Put your blog's address down as your email signature.
Collect names and email addresses of everyone you know. These are people who can recognize your name and face. There are no other requirements. Reconnect with all of them. Send out one liner emails. More than one line and they might miss out on your punch line, the signature.
Every time you put out a new blog post, promptly feed it to your Twitter stream.
Sometimes feed the same blog post to your Twitter stream twice, with a few hours' gap.
You must give your visitors the option to subscribe to your blog's RSS feed. You must give them the option to subscribe with their email addresses. You can do both for free with Feedburner. That mailing list is key. They say, in the long run, that is the best kind of readership.
Read other blogs. Leave meaningful comments in their comments sections. Link to blog posts by others from your blog posts. That works great if they have the trackback thing. Zemanta makes it easy to link to blog posts by others. I got quite some traffic from the Google Wave Developer Blog that way. I have a feeling this post will get me a lot of valuable trackback traffic: Mashable Did It.
Engage those who leave comments in your comments sections. I recommend Disqus.
Find your passion. Find your niche. You discover your passion as the topic you blog about the most. Your niche is what Google Analytics tells you it is. If you are lucky, there is an overlap.
Once you find your niche, you have to work very hard to occupy it. There should be at least one word, one phrase - not your name - that when you google up, your blog shows up on the very first page. Work at it. You can do it. In the short run most of your traffic will come from the referring sites. But in the long run, if you are meant to be a professional blogger, most of your traffic will come from the search engines. That is why it is very important you discover and occupy your niche. You can have several sub niches, but you need one or two very well defined niches that you occupy.
Find a group or two to belong to in your niche. Do a search on Google Groups. Find one with a large enough membership. You have to be an active member of a virtual community or two of people who share your passion. That will bring you traffic. Some groups I have signed up for: Google Wave API, Wave Protocol, Android Beginners, Android Developers.Of course every message by you is going to carry your signature.
Say hello to Arianna at the Huffington Post. When she puts out a blog post, read it, and say something mesmerizing in the comments section.
Remember, every page hit counts. Just like every cent counts. Google makes its billions in cents, not dollars. You are going to 100,000 visits a month one visit at a time. Every visit counts. Every click counts.
Writing top quality, regular content is the number one thing to do to boost your traffic.
But that alone will not cut it. You have to go out there and network feverishly in your part of the blogosphere. You have to read blog posts by others, engage them in their comments sections. Ending up on other bloggers' blogrolls boosts your blog's PageRank. High rank means more show up in search results means more traffic.
With Google Wave, Google has proven it is still the 800 pound gorilla of web technology innovation. So you have to ask, what is behind Google Wave? What's under the hood? Looking at the architecture also gives us a better idea of all that might become possible with this new heart-pounding innovation.
Google wants Wave to become a fundamental web application like email, that most fundamental of all web applications. Email is not actually a web application, it has been around for decades, it just migrated to the web when Sabeer Bhatia came along. Microsoft already had email but still paid Bhatia $400 million for Hotmail, so I guess the migration was a seismic event.
Google offers email, so do Yahoo and Microsoft and every ISP worth its salt, and all those web programs talk to each other. I have the option to send an email from paramendra at gmail dot com to paramendra at yahoo dot com or paramendra at hotmail dot com. Wave is going to be like that.
But only Google does the innovation in Gmail. Wave is not going to be like that. Any outside party could innovate Wave and add new and exciting features, and numerous will. I expect there to be so much innovation in the Wave space that I expect Wave to become like an operating system. We have now moved beyond talking of a browser as an operating system. Now we are going to have to talk of a web application as an operating system. That application is Wave.
