Bloggers Go Mainstream
August 31, 2006
Blogging used to belong solely to people ranting, gossiping, letting us in on their (usually) mundane, unremarkable lives and views on politics and myriad other topics.
Big bloggers were simply the guys and gals who did the same kind of thing, but gained a large following, usually due to better writing and being more insightful, provocative, and calculating with their content.
But now there are bloggers who get paid big time for their opinions, rants, remarkable, and unremarkable observations.
In this month’s Business 2.0 magazine, the cover story “Blogging for Dollars,” really puts a head on the current evolution of the blogosphere. Bloggers were once the outcasts. The news maker-wannabees that mainstream news media loved to make fun of and ignore.
Now no one can ignore the blogs. They are even a core part of news aggregation on major news shows like The Situation Room on CNN.A growing interest also comes from corporations looking for better, more effective advertising outlets.
And they are finding them on blogs. Not your average [tag]blogs[/tag], mind you. But blogs with following and huge readership.
The difference between TV and radio advertising and blog advertising is obvious: A blogger with following and respect with ads on their blog can trump a cold TV ad any day of the week. Both in price and in conversion.
At least that’s what advertisers are banking on. Bloggers with following and high traffic flow have people who are clearly swayed by and interested in what their favorite blogger has to say.
Therefore advertisers can take advantage of the relationship and tie their brand to thousands of subscribers favorite online personality.
Business 2.0, September 2006 highlights several bloggers-gone-mainstream. One of which is Michael Arrington, the brains behind TechCrunch.com, a high-traffic, high-revenue blog reportedly earning over $60,000.00 per month in ad revenue.
Not bad for a [tag]blogger[/tag]. And all you need is a following.
So how do these guys get their dedicated readership?
Here is how Saheli S.R. Datta puts it in “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers” Business 2.0, September 2006:
- Focus intently on a narrow niche
- Set up your blog so that each post gets its own permanent URL
- Think of your blog as a database
- Blog frequently and regularly
- Use striking images in your posts
- Enable comments and interact with readers
- Make friends with other bloggers
Datta goes into detail about each of those habits in the article, but I am going to MAKE you read the article and grab a copy of Business 2.0 because you simply must read the whole thing.
If you are a blogger who aspires to do great things and turn your passion into a full-time big business, there are formulas to follow and technology beyond what you get with a basic free blogging account that can help.
Purists will say things like “sell out” and “mainstream” and “suit” when describing profitable blogs. But going mainstream and making money with a blog is part of the original spirit of blogging: “Screw the establishment, I’m doing it MY way.”
The only difference in this case is that [tag]blogging[/tag] itself is the establishment and people who make money with blogs are simply rebelling against poverty blogging.
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Marketing on Social Bookmarking Sites
June 18, 2006
When Tag and Ping was released, the potential to destroy or at least disrupt a perfectly clean environment (social bookmarking sites) was born.
Now, I promote Tag and Ping as an incredible marketing tool and have been calling the social bookmarking phenomenon “Social Power Linking” for awhile.
The potential for great, new targeted traffic streams is massive. And proven, now that marketers other than me have seen the results of participating in social bookmarking sites first hand.
But with every new marketing tool or system that actually works and is very powerful in the right hands, there is always a caution: respect the tools and the communities they help you reach out to with your information!
The key to success with social bookmarking and tagging is caring and ethics.
Spamming places like jots.com and digg.com will not work. You will get flamed, buried, and loyal readers of such sites will despise you.
Search engines WILL enact a no follow rule by the end of this year as a result of people spamming the many social bookmarking hubs, there is no question about this.
So just spamming to get links on high ranking pages will be a moot point.
The most important point is that interacting with and playing by the rules set by the blogoshpere when it comes to tagging will bring you vast rewards over spamming the directories with links having no clear intention of respecting the community in which those links show up.
Philip Nicholson, a writer for 4webresults.com, writes this about social bookmarking:
“What’s going to make advertising to social networks effective is to engage the audience, and the audience will be engaged by targeted advertising and interactivity.”
That certainly is true for places like Digg.com. Post something well thought out and you will get some action on your site and at Digg.com itself as readers “digg” your story and check out your site for more information.
Conversely, if you mess with that community and post cruddy content or irrelevant content, they will literally bury you from showing up on any pages of significance on their network.
Google only WISHES it had the same power of human edited content!
If you want to learn more about social bookmarking for marketers, check out my Tag and Ping post and grab a free audio podcast with me interviewing Sean Wu, the author of Tag and Ping.
Tags: Blog Marketing, Blogs, bookmarking, promotion, social, social bookmarking, tagandping, tagging55 places to promote your blog!
May 24, 2006
This is an awesome list. I love lists.
If you want to put your blog promotion on ‘roids, check out “55 Social Bookmarking Sites to Promote Your Blog Articles” immediately. What you get is a quick and dirty list of the top social bookmarking and tagging sites to get the word out about your site and content.
This will help all the tag and pingers immensely.
You saw it here first marketing maniacs!
How To Drive Traffic To A Blog With New Media
February 24, 2006
Blogs are different than regular static sites. Although a blog is really just a fancy word for a content management system, therefore it is just a regular site with enhanced and easy editing, a blog has a sense of urgency and “newness.” People read blogs because there is a general feeling that the information posted is more current compared to static sites.
This is true when the blogger is very regular with new material and gives people a reason to tune in frequently.
Promoting a blog, I have found, is far easier than promoting a regular website for many reasons.
Because you can create “news” on your blog at the drop of a hat, you can create buzz. Buzz is infectious, produces links from “buzzed” website owners looking to present their visitors with a buzz, and gets you attention that is harder to acquire for regular sites.
You can promote a blog through RSS and get subscribers who would rather use a “podcatcher” (a newer phrase that simply means they subscribe to your RSS feed rather than your email list with a tool like FireAnt).
People like being anonymous in this over-emailed world of ours. Getting subscribers to a blog via your RSS feed means you are offering a way for the justifiably paranoid to access your material without committing their personal information in the exchange.
So you have another way to promote here as well. Rather than sending people to your opt-in page only, you can grab RSS subscribers on every page of your blog, no matter which page they come through.
Now you can trade links, or trackbacks, with other bloggers in your niche which is a much more highly respected and valuable form of reciprocal linking that Google actually loves.
Having a blog means you can “podcast.” Podcasting is making audio and video files available in your posts that can be picked up in your RSS feed by people using places like iTunes.com to find multi-media content.
This is a MASSIVE new open market of people really getting into iPods, especially the new video iPods, and seeing what their new gadgets can really do.
By creating an informative how-to video and podcasting it from your blog, you can get listed in iTunes and other podcast directories that are practically empty on many niche topics right now!
These are things you can do with a blog that you cannot do very easily or at all with a static site.
Don’t forget that there are other directories only bloggers can promote in. Directories like Syndic8.com and Daypop.org are only open to bloggers with RSS feeds.
While everyone else is working down in the trenches on their one-dimensional static html site, bloggers can enjoy promoting their sites in far less competitive areas with extreme amounts of traffic flowing through them.
In short, a good blog with the right plug-ins will give you marketing power I wish I had when I was starting out. My blog would be 7 years old this year and would have an archive section a mile long with content syndicated all over the web established over those 7 years!
This time next year you are definitely going to wish you had started your blog today! Especially when you consider the vast potential of audio and video podcasting and syndicating your content easily through your feed to places that only accept bloggers. Static sites need not apply!
Tags: 5. Podcasting, Blog Marketing, Blogs, Podcasting, video, Website Promotion
