Down the Social Media Rabbit Hole

By Tim Berry

President and Founder, Palo Alto Software

John Jantsch posted My Social Media System, detailing his twice-daily, daily, weekly, and monthly routines in blogging, Twitter, and so on. In email he asked me (and several others) to join in:

I would love it if you would consider writing a similar post on your blog and then let's hook them all together and create an "at this moment" guide. I think this would be a very instructional free guide in PDF form and I would be happy to collect, document and share for everyone's use - this could change over time obviously.

That's an attractive invitation. For me, though, it's not so systematic. In fact, my 18-month journey into the soft white underbelly of social media is more like delightful, alluring, distracting, disorderly chaos. I'm 61. If this post had a sound track, it would be White Rabbit, by Jefferson Airplane. In fact, I just put that onto iTunes, while I write this.

About Blogging
"But I'm all about business planning," I said. "It's not a blogging thing. It's static." OMG how wrong was I with that one! Falling headlong down the hole. That was April of 2007. I'd just decided to step down from managing Palo Alto Software. The new team wanted me blogging.

"Don't worry," Sabrina said. "You'll get it."

"Install Google Reader," Noah added, "and start reading the blogs. You'll see."

And I saw. Since then I've done more than 1,000 posts on Planning Startups Stories, and Up and Running alone, not to mention Planning Demystified, and dozens each on Small Business Trends, Huffington Post, and Business in General.


Blogging Tips and Tools

1. The draft blog. Wherever you've got a blog set up, as long as it's on one of the major blog platforms (I use TypePad, WordPress, and Blogger), it's very easy to set up a draft blog. Use your control panel to keep it private, not indexed, not searched.
   
   
2. Use "Post automatically" tools to catch ideas. On my Windows systems, I have Windows Live Writer set up, and on my Macs, Mars Edit, so on either one when I'm browsing something interesting I can automatically post it into my draft blog. No thinking required. Save for posting later, or thinking, drafting, and if not a post, then delete it. Where others use del.icio.us to keep track of these things, I like my draft blog.
   
   
3. Focus on headlines. People browse headlines in the reader, or they catch them in Google. Lists are great, buzzwords, surprises, challenges are good. Don't trick people with bait and switch headlines.
4. Be real, be yourself, pay attention to style, throw change-ups occasionally, read as much as you can, comment, track back to other blogs, be worth reading.

Managing Twitter
I'm new at Twitter; still getting used to it. I'm following a few hundred people, and a few hundred -- almost exactly the same number, but not all the same people -- follow me. You're welcome to follow me as timberry. And here's what I've figured out so far:

1. I use twitterfeed to automatically tweet my blog posts. It works for me pretty well.
   
   
2. I use TwitterFox for most of my tweets; it's in the lower right corner of Firefox, and the coolest thing it does is automatically create a tiny URL from a larger URL. So I copy the URL and type into the box in TwitterFox, making tweeting quicker, just a single step, instead of doing the tiny URL step first.
   
   
3. I asked the Twitter world: do I follow people I disagree with (politics, religion, etc.)? Is it rude not to follow? I got lots of contradictory answers. My favorite was Evan saying, "If you follow users you aren't interested in then you break the metaphor." Second favorite is JonDiPetro's answer: "It depends on your agenda - if u r here for bus. leave ideology at the door (imo). If u r here to meet like minds, filter out." So I left ideology out of it. I follow people who follow me as long as they're tweeting in English or Spanish, and are not strident one-issue tweeting repeatedly, or simply sales shouting.
   
   
4. I refuse to add information clutter. I try to tweet posts, issues, and thoughts; not ever where I am or what I'm doing. Sure, I fail at it sometimes, but at least I try.
   
   
5. Confession: Twitter is overwhelming. I could watch it all day everyday, and do nothing else. So I simply stop looking after a while. Then I go back a few hours later to see if you or anybody else has started following me; and I get hooked for another hour or more.
   
   
6. On the other hand, counter-confession: I follow some very cool people in Twitter, and they come up with some great ideas and great links. It works very well for blogging.

Which brings me back to the idea of chaos, and getting lost in wonderland. I can't write about this stuff without admitting that I don't understand it all that well. I've only got a dozen or so Facebook friends, exclusively family, and I'm turning down friend requests because I can't deal with them. I do have a few hundred LinkedIn connections (I'm Timberry there too) and I've answered a bunch of questions on my favorite topics (business plans, startups). So with that in mind, my next section is...

Where Social Media Things Baffle Me

1. How do you manage your time with all this? How does anybody find the time to follow all those great blogs? What about time for Twitter? The tweets go by and I click the links, mesmerized, fascinated -- I've been accused of acting like a fish following the latest bright shiny things -- and the hours go by. If I had a real job, instead of just blogging, writing, teaching and speaking, I'd be really lost.
   
   
2. What do you do with people you don't know wanting to "friend" you? I get it in Twitter, the answer is always "yes." But in Facebook and LinkedIn, it feels mean to just ignore such requests, but why does anybody want friends they don't actually know?
   
   See, I guess I'm incorrigibly too old. I've been linking in only to people I know, business people for the most part; and I've been keeping Facebook for family only. Is that crazy? Social media suicide?

READ MORE - Down the Social Media Rabbit Hole

10 Blog Traffic Tips

In every bloggers life comes a special day - the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else''s blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader - you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best friend about your new blog but that''s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called "traction", which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major "pillar" articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good "how-to" lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don''t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that''s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger''s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry - it''s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important - it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it''s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it''s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it''s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have - your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your "Resource Box". You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it''s certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

READ MORE - 10 Blog Traffic Tips