Tuesday, August 22, 2006
More Blog Struggles (with advice)
OK, I admit it. My business-writing blog is not turning out the way I'd like it to, and that's probably because, for starters, I'm not sure what my goal is. With the parenting blog, I have a lot of content that some people read, and with this business blog, I have almost no content that presumably a few people read... something has to change.
At any rate, I did some research on business blogs and found some great advice from the University of Massachussetts Dartmouth. Their Center for Marketing Research put out a paper, "Behind the Scenes in the Blogosphere." In case anyone wants to check it out, the link is here (let's see if I do this right):
But if you don't want to check it out, here are some tips (paraphrased in my own words, except for quotes) that I picked up from the study. My thinking is, is that if I follow these guidelines, it should be quite easy to make my blog more popular and relevant.
So according to the study, if you want to have more people visit your blog, you could:
Add additional authors to your blog. That's not a bad idea. Instead of maintaining one blog, you could have several maintaining it. That's what Entrepreneur magazine does, and many companies, and then you don't have one person solely responsible for it, and if numerous people are blogging on your blog, presumably more content is going up, and managing a blog is a little less overwhelming. Still, that doesn't hit the problem of attracting readers, but try this next idea.
Offer your own comments on other people's blogs--and this is key--who are covering the same subject matter. I watched that happen with my wife's blog; she's often commenting on fellow birdwatcher's blogs, and as it happens, she has quite a popular birding blog. As one reader said in the study, "Grow your blog by being cited by other more popular blogs." This makes sense. I could do this.
The study also recommended publicizing yourself, using a link in your email to direct others to your blog. I usually do that, and sometimes don't, knowing people will find a lot of old, not-so relevant information in this blog. But, still, it's a good idea. I could do that even more. Say, this is going to be easier than I thought.
Quality counts. And the study concluded that the growth of a blog depends on not just the number of postings, but that they have to be well-written and interesting.
Quality? Sigh, I knew there'd be a catch.
At any rate, I did some research on business blogs and found some great advice from the University of Massachussetts Dartmouth. Their Center for Marketing Research put out a paper, "Behind the Scenes in the Blogosphere." In case anyone wants to check it out, the link is here (let's see if I do this right):
But if you don't want to check it out, here are some tips (paraphrased in my own words, except for quotes) that I picked up from the study. My thinking is, is that if I follow these guidelines, it should be quite easy to make my blog more popular and relevant.
So according to the study, if you want to have more people visit your blog, you could:
Add additional authors to your blog. That's not a bad idea. Instead of maintaining one blog, you could have several maintaining it. That's what Entrepreneur magazine does, and many companies, and then you don't have one person solely responsible for it, and if numerous people are blogging on your blog, presumably more content is going up, and managing a blog is a little less overwhelming. Still, that doesn't hit the problem of attracting readers, but try this next idea.
Offer your own comments on other people's blogs--and this is key--who are covering the same subject matter. I watched that happen with my wife's blog; she's often commenting on fellow birdwatcher's blogs, and as it happens, she has quite a popular birding blog. As one reader said in the study, "Grow your blog by being cited by other more popular blogs." This makes sense. I could do this.
The study also recommended publicizing yourself, using a link in your email to direct others to your blog. I usually do that, and sometimes don't, knowing people will find a lot of old, not-so relevant information in this blog. But, still, it's a good idea. I could do that even more. Say, this is going to be easier than I thought.
Quality counts. And the study concluded that the growth of a blog depends on not just the number of postings, but that they have to be well-written and interesting.
Quality? Sigh, I knew there'd be a catch.
# posted by Geoff Williams : 5:19 PM