What's your IQ ? a free, online course to increase your knowledge about Google Analytics. The curriculum consists of over 20 self-paced online lessons Activities and Tasks Design Guidelines how to enrich the user experience you are creating. .... multitasking, activity reuse, intents, and the back stack. .... what it means to design and develop an Android UI. Top 10 Malware Sites recent surge in compromised web servers ...... more than 4,000 different sites that appeared to be set up for distributing malware by massively compromising popular web sites. Of these domains more than 1,400 were hosted in the .cn TLD. Several contained plays on the name of Google such as goooogleadsence.biz, etc. ...... All domains on the top-10 list are suspected to have compromised more than 10,000 web sites on the Internet. .... our Safe Browsing API is freely available and is being used by browsers such as Firefox and Chrome to protect users on the web. Google Chrome, Sandboxing, and Mac OS X Google Chrome for the Mac is coming along fine Keyboard shortcuts & Search Operators c: quick call Improving Freenet's Performance Freenet divides all files into 32KB blocks (called CHKs), which are each fetched and decrypted separately ..... the project took one developer most of a year, the final diff was over 46K lines of code covering 320 files Introducing the Conversations element Have you been looking for a way to easily add your favorite Google products to your own site? Now you can with Google Web Elements. .... the Conversation element.
A Speedier Google Chrome for all users It's been about 8 months since we launched Google Chrome. Aside from exclaiming how fast it is, users have been sending us lots of feedback and feature requests. We've increased our focus on speed and also added some of the most-requested features. ....... Google Chrome is more stable than ever--we have fixed over 300 bugs that caused crashes since launch. ....... Making the web faster continues to be our main area of focus. Thanks to a new version of WebKit and an update to our JavaScript engine, V8, interactive web pages will run even faster. Launching Google Suggest in SwahiliToday we have added full support for Swahili - on our domains in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and DR Congo. ...... The Google Suggest feature originally started as a 20% project in 2004, and we are thrilled to now have Suggest in Swahili. The best and the brightest I can't think of a better environment than academia for asking hard questions and trying to solve the unsolvable. It's at universities that graduate students perform some of the most exciting and game-changing research in computer science and technology. ...... find the best and brightest PhD students ...... The breadth of research covered by these students and the scope of their vision was astounding. ..... The Google Fellowship will provide them with funding to cover their tuition and expenses, plus an Android-powered phone and a Google mentor. Google News gets a makeover 7-year anniversary of Google News. ..... a better news browsing experience and connect you to a wide variety of perspectives on current events. Product Ideas - Now for Blogger! The Google Sites blog is moving Google Sites already has features built in from other Google applications, like when you insert Picasa web albums, YouTube videos, gadgets, and Google Docs into web pages Monetize! New in Labs: Automatic message translation Since the heart and soul of Gmail is about helping people communicate, I'm proud to announce the integration of Google's automatic translation technology directly into Gmail. ..... Google's automatic translation technology ...... a language you can understand. Hierarchical navigation and other new features for Google Sites Import your mail and contacts from other accounts 30,000 Valeo employees put Google Apps to work putting complex, expensive on-premises IT systems in the past. ..... integrated voice and video chat. Valeo – an auto parts manufacturer with 30,000 Internet-connected employees in 27 different countries – has joined the movement. .... the Google Blog Tasks, now in Calendar too Bringing your contacts to the cloud Calling all teachers we enjoy seeing people learning and working together on Google Sites. Share your location with your Gmail and Google Talk friends Manage your contacts, outside of Gmail New in Labs: Google Search right in Gmail Spruce up your surveys: 70 colorful themes New in Labs: Extra emoticons Sheet protection gives you finer control of your spreadsheets Calling Video Publishers find any video, at any time, from any site. Statistical machine translation live Most state-of-the-art commercial machine translation systems in use today have been developed using a rules-based approach and require a lot of work by linguists to define vocabularies and grammars. ....... a different approach: we feed the computer with billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model. ....... Arabic is a very challenging language to translate to and from: it requires long-distance reordering of words and has a very rich morphology. ..... you probably should not try to translate poetry Translate between 41 languages with Google Translate we can now translate between languages read by 98% of Internet users. ........ For several languages, Google Translate is the first freely available machine translation system for these languages. ....... We've heard stories of people using Google Translate to help them do business internationally, and we've seen many websites (e.g., New York's Metro Transit Authority) and blogs add the Google Translate My Page Gadget to their pages to make their content more accessible to people from all over the world. ...... the cross-language search feature .......... Translate provides people who may not otherwise have a lot of web content available in their own language with access to the wealth of content on the truly worldwide web. 30,000 new Google Apps business users at Valeo and voice and video chat. ...... Gmail was really the beginning of how we're rethinking personal and group productivity, and over the last couple of years, business adoption has accelerated rapidly as the hosted suite has emerged as a powerful, affordable successor to on-premises business technology. ....... Today, more than a million businesses have moved beyond traditional software and hardware to cloud computing – where data and applications live online – and they're using the Google Apps suite not just for Gmail, but also for shared calendaring, collaborating on files without attachments, private video sharing and quickly deployable internal and external sites. IT managers are refocusing the money and time saved towards core projects that help their individual businesses become more competitive. Gmail voice and video chat I happen to work in the New York City office (one of Google's many distributed offices), while most of my teammates work in the Mountain View headquarters. While we make good use of video conferencing, there are times when I need to talk to a teammate at a moment's notice. .......... Learn more about voice and video chat
Mark Penn says in his famous Wall Street Journal article that at 100,000 unique visits per month, a blogger hits 75K in income. There is a suggestion that there is a direct correlation between how much traffic you get and how much you make as a blogger. So how do you go about increasing traffic for your blog?
There are three kinds of traffic:
Search Traffic
Referring Sites
Direct Traffic
If you focus solely on content creation and engage in no other marketing effort, all your traffic is going to come from search engines. If you become inactive for any length of time, you are still going to get residual traffic. Most of that likely might be search engine traffic, except if you get residual traffic of the other two kinds from your previous marketing efforts.
It is fundamental that you use Google Analytics or a similar tool to see how much and what kind of traffic you are getting. The tool also tells you of the keywords people use to feed the search engines to end up at your site, and what pages they visit. This helps you discover your niche, and to create ever more content for that particular niche. For me right now that seems to be Android.
More specifically "donut android" and "cupcake android." For those two phrases my blog for now shows up on the first page of Google search results. That is prime real estate. The reason I have to hone in that niche makes sense at many levels to me.
When I write new blog posts on Android, content creation and marketing are not two different activities. They are one and the same.
Android is no cottage industry. It is not some sub sub sub topic. It just might end up being the top technology news for this year.
Android so totally fits into my IC vision and my startup. The more I learn about Android, the better for me. I don't mind getting paid to learn. (Google's Newest Venture: Google Ventures) I plot every day to go back to working on my startup full time. Android is fundamental to the IC vision. The ground - operating system - itself has to move for the vision to become reality.
I feel lucky that the topic in technology that I find most fascinating right now is also my blog's prime niche according to Google Analytics. And I got told of that niche right after my first Android blog post. I find that amazing. My respect for Google's algorithms grew. And when Google gave me the number two spot after my first Donut Android blog post, my respect for the search engine really grew. (Taking The Number 2 Spot On Google Search For Donut Android)
Search engine traffic I think is the best kind, but working on the other two does not take away from your search engine traffic, quite the opposite, so don't ignore the other two either.
If I am a tech blogger, it makes sense that I visit TechCrunch, for example, or Mashable. And if I am going to visit anyways, why not participate in the comments sections? It takes but a few seconds. And because your name gets hyperlinked to your blog, those comments sections start sending a little traffic your way. What is there to complain?
Contrary to the stereotype, blogging is a social activity. You have to belong to blogging and online communities around your interests. You have to forge friendships in the blogosphere. And forging friendships with bloggers who are not so big name increases your chances of them putting you on their blogrolls. After traffic, those backlinks are what jack up your google rank. Those backlinks are key. And content creation alone will not do the work for you, especially during the early stages when you are still wondering how you hit 1,000 page hits a day.
Twitter is micro-blogging. And there is another: that would be the comments sections of other blogs. Got to participate.
Twitter is another great place to socialize. Don't just have a list of people you follow and followers. Got to make some time and visit their profile pages and respond to some of their tweets. These are real living, breathing people. Get to know some of them, or many of them if possible.
And there is direct traffic. Feedburner lets you put a box at your blog that gives visitors the option to subscribe to your blog with their email addresses. Seth Godin claims that mailing list is how he gets most of his traffic. But he probably became a star blogger first. But before you become famous and other people know you, when you are a small fish blogger, there are people you know. Once in a while it is okay to send out emails to people you know sharing a blog post or two with them. Look Ma, no hands!
Focus on great content creation.
Find your niche, and create great content for that particular niche, but also constantly be diversifying. You don't want to go out of business when one rainy day Google revised its algorithms and your blog ended up in Siberia.
Blogging is a social activity. Be in a habit of visiting other blogs and participating in their comments sections in meaningful ways.
Strive to generate a band of loyal visitors, people who want to lap up every blog post you put out because, oh, you are just so wonderful.
If you got a great blog, most of your traffic is going to come through search engines. Tags are important. External links are important. Hyperlinks are important. For all three these days you got Zemanta. Use it.
Great, regular content hence is also good marketing. Content is queen.
Got to build a mailing list for your blog. The one that I started using for this blog is over 9,000 strong. I decided on it yesterday. And look what I got.
♫
"My name is ______ and I graduated Columbia J School in 2008 where I concentrated in broadcast. I work at ABC News in DC now (the network) and I am working on this idea of Job Hunting and the Internet--pretty much exactly what you posted in your blog below. I am wondering if maybe we could talk on the phone about this idea."
One email a day, with five links to five blog posts: do you think that will work?
(3) Comments Sections Of Other Blogs
Like minded blogs. Celebrity blogs. If you are passionate about what you are passionate about, it is not possible you don't regularly read at least a dozen blogs that share your passion. Engage your favorite bloggers in their comments sections. Link to your blog from their comments sections. That helps jack up your Google rank. And that is a good thing.
JP, Confused Of Calcutta, is a big shot. I have never met him, but I think of him as a friend. He is CIO of British Telecom. I once came across a list in some magazine where Google CEO Eric Schmidt was number six, and JP was number 12. I really like his blog, that is why I visit his blog and participate in his comments sections. But that participation also jacks up my own blog's Google rank. I am not complaining.
I grew up watching Amitabh Bachchan. This here is me in 1993. Amitabh just so happens to be the most recognized face on the planet. His blog lets me interact with him and read his mind the way a handshake will not. In his comments sections, I have hope I will meet him one day. And, by the way, Amitabh was in Calcutta before he moved to Mumbai.
I am a New Yorker. I take pride in the New York Times. It is a good idea for me to leave comments in some of their blog's comments sections and hyperlink my name to my own blog.
I really like it that when I link to an article on the Google Blog, my blog shows up at the bottom of that post at the Google Blog. I am flattered, what can I say?
Mark Cuban is a loud mouth. I think that is a good thing for my blogging.
Huffington Post does Facebook and Mashable does Disqus. They don't make me create a separate account with them or fill up basic info before I can leave a comment. And they both have huge traffic. So it is a very good idea to participate in their comments sections. Read a post, then say what you have to say, and leave a link to one of your blog posts that might go with the theme. Or just leave a link to your blog.
But primarily, you are looking to make friends in comments sections. Passionate bloggers with small traffic might have time for you. Get to know them.
Another way to figure out which comments sections to visit is by using Blogsearch. Make a blog post, then search the key term for your blog post. Relevant blog posts will show up. Read and comment and link back to your blog post. The weirdest part of the exercise though is that most blogs out there don't do Disqus, at least not yet. But the nice ones just ask for your name, email address, not to be published but required, they say, and website address. The not nice ones expect you to register with them. I almost always walk away when I see that red flag.
The reason you want to follow everyone who follows you is because the Direct Message option is a great one. It is like a politician saying hello to you on the campaign trail. That is not shallow. He/she is not pretending to be family.
Twitterfeed is as grand as TweetDeck. Thanks to Twitterfeed, as of yesterday, my Netizen blog, this blog, BusinessWeek, CNet, and Digg will all feed my Twitter feed without me doing anything about it. Manual feeding is history.
(5) Facebook Notes
My blog is integrated with my Facebook account. So a new blog post shows up as a note in my Facebook stream. And I like to tag friends to those notes, so I show up in their Facebook stream as well. That is a fancy way of saying hello.
(6) Feeds
Don't allow feeds access to your full content. Give out the first paragraph. Let people show up at your blog if they want to see the whole thing.
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