Workshop: Building your blog audience
Speaker: Elise Bauer
3 Pillars of Building Traffic & Audience:
- Content
- Community
- Technology
Content
- Useful (e.g. Lifehacker) – provides value over time
- Entertaining
- Timely- latest scoop, requires a time commitment
- Focus your content, whether your content is one or all three of the above, it needs to be focused. Niche draws a specific community of interest. It connects.
- Post a lot, but do not sacrifice quality
- Use images
- Write well
- Consider text effects: headlines, size
- Be interactive: polls, contests, interviews, controversy
- Top 10 Lists, How to’s
- Care about the topic to sustain over time. It will come out in your writing.
Community
- Connect to others who share your interest (your ‘community of interest’)
- Link, leave comments, join online events, contribute to the community
- Link via posts or blogroll
- Lots of bloggers find others via their stats
- Do not send a link exchange email – those sound odd
Technology
-
How do people find your blog?
- other sites
- Google or other searches
- bookmarks
- newsfeeds
- tagging tools (delicious, technorati, digg, etc)
- press (send them pitches, accurate to their spaces) – pitch knowledge not you
-
SEO
-
PageRank
- Inbound links, and the power of those links (their PageRanks)
- Text content (not images or Flash)
- Keyword use
- Page title (H1 vs. bolding)
- HTML structure
- *bad* don’t link to spammy sites (including w/in your comments)
- *bad* don’t have 404 errors
-
PageRank
-
Design
- Image size <15.5k
- Page length and size (< 100k) – Load time
- Font size
- Clutter
- Colored backgrounds
- Upper left focus (content to the left)
- Search bars
- Categories
- Mac & PC friendly on all browsers
- Screen resolution
Tags: audience, blog audience, readers, community, writing, blog, blogs, blogging, elise bauer, blogher, blogher06
[...] The post makes some interesting and helpful hints, check it out. I think it for new blogger’s it gives you a great place to start. Especially since those first couple of posts are difficult and it is hard to get some direction. [...]
Thanks for this fabulous update! I was upset to have missed the conference this year, but you did a greta job in filling me in!
Love your blog!
Thanks!
[...] A string of recent blogaholic posts recap some of the notes from the workshop’s conferences: Primp Your Blog Ten Types of Web Writing Building Your Blog Audience BlogHer 2006: Final Thoughts [...]