Blogher06 day 1: where the women bloggers want to be read by many

BlogHer

(Attending the session: Building your audience with Elise Bauer (Simply Recipes, Learning Movable Type) - blogged live by Whitney)

Three pillars of building an audience: create great content, engage your community, use technology.

Content

The most successful blogs are useful, entertaining, timely, or a combination of the three. Did I mention useful?

You need to focus your content. Focusing your content creates community and attract people who are interested in the topic.

Post great content even if it means posting less frequently, but do post frequently. Use images and photographs (but make sure that they are good). Write well, with care. Don’t write really long posts, break your posts in paragraphs. Use headlines that are catching AND use keywords (but keywords are more important if you want to be found on a search engine).

Engage your readers: run a poll, post a top-10 lists (people looove top-10 lists), run contests, provide how-to instructions, conduct interviews, and write about controversial topics.

Be excellent and blog about something you really care about, because it’s going to be a lot of work for a long time.

Community

Have a blogroll, and link to other bloggers. Go around and leave comments to other people’s sites. Join or hold an online event like blog carnival (for example Blog Carnival, or Is my blog burning? for food blogs). Contribute to the community.

Technology

How do people find your blog:

  1. somebody else’s website;
  2. Google (or other search engines);
  3. repeat visitors who bookmarked the site;
  4. news feeds (Bloglines, My Yahoo, personalized Google);
  5. del.icio.us, Technorati, or other tagging and social bookmarking tool;
  6. someone emailed your URL (tip: add a “email this URL to a friend” button to your blog);
  7. press (find who is covering your space, send an email, pitch your knowledge about your space, make yourself useful to the reporter)

Page rank - All the search engines use search algorithms to rank sites. These are some of the things you can do to increase your page rank:

  1. get links from other websites;
  2. get links from websites with high page rank;
  3. use text-based content (not flash or images) if you want to get indexed;
  4. use keywords in the text and in the title;
  5. use good HTML structure (for example, header tags are better than bold text).

What detracts from page rank?

  1. links to link-farms, spam sites (even links from spam comments; so check your blog and delete spam comments; pay extra attention, because innocent-looking comments and blogs may hide spam links);
  2. 404 not found errors.

Site design:

To summarize: create good and useful content, focus your content, engage your community, tune your site, promote your feeds, and create a blog you are proud of.

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August 1, 2006 | Filed Under Blogging, How to Blog, Women 

Comments

2 Responses to “Blogher06 day 1: where the women bloggers want to be read by many”

  1. Elise Bauer on August 8th, 2006 11:09 pm

    Hi Antonella,

    Thank you so much for your comprehensive wrap-up! I love how well organized and laid out your site is.

    For clarification on the “be controversial” point, what I had hoped to communicate was to “not shy away from controversy”. I notice a lot of people writing about inflammatory or controversial subjects just to get attention and links. Personally I think that behavior is manipulative and degrades the conversational web for everyone.

    Again, thank you for taking the time to write such a detailed wrap-up.

  2. Antonella on August 9th, 2006 4:01 am

    Elise,
    Thank you for the comment and the important clarification.
    it was a very good session, full of interesting information, and very well organized. Thank you for sharing the information!