There are hundreds of millions of blogs in the blogosphere and like the universe, and Rosie’s waistline, it’s expanding. Fortunately, there are many more millions of readers. So, how does one carve a tiny portion of cyberspace out of this enormous juggernaut as we can say, with a hint of immodesty, we did with http://www.thesharkguys.com/?Here, in no particular order, are 20 tips to gain a wider audience for a blog.
1. Register a unique URL. Nobody is going to remember c427tripod.com/index. It’s $10 well-spent and can be attached to a primary email as a signature. It’s also helpful when creating a brand and accompanying, hopefully memorable banner. [We are currently in the process of doing this very thing]
2. Blog often. Infrequently updated blogs are soon relegated to Google’s backwaters.
3. Have unique content, but not too arcane that it’s alienating. Know your niche (rhymes with ‘quiche’ in Canada, ‘witch’ in the US). Ours happens to be everything to do with drinking culture, with the occasional bit of pop culture shenanigans thrown in, like 25 Horrible Bands Named after Places the Top 10 Best NFL Names as well as the occasional DVD review.
4. Join a social and media networking site like DIGG, Gather or Zimbio
5. Submit a blog to as many blog search engines as possible. These include, but are not limited to, Technorati, Yahoo and Google. In fact, a veritable cottage industry has sprung up, of competing and/or niche blog internet search engines. Have a knitting blog? Submit it to an Arts & Crafts subsection of a search engine and compare traffic to similarly-themed blogs. They typically request a button be placed on your site in return.
6. Post interesting pictures. A sizable portion of readership will happen upon sites while looking for something completely different. Who knows? They may like what they see and stick around.
7. Blog often, but not too often, unless it’s a quality post.
8. Create a blogroll. What’s this? It’s simply a link to friends. Have a blog about beer? Check out who else does, whether it’s brewers, aficionados or sellers of beer-related merchandise and particularly those with high traffic or high quality. Befriend them. Post on their site. Ask about a reciprocal link. These are usually mutually beneficial and bloggers are typically more than welcome to sign on and vice versa. Having many people add you to your blogroll increases your web ‘authority’, used by some, such as Technorati, in their ranking scheme.
9. Invite guest bloggers. Draw their audience over to you and vice versa.
10. Post a lot of comments. This helps Google ’searchability’, and draws the curious over to your site. Make friends. Reach out and touch someone, not literally of course.
11. Allow open comments from readers. Don’t restrict what they can post, as this is irritating. People like to read what others have written in response to blogs and like to participate. This should be encouraged (of course, bigotry and the like can be deleted)
12. Be timely. Did some celebrity do something stupid over the weekend? Have a blog commentary ready for Monday morning. Don’t delay, as the crest of the media wave will be missed.
13. Create unique content. Have a unique and fun Top 10 List? Post it, and send it to sites that post Top 10 Lists (the blogosphere is full of these). Happen to notice a funny sign coming home from work? Perhaps some glaring grammatical error or some really clever bit of ad copy. Take a photo and upload it. There is a popular humor blog devoted to, of all things, unnecessary quotation marks. Play a musical instrument, or have a pet that does amazing tricks? Again, take a video and upload it.
14. Allow readers to flag your postings. At the end of each posting, allow readers to ‘Digg’, ‘Stumbleupon‘ or ‘Del.icio.us’ the blog. These are social bookmarks that give readers an opportunity to check what they like. If it’s popular enough, a posting could spread through cyberspace like a wanton brushfire. A cool site that is an agglomeration of these addthis.com
15. Facebook. As with the above, add a Facebook link to the bottom of a blog which allows readers to post content onto their sites.
16. Use ads sparingly. There is nothing more annoying than a site overwhelmed by ads distracting the reader from the content.
17. Choose blog titles wisely. For the purposes of Google searches, it can’t afford to be too clever. But at the same time, it has to attract eyeballs with something catchy. Check out Google Keywords. This will tell you how popular a particular phrase is, and how hotly advertisers are competing over it.
18. Be open. For better or for worse, we live in a confessional world. The seemingly mundane goings on of south Illinois farm life may be of interest to an urbanite in San Francisco.
19. Label posts and internally link to previous ones. Readers can keep track of whatever topics have been blogged about, and find earlier posts done on the same topic.
20. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, WRITE WELL. At the end of the day, quality counts and it’ll have people coming back for more.
Christopher Lombardo is co-author of The Man who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery (Penguin 2008) and co-author of the humor blog, The Shark Guys www.thesharkguys.com
