I was not worried someone else might take away the Paramendra name - my parents saw Google coming, noone else seems to have that name - but I figured why take a chance? So I was on the case promptly after midnight Friday to get myself a facebook.com/paramendra vanity URL? Why have they been calling it a vanity URL? My name is not vain. It is just so much more user friendly, consumer friendly to have a URL like facebook.com/paramendra.
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.
Mashable did it. They rose with the rise of social media. While TechCrunch wanted to cover everything tech, Mashable honed on its niche. It refused to cover everything tech and instead honed on primarily social media. Mashable has aspired to be the bridge between the average person and social media. And they have done the smart thing of selling their own
ads. When you do that, you can ask for much higher prices.
Congratulations to the team. Pete Cashmore has been ubiquitous on Twitter, more so than Guy Kawasaki. Kawasaki has been more of a lone shark. Pete has zoomed ahead by building a high profile team around him.
People talk of Dell using Twitter as a marketing tool. I think no other brand name has used Twitter to its benefit quite like Mashable. That just might have been their biggest secret weapon, or maybe not so secret.
Mashable rose by demystifying Twitter for the average person. Mashable rose by having a hyper active Twitter stream.
I find this "coverage" ironic because I am deep into Web 2.0, a big believer, and NYT is one of my favorite news destinations online. NYT need not, should not die. It just needs to go completely online. Put all your archives online. Cover news to be published immediately. 100% ad model. Encourage others to link to your articles. Dominate the search engine results. Go multi-media. Get the top, lone, super niche bloggers to contribute on a per post, for pay basis. Even more important, have thriving comments sections. Readers don't want to just read.
Stop calling them readers. That is so yesterday. Call them consumers cum contributors. Become a megasite that is megainteractive. Appoint a CTO. Don't die. Reinvent yourself. News is more important than ever in this new age. But the old medium has become indefensible. Face the reality and live, thrive. Go for the global, real time audience. Visitors, they are visitors. They are not readers. The paper version has to die for the brand to live and thrive. Life for the NYT will be so much simpler if there was no paper involved whatsoever. Do all business online. 100% online, 100% global, 100% real time.
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