Slacker-Friendly Ways To Increase Your Blog's Exposure
It's not that you aren't willing to invest time promoting your blog - you are. Indeed, you spend so much doing so that you haven't got much left.Have you, therefore, hit a wall in the amount of exposure you can generate for your blog? Not if you can tap into some slacker-friendly ways to broaden your community.
To that end, here are a few examples of services and techniques that work. I invite you to add your own favorites, too.
Slacker-Friendly Services: Communities
Now, I'm not promoting a self-centered view of online communities, where the only goal is to receive and not to give. However, if you truly understand and believe in the value of your blog (do you?), then even limited community participation can pay off. Does your blog sell itself?
Here are two such communities that are sending traffic my way:
SpicyPageA Digg-like voting site for blogs that I joined recently. Setting it up is quick and easy, and possibly all you need to do. While active community participation will undoubtedly increase your exposure, good blogs sell themselves here.
PlugIMA new-ish service I joined recently. This is also a Digg-like community, but the content is more focused on marketing and promotion. Conveniently, you can set it up to auto-submit new posts from your RSS feed. If you regularly post in these themes, PlugIM will increase your exposure, even if you can't spend as much time there as you'd like.
Slacker-Friendly Techniques
Another way to increase your online exposure is to invite your readers to network with you, as well as offering reciprocation when possible. If your favorite bloggers offered easy ways to network with them, would you?
Show Your Readers Where Else to Find You
If you're (for example) a Stumbler, Digger, or have a MyBlogLog community, consider providing the links to your communities on your blog.
These kinds of services become more valuable depending on how many friends/members you have, and many of your loyal readers would be happy to hook up with you there; especially if you're providing interesting content there that isn't on your blog (see my StumbleUpon page, for instance). Providing these links for your readers is pretty light in the time-investment department, but the rewards can be great.
Social Voting Reciprocation
This isn't something I actually do at the moment, but Andy Beard does, and I think it's worth talking about.
Specifically, if you add him to your Technorati Favorites or vote for him at SpicyPage, he'll do the same for you (provided your blog is on the up-and-up and isn't overly naughty). Once again, this is a way you could increase your exposure without the need to invest a lot of time. I'd be interested to know what others think about it.
Increase Your Exposure: Slackify
There's only so much you can personally do to promote your blog. When you hit that wall - and you've probably hit it many times - it becomes essential to start thinking of promotion and networking in new ways. Slacker-like ways.
I'll leave you with two:
- If you build a blog that sells itself, it'll do great in many communities, even if you don't have the time to participate as much you'd like
- If you invite your readers to network with you, and make it easy for them to do so, they will
Great post John! I'm taking slackness to a new level and paying $30 for other people to promote my site:
ReplyDeletehttp://kumikosuzuki.blogspot.com/2007/03/win-30-plus-prizes-by-predicting-my.html
Kumiko
xo
Yo Kumiko,
ReplyDeleteIt'll be interesting to see how that turns out. (:<
-j
Hey John, thanks for the plug for PlugIM. I'm glad you've found the RSS service to be slacker friendly cause that's what I was going for when I wrote it. I just hope people do more than add their RSS feed and run though. There's lots of good info from many different people being posted.
ReplyDeleteIt is hard to relate to your readers if you don't read their blogs once in a while, and most of the time it is easier to do that in an RSS reader.
ReplyDeleteThe Technorati favorites thing I started when I launched the blog as a realistic goal but also as an easy way to share with my readers.
The 2.0 version of my blog will have the Technorati feeds in some way integrated. I used their feed widget for a little while, but wasn't very satisfied with the results.
I haven't fully decided on the best way to display the RSS, but I will get there in the end.
Lots of Digg tutorials suggest that you should study the top 100 diggers and find active diggers. Others suggest developing a Digg culture with the assumption that your readers are already Diggers.
Typically that is only the case if you have had a lot of Digg traffic in the past.
In my case most of my friends on Digg are now my readers. I get to see the type of things they are interested in, and that helps me target some of my content.
Hi Ryan,
ReplyDeleteI hope people go beyond just adding their RSS feed, too. -j
Yo Andy,
ReplyDeleteI think your attitude in offering those things to your readers is great (the do-follow in comments is interesting, too). Have you heard many criticisms of those methods? -j
Thanks John, from one slacker to another. There's definitely a lot to be said for the creative impulses that come from sitting around the house for hours on end with nobody to talk to.
ReplyDeleteIn the e beginning, I had a flurry of readers now it just has all but died down, and thus has left me with little inspiration to write, what do you suggest?
ReplyDeleteThank you and have a nice day.
( my eight year old son says I should always say that)
I love the smaller community sites such as BlogEngage because you can actually interact with the community.
ReplyDeletePlaces like Digg suck for a lot of blogs because of the power users, most people are all meh when it comes to topics that don't focus on the overall theme of the bookmarking site which sucks in the long run.
I'm all for promotion as lazy as I can get :D
Yo DJ -- I was thinking of updating this post for the new age. BlogEngage should be on the list, indeed. Thanks.
ReplyDelete