news. ?Current events search engine(s)” allow people to search or list the most popular news items, ranked by the amount of links. They are great value for a quick snap shot of what happens to be popular among news sites and Bloggers on any given day. Two well known engines are Daypop and blogdex.
As well as showing a list of the most popular current events, they both allow a listing of ?citations” or ?sources”. These are lists of Blogs that make a reference to the page that contains the news. If your Blog links to the the friday five, you’ll show up in Daypop’s list of “friday five” citations.
Make sure you are registered on sites like Daypop and blogdex, to take advantage of these free listings.
Make Use Of RSS Aggregators.
An Aggregator is an application that reads XML based news resources (including Blogs), extracts the new articles or posts and displays them to the user. For an Infovore like Cory Doctorow or myself, an Aggregator means that the news comes to you almost as soon as it is posted.
A lot of Blog Tools automatically generate XML for ?syndication”. By adding the URL of this code to an Aggregator, a user can see when you update your site. This means your posts go to them, or a snippet of your post attracts them to you.
Some web sites use this method to update their pages with the latest news. NewsIsFree, for instance, updates as new feeds come in. If your Blog is registered, it to will be added to the list as you update your site. Syndic8 offers a similar service for submitted URLs.
For users of Radio UserLand there is an automatic News Aggregator.
Other Tricks.
If you have a collection of Blogs you visit often, create the links on your main index. When visiting these sites, follow the link from your page. That way at least one referer will show up on their referer list, and it will be from your site. Just like a Blogger Honey Pot, if they are even slightly curious, they will pay you a visit.
If you link to a popular book at Amazon, your Blog will be listed in the Onfocus Weblog BookWatch Mentions.
A Successful Blog.
These tips will get you started on the road to attracting a hoard of addoring Blog Groupies. It won’t be long before your mobbed on the street for autographs, and you’ll have to shut down your email account and Instant Messenger to return to your comfortable hovel of insignificanse. Or at least it will give you a little nudge into the Blogger community. Either way, the sign of a successful Blog is how much you enjoy it. No statistic package will measure this for you. The only sure sign is when you take it all too seriously, it might be time to look elsewhere.
Have fun.
Other References.
Living Code : Secrets of Weblogging
Scobleizer : Google Shows How Weird We Are
Plasticbag.org : How to get more traffic to your weblog