The Cosmopolitan Blog

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything about blog strategy, so here it is. I just found this amazing site: http://www.howtomakemyblog.com/, it has countless blog posts about ways to improve the success of your blog. But instead of being generalities and theory like most other expert blogs, these are a series of concise blog posts about specifics: how to increase comment traffic, useful plugins to increase traffic, best way to use StumbleUpon…

The only catch is that the focus is on Wordpress blogs, since it discusses plugins available for it. But at the same time, ask anyone, i think that Wordpress is fast becoming the only sensible blogging software, whether it’s externally-hosted wordpress.com or your own wordpress.org.

There’s something for everyone. The one tip i found the most useful and went ahead and implemented right away was the no6 on his “10 ways to increase the number of blog comments“:

Does it say “No Comments” underneath your blog article? Does that sound inviting to your ears? It certainly does not, even though it is the text on the standard WordPress installation and most probably on your blog as well. Open your comments.php and edit the “No Comments” to something more inviting and encouraging like “No comments yet, but your thoughts are welcomed”.

Go check the site out. And come back and tell me which you thought was the most useful post, or come and share with us here some useful tip for strategy.

Which site(s) do you consider the most popular web 2.0 / social bookmarking sites out there? Vote now in the poll on the right (scroll down a bit if this is the latest post of this blog). Also, i want to hear from you. Which sites to you like? Which work well? Which don’t? What features do you like? Which are the easiest to use? Which ones do you use for self-promotion, and which ones do you use for a collection of interesting links? Am i missing some crucial sites in my list (see poll)?

Write your comments below after you voted (in the poll, you can pick as many answers as you like).

So i’m back to exploring how to best promote a blog, and realized that i a friend of mine owns a very prominent blog, and here’s the recipe to his success: find yourself a niche, make sure it’s not to restrictive but not too widespread, stick to it, post often and promote it.

This is nothing new. But it’s important, and it’s really the bottom line. Blogs are amazing still, because they are indexed by search engines a million times faster than static websites, simply because their content changes so quickly. Which is why, for example, when in summer i wrote about Al Gore, minutes later, i noticed that my post was featured on Al Gore’s Live Earth website. So, deconstructing the advice above, we have:

1. Find yourself a niche

You need to be a specialist in your topic. No, that doesn’t mean you have to have a degree in it. It just means you have to have something to offer in that topic. People have to have a reason to come to your blog, whether it’s just that you understand a specific topic, that you have great political insight, or that you’re a master at a playing a specific game. So pick a niche, it them becomes “your thing” that you’re known for.

2. Make sure it’s neither too restrictive or too widespread

Well, now that you’ve found your niche, let’s see. Are there only 3 other people interested in your topic? In the entire world? If so, while your blog may be the center of the universe for those 3 people, it won’t be for very many other people, so your blog probably won’t get a world-famous reputation. On the other hand, if your niche is discussing the latest Hollywood scandal or when the last time we spotted Britney Spear’s underwear (or lack thereof), then, well, um, you may not be the only person who talks about this, and so your message will get diluted in the masses. For your blog to gain a reputation, then, will be extremely difficult.

3. Stick to it

If you found a topic / niche, then stick to it. Don’t go talking about other stuff, because that’s not what you’re known for. If you digress too often, readers will stop coming. If you have a million topics (good tip, check the number of categories you have, there should be max 3-4), it will be hard for readers to understand what the value of your blog is, and so promoting it will be tough.

4. Post often

Well, this is the nature of a blog, it’s meant to be alive. If your topic is amazing, people will want to come and read. But if nothing gets updated, then they’ll come once, read what is there, and be done with it. If they see there is a new post every 4-5 days, then they will subscribe to your RSS feed, and keep up to date with what you’re saying.

5. Promote it

Write posts that encourage people to comment, thus generating traffic and discussion, again, a surefire way to promote your blog. Then, of course, use the tools out there to stretch your word. Link to your blog from Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Technorati, and even Facebook and Twitter if you want! Go visit other similar sites, and comment on their posts, remembering to link to your blog. Allow trackbacks to your posts/blog. Keep up to date with the latest places where you can promote, and that way you can be one of the first!

Well, now, all i need to do is eat some of my own dogfood, right? My readers will know that i don’t post often enough, if fact, i go through 3-4 day spurts where i post a lot, then i’m silent for a long time (ahem, *cough* *cough* 2 months *cough* *cough*). But this will change now that i have a super tool to update my blog with my twitter updates. The other thing i know would make my blog more popular is if i stuck to one topic, not tried to tackle politics, food, blogging and personal opinions, and if at least one of those topic was a little more “niche-ish”. Ah well, i never claimed by blog was perfect, i just like to use it to ramble