Building traffic: Posting Isn´t Enough

One of the biggest challenges any site faces is how best to build traffic. Blogs are often touted as a great way to do this and have built a bit of a reputation as an instant traffic-building product. This is, of course, not true. And so the question is, how does my blog actually build traffic? As the session title announces, posting isn't enough.

This session is a presentaion on those issues from Robert Schoble and Dave Taylor. Scoble opens with a preview of a link analysis site which appears to be an outgrowth of memeorandum called tech.memeorandum. Much as memeorandum tracks the political blogs and what they're talking about, it appears this will do the same for tech. This will apparently be out in September.

Scoble says that if you want to be the top guy in memeorandum, you need to actually break news. You can be included in the discussion by linking to news that's already broken, but you won't get to the top of the list. One place Scoble uses to track what's happening now in tech is the chat room on Joi Ito's site.

Dave Taylor chimes in that one thing he does is read a lot of other blogs to find out what's interesting to them. If Taylor sees an interseting story, he'll email the blogger or journalist to prime the pump of conversation. It's in his best interest for people to know that he's involved in these conversations.

Scoble notes that in the email, don't straight up ask for a link as it can upset some of the more popular bloggers. Just email them that something you've written might be of interest to them.

Scoble currently likes Chris Anderson's Long Tail blog. Scoble doesn't think he can explain the Long Tail well enough. Taylor makes a stab. The best explanation, according to Anderson, comes from a former Amazon employee:

We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.

Shel Israel (shouting up from the audience) notes that in the electornic world there are millions of microscopic markets, and companies can access all of those markets and be successful. When Scoble started his blog, he very intentionally wanted to be noticed in those niches. Taylor summarizes this as "stay on topic." Scoble notes that your <title> tag is important in defining what niche you're going after. A lot of this is standard SEO stuff, check out Lee's blog for SEO advice from an expert on the topic.

Taylor mentions WordTracker as a great way to find out what words are most popular in order to frame your blog most effectively. Spend a day or so before launch working with WordTracker and a list of the most popular words in your niche. Scoble notes that this is an effective way to find out what your site is about. Beyond just the title tag, use WordTracker to pick good titles. Spend a few minutes thinking about the title, and how people later will best be able to find the post.

This segways into ways to find out what's best to write about. Following what's being discussed elsewhere on your blog is a good way to bring traffic to your own. Commenting on other blogs puts you on their radar screen. For instance, Dave notes that he tracks what BusinessWeek's Blogspotting blog is discussing and adds comments when he has something germain to say:

I'm with you, Stephen. Dave's argument doesn't make much sense to me, actually, because if you view all writing, or publishing in any media, as advertising, then you can't differentiate between doing something for yourself and doing something for others to read. Further, even if you accept his thesis, then your personal advertising would gradually evolve into attracting more people, so you'd be suffering from the same "corruption" anyway.

Questions from the audience have segwayed us to RSS feeds and whether or not a blog should offer the full post or a partial post in its RSS feeds. Scoble interjects that he'll unsubscribe from any feed that isn't the full feed. Scoble says that offering a partial feed may work for large companies but for smaller companies trying to build a brand, it can be detrimental. Taylor disagrees totally. Taylor says that there are two reasons to offer an RSS feed. First, to get traffic back to your site. In this instance it makes sense to use a partial feed. Second, a blogger might simply want to get their ideas out into the internet ether. This feed should use a full feed. Scoble retorts that RSS and blogging depend on connectors. And when you're dealing with connectors. Way less than 1% of the people who read the web are using RSS, but those that are do use RSS. Scoble says that when you don't include the full feed, you're not treating him well, and when you do that you won't get links to your site. Chris Pirillo says that there's no right answer and no wrong answer since different people's lifestyles are going to dictate whether they want the full or partial feed. Taylor and Scoble continue to disagree with Scoble pushing the point that he's a connector and that connectors don't want the partial feed. Taylor reinforces the point Pirillo made about there being no right answer at the moment.

From the audience Bob Wyman notes that if you're going to be publishing partial feeds, you need to put as much care into what that partial post is. Most software just chops off the first 75 or so words from a post. Wyman says this is bad because it's not optimized for search or for keywords so readers who are searching for your content won't be able to find it.

Scoble and Taylor segway into the need to make connections in person rather than just through the blog. It's important to go to conferences and join assocaitions and to make connections through old fashioned networking. Taylor said that he's built tremendous traffic through speaking to associations. Scoble brings us back to the electronic world by noting that it's important to link to other companies and competitors.

Taylor closes that the two most important things to build traffic are your title tag and using words that other people use to find you. He stresses that it's important to get people to link to specific pages on your site rather than just your main site. Scoble closes that interviews are a very good way to get attention as when you interview another blogger, they're inclined to link to that interview on your site.

All in all nothing new or shocking in this session. Good content is crucial, reaching out in person and on the web is crucial, and optimizing your site so people can find it is crucial.

tags: blogbusinesssummit