The Social Media Diary

In two weeks, I will be attending and presenting at PodCampBoston, described as an “unconference where newbies and advanced content makers alike come to learn more about and share their knowledge of podcasting, blogging, video blogging, social media and more.”

My presentation is called “Best Practices To Drive Qualified Traffic To Your Blog” and will discuss both pull and push strategies. Here are some highlights……

** A “Pull Strategy” focuses on attracting people to your blog via your content that readers find via organic search engine listings. Your great content pulls the readers in.
** A “Push Strategy” includes proactive techniques to market and create awareness about your blog and the related tactics push people to your blog.
** As a blogger, you should create your pull strategy first and your push strategy second. The two must align and intertwine.

The key steps involved in creating a Pull Strategy include:

1) Determine your blog objective: What is the purpose? What do you want to accomplish?

2) Define your blog audience: Who are the target readers of your blog?

3) Narrow your blog scope: What will differentiate your blog from other blogs? How can you stand out?

4) Create your content strategy: What specific topics will you write about?

5) Identify top 25 keywords

- Popularity and alignment with blog strategy
- Leverage Google Adwords search tool

6) Produce engaging content

- Must be frequent, high quality and relevant to your blog audience
- Lightly incorporate your top 25 keywords in blog content
- Great content always trumps keyword alignment
- Consider keywords in blog posts, categories, tags, titles, “about us”
- Combine text, video, images

7) Monitor referrers/search engine terms- feed back into content strategy

When it’s time to push and promote…

8 ) Fish where your readers swim

- Promote content leveraging Social media  (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook)
- Write guest blogs and leave comments on other blogs, that appeal to target audience (link back)

9) Make it easy to subscribe to your content

- Clearly direct visitors to RSS and Email sign up links
- Ensure readers know content is free
- Every time you publish something new, content is pushed to their desktop

10) Leverage traditional PR techniques

- Press releases
- Advertise blog on email signatures/business cards
- Sponsor events

Want to know more? Please join me at PodCamp Boston the weekend of September 24 and 25, 2011.  There are a number of awesome presenters.. don’t miss it!!

I have recently noticed a rash of what I’ll call faux blog posts. These are posts that just pretend to be actual blog posts but really aren’t. For example..

The Retweet Post: This happens when someone posts/tweets a great blog post title and a link to their blog, but when you get there you learn that the post is somewhere else (i.e. it’s another blogger’s post) and you have to click another time. The likely purpose of the retweet post is to get traffic to their own blog, but the traffic is not qualified and not interested in staying to learn more. The solution? Tweet about the actual blog post and provide a direct link.

The Bad Ad: Like the Retweet Post, these usually have a fantastic title like “What Oprah taught me about blog traffic” or “6 things I learned when I met Donald Trump” and may even have an original starting paragraph. BUT.. if you continue reading you soon learn that the post is an advertisement for a person, business or thing (usually a book).  Wahhh.

The Spider’s Webinar: Webinar ads are not blog posts. There, I have said it. I like webinars as much as the next gal, but they belong in another section of your website, perhaps called events or news and should not appear on a RSS feed or email sign up, disguised as possible blog posts.

I enjoy getting my news and learning new things via blog posts, so please help keep the blogosphere clean and spam free.

Did I miss anything?