Elise has tons of traffic – Simply Recipes and the Moveable Type Tutorial site . Three pillars – content, community, technology.
Community brings your site alive.
You need to be useful, entertaining or timely – or all of the above in order to build traffic. Be "useable". Build something that has legs. Value a year from now. Build an asset or a database.
If you can’t write like Dooce then don’t try that. Think about the skills you have.
Stay focused – if you want traffic, stick to your focus.
You don’t have to post daily, just make sure you are compelling or posting quality content. (101 cookbooks is an example)
Use images and photos. Visual medium.
Write well – concise (keep your paragraphs short) , spell check, consider headlines (witty or boring SEO ie search engine optimized)
Polls, top 10s, contests, interviews, controversy.
Post what you’re proud of. Write something you’re passionate about to avoid burn-out.
Link out, link out, link out. The MOST important thing.
Leave comments!
Join online events, carnivals. Connect with a community. (Kalyn’s Kitchen weekend herb blogging, week 43 – go Kalyn! Now it’s so popular she only writes every other week but she STILL gets linked to every week.) Be generous with your community of bloggers. Put time into other people’s blogs, into your community.
Technorati this, email this, delicious this. She emailed the Sacramento Bee about her food blog. She got a cover article in the food section.
Page Rank – algorhythms for search. (GOOD: Links from other sites. Links from sites with a high page rank. Text based content, not flash or images. Use keywords in text, page title, subject lines. HTML and header tags. BAD: Links into spam, 404 errors)
Site Design – make it easy to load, easy to read, easy to find. Page length and size under 100K. Reduce clutter. Colored backgrounds. Eyetracking – focus on upper left corner, search bars, categories, check multiple browsers. Careful with font size (and type and color) Screen Resolution 800×600 is what more people are using.
RSS – Personalized google (Elise likes it, I don’t. If you’re gonna do it, there are better personalized homepages to use. The only thing I like about the google one is that it’s better at picking up various TYPES of RSS feeds. Netvibes is better even than google, I think. ) Feedburner gives great stats. Feedblitz, publish via email. Turn your blog into an email newsletter. Promote your feed with buttons. Tags!
Don’t forget search engine bots are included in your bots. 1000 visitors doesn’t mean 1000 visitors, some of those may be search engine bots.
Number of subscribers, number of click thrus, individual page views – in technorati, she cares about who is linking to her. Server referrals also good.
~~Time for Questions~~
Heather at working moms dot com? or mommies.com? (I didn’t catch the url clearly) feedburner? does it screw up anyone if I switch to feedburner? Yes you need to redirect your original feed. Typepad makes it easy. If you are using something else, then you really need to follow the directions carefully otherwise you get this continuous loop.
Ausha from parenthacks search engine recommendation to find blogs? Elise doesn’t use google blogsearch – oh wait, when you want to search your own blog, put up a search box. Elise likes google search bar.
Amy Gahran (OMG CONTENTIOUSSSSSSSSSSSS – OMG!) Leave comments is important and she has a good strategy on her Right Conversation.com or Write Conversation.com – no blog is an island. (that was Amy’s way of building traffic and she’s a pro at this)
Kayln Denny – she sends people a list of recipes, by hand, every week. Can she use feedblitz to do this? Elise says yes. That costs money at feedblitz, $10 a month. Toby says put those recipes into categories but she’s on Blogger. 101 cookbooks uses a newsletter software thingy. Constant Contact is what it is.
Links to Elise’s presentation, as posted on Blogher: Intro, Content, Community, How do people find your blog
Technorati Tags: blogher, blogs, buildingtraffic, audience
Awwwwww…. thanks so much Denise! Good job covering this session.
– Amy Gahran
FYI FeedBlitz email services are free with premium upgrade options. Elise pays for some extra values, but many users are more than happy with the standard, no charge service. Schedule changes and customization are services we charge for.
Thanks!
Phil
Hey Phil!
I just got home from the big event, after taking the red-eye last night, and haven’t had a chance to link anything or clean up anything. Thanks for posting – Elise is awesome, isn’t she?!
Ah shucks, Denise. Thanks!
Phil is right – FeedBlitz is free, and I use the free service for several of my blogs. For one particular blog when I want to time when the emails go out, however, that’s a premium service.
I don’t use Personalized Google that much myself, but I have thousands of people who get the feeds to my blog from personalized Google. Lot’s of people do like it so it is worthwhile to make it easy for readers to add your feed to their Google page (or MyYahoo page, or MyMSN page, etc.)
Thanks for doing the wrap-up!