Get social.

Now that you’ve laid the groundwork for your blog, it’s time to get engaged.  You have great content and you’re tracking your visitors. Now you need to get out to the community and interact. If you’re focusing on the gaming niche, do things like hit up gaming forums and talk about the games you’re playing. Don’t blatantly advertise your blog. Just put it in your signature. People will click on it, I promise.

Be creative when you’re baiting people to come visit your site. Back on gaming: if you’re playing, why not set things up to do live casts of whatever you’re playing. People can interact with you while you’re trying games out and that entices users to visit and subscribe. You can take the archived video and turn them into posts later.

Commitment

12 hours or more.

Constantly be Producing Content

Back to that content thing. You’ll most likely see this every week for the rest of the series and then beyond. This is the groundwork and foundation that your website rests on. Without nice, high quality content people won’t have a reason to visit. Try to vary things up a bit. I have three major topics I focus on with mine: diet, exercise, and motivation. I try to hit at least one a week, and never three of the same one in a row.

Twitter

Search.Twitter.com is a powerful tool to interact. You can use this to find out what people are talking about in your niche(s) and correspond with them. You want to be spending at least an hour a day doing this. If you’re not an expert, use it to find experts and ask questions. You can also aggregate news stories in your niche that you find. This will provide value to your followers as well.

There are some more advanced ways to interact with Twitter that I won’t go into here. There are all sorts of things you can do, like setting up bots to aggregate information for you to using services to respond to high volumes of followers. I just want you to know that they are out there and I might cover them in the future.

Facebook

You should definitely have a fan page for your blog. You can do one of two things: if you have brand awareness already you can just create a page for your blog; if you don’t, you can create a page about the niche for your blog. What does that mean? It means that if you’re in the gaming niche and you blog is: MyGamingSite.com you could either make a fan page called: 1) MyGamingSite.com or 2) Playing Video Games. The latter will attract more likes from people that don’t know who you are.

You can then leverage that population to advertise your site. When you reach a higher level of traffic, you can create a new fan page for the same blog and name it whatever the site is. That fan page will be much more targeted and convert better when you’re soliciting your fans, followers, and users. You should spend at least an hour a day conversing with people on Facebook and creating awareness of your pages.

Problems I Had Last Week

I didn’t really have any problems last week. I did change my mind about some plugins, etc. That was mostly a function of response to the post I did about plugins. That wasn’t anything major. I’m mostly talking about plugins that added widgets that could easily be HTML in a text widget. For example: Feedburner subscription boxes.

How are things going so far?

Please let me know if this was useful to you and how things are going. I’m truly interested in helping you do this and want to help you along the way.

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: Series: 7 Weeks to a Successful Blog: Week 3

Users at an internet cafe in China

The internet is a community like any other town in the world.  It has people, transportation, communication, media, and many other features of actual cities and towns.  The people that spend their time working and playing online have developed relationships with others in a way that people become friends in real life (I hate saying “in real life” too, because despite some arguments The Internet IS “real life”.  It just takes place in a different locale – anyways, I digress).

Transportation

Google is the backbone of Internet transportation, serving as the largest central hub for directing traffic.  There are other modes of transportation such as MSN, Yahoo, or the once defunct, rising once again Ask.com.  Unlike our physical world, we can transport ourselves directly to a new address.

We can also move fluidly from one website to another – each link becoming a road, moving away from where we were last.  I suppose some peoples’ goal would be to get as many roads leading to their house or place of business.  Others may even charge a toll to use their roads (subscription services).

Friends & Communication

The amazing thing about this new world is that the barrier for entry to communicate is extremely low.  Anyone can get their 15 minutes of fame by creating the next most popular viral video.  We can build relationships with people that we have never met in person before.  People even work for businesses from the other side of the world without ever setting foot in their physical offices.

We can build, maintain, and document our relationships with others on our websites, through Facebook, or through a much lesser known standard: XFN.  Sharing information with friends in our community is extremely easy – and almost overwhelming at times.  Many people blog, and those blogs can be aggregated to one place through RSS, putting so much information at our fingertips.

We talk through chat, web conferencing, and internet telephony like Skype.  Any person can stand at their podium on streaming sites like USTREAM or Justin.tv and talk to their viewers, not unlike a person standing at a podium in Central Park.  People can even get together for a quick soccer game in our virtual community.

Media

The new newspaper is Twitter and the new televisions are YouTube and Hulu.  Social media is adding new dimensions to media and news is being reported and shared at alarming speeds.  I find it amazing how quickly an Amber Alert can permeate Twitter even if it’s fake.

It’s interesting to see how traditional media is still having trouble keeping up and people that can adapt are taking advantage of that gap.  Internet performance marketers all over the world are stepping up and representing huge corporations and usurping advertising dollars from the traditional power houses.  This new media is so enticing for business, because compensation is based entirely on performance – much like 100% commission sales people.  No, it’s not like that.  It is that.  Businesses ALWAYS have