One of the people that I follow regularly is Ed Dale. You may know Ed from the 30 Day Challenge. When it comes to social networking and blogging Ed is usually on the cutting edge or sometimes even a bit ahead.
Just got this tweet this morning from him.
“Ed_Dale In April of 2007 (waaay back) I pointed out that Twitter was going to have a massive impact on Internet Marketing..
Ed_Dale It’s now October 2008 – and I want to give you the heads up to do with what you will…FRIENDFEED…They just made a SIMPLE change…
Ed_Dale That SIMPLE change at FRIENDFEED – Changes EVERYTHING”
So I went to Friend Feed and started setting it up. I can see the power as it brings in quite a few social sites into one place. I added my feed to the sidebar here and can see using this quite a bit in the future.
Looks like it could become a great resource for bloggers and when you join add me as a friend. It gives us another way to interact.
There are literally 1000s of social networking sites with more popping up every day. Not all apply to everyone. These sites have become very nichified (if that is an actual word) but you know what I mean.
There are sites for dog lovers, cat lovers, cat haters (probably but no nasty email here for that topic I do like cats) that will allow you to interact with like minded people.
Now there is a new great resource that lists over 3000 social networking sites and you can grab it for free. You can even search it by keyword to find the ones that would help you the most.
Just read a good article from one of the people I follow regularly. Actually read it a few days ago then went back again today to make sure it was fresh in my mind.
It is called Revenge of the Minisite from John Taylor and brings up something I was aware of and recommend to client’s but have seen too many people ignore.
Seems a lot of people love blogs. Google loves blogs. I love blogs but…
There are certain things blogs are not good for and you should not forget about the minisite.
The power of blogs is the interactivity and ease to have a conversation but sometimes when you want a specific action they just have too many distractions and when you are trying to sell something or get someone to subscribe not having distractions is a good thing.
Consider it the next time you are considering adding a page to your blog to save time and avoid creating a minisite.
As always your questions and comments are welcomed and stop by and say hi to John at his blog as he has a lot of good information there.
Mike Paetzold
P.S. Last time I will mention it but there are still not enough comments on the last blog traffic post so the series is discontinued until that is resolved.
The noise online makes it very easy for your message to get lost easily. Someone visits your blog, likes your content and bookmarks your site. They really do intent to come back but do they?
The answer is a great big maybe. If they grabbed your feed and added it to a reader like Google Reader they just may depending on how many people they follow. (My average new posts in my reader is huge). If they bookmarked your site the odds are much, much lower.
Think about it. Go check your bookmarks and see how many of them you actually use or even better remember why you bookmarked them. I have and if you were to force me at gun point I would be lucky to remember half of them and outside of a dozen or so have never used the majority of them even once.
That is one of the reasons that I like to have a subscribe form on my blogs. This lets me remind people to come back again and again.
Now there are multiple ways to do this and you can use a service like Feedblitz but I prefer using my own autoresponder (Aweber because they automate delivery off of my feed). The reason is that I can easily send other messages too with an autoresponder.
This allows me to offer an ethical bribe for signing up to receive updates. For this blog I use a piece of software that most bloggers would find useful. As my topic here is WordPress and blogging that is something of value for my readers.
Previously I gave away some tips on generating blog traffic. Both of these target the reader that will want to come back again and again.
As people return and get value they are more likely to comment and take part in the discussion. You build trust and loyalty by continuing to provide valuable content. The comments create even more valuable content for my blog and build a community here.
I can also use the list to get questions as that is the primary focus of my content here. On another note it is almost time to resend as the questions have slowed down but because I am using Aweber I can send out a gentle nudge to get the questions coming in again (hint, hint use the survey form above or comment).
In conclusion if you are looking to increase your blog traffic (and who isn’t?) then you really need to be asking people to subscribe and giving them a reason to do so.
As always your questions and comments are welcomed.
