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Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Can Find You

Someone added a reason not to blog to my Top Ten Reasons To Blog and Top Ten Not to Blog:
Because you think no one will read it...how can people find it?
I realized that in all my posts talking about blogging and Pushing People to Blog as a learning tool, I had never specifically blogged about how you find readers - or more appropriately - what should you do so that potential readers can find you. So here are a few specific suggestions to make sure that readers can find you:
  1. Subscribe to bloggers and get to know what they write about.
  2. Participate in the Learning Circuit's Big Question.
  3. Engage me in my 100 Conversation Topics.
  4. Engage any blogger by posting and linking to them (do item #1 first). They won't respond every time, but they do quite often.
  5. Comment and link to your post in the comments on blogs. It's better to link directly in a new post on the topic, but if you've already posted on a related issue, feel free to link to your blog in a comment. (Make sure you know how the anchor tag works.)
  6. Ask Questions and Make Openings Clear in your posts in order to get responses.
  7. Post Controversial Topics, but make sure you believe your position and can take the heat.
  8. Participate in Blog Carnivals is the Work Learning carnival still going?
  9. Twitter about it, especially to twitter groups such as the upcoming TK09 group
  10. Make sure to include a link to your blog in email footer, social network profiles, etc.
  11. Include links to your posts (when relevant) to discussion groups
  12. Make sure your blog is search engine friendly. Good titles and URLs are a must.
The usual caveats that this takes time and you had better be first focused on personal learning, but hopefully this will help make it so that readers can find you.

What did I miss?

4 comments:

Tracy Parish said...

Thanks for this refresher and I'll admit new ideas for me. I did not know about blog carnivals, I also didn't think too highly about putting my blog link on emails...seemed a little too high on the self-promotion scale. I am going to give both a try to see how these options work for my blog.

Tracy

Anonymous said...

Blog carnivals are new to me thanks.

Another idea, add a blog widget to your Linked In or Facebook profile. This will display your latest posts within your profile. FYI: Keep your profile open for anyone to view, allowing all/more to see your blog posts within Linked In or Facebook.

Blogger In Middle-earth said...

Kia ora Tony

A great list. What did you miss? Not much. But I might add a few more items, though you may not follow some of this advice on principle:

1 -
Choose a catchy blog title, like Blogger in Middle-earth :-)

2 -
Write (interesting?) posts and give them catchy titles that are likely to get picked up by searches (not unlike your No12 but with a bit more focus on what's catchy).

3 -
Use headers for sections with catchy titles that are likely to get picked up by searches.

4 -
Write posts about the commentsphere and the people in it - people like to read stuff that's about them.

5 -
Approach post writing from the story point of view, incorporating personal stories into your range of post topics - I just learnt about that one :-)

As I said, there are principles that may be breached by following a pattern of post writing that addresses these points above. It's a bit like the singer who'd rather sing her own stuff than stuff that people ask to hear.

Catchya
from Middle-earth

Tony Karrer said...

@Tracy, if you don't feel comfortable about adding your blog, then add a LinkedIn profile link which lists your blog. Definitely LinkedIn profile is relevant and quite useful to have in email signatures.

@Jeff - good suggestion.

@Ken -

1. On the name, I agree making it catchy is good, but so is a name that helps a little bit with SEO and quick recognition what the blog is about. In other words, it's good to have a term or terms that relate to your topic.

2 & 3 Your suggestion on titles and headers for searches is good. However, I would focus more on title.

4&5 - great points.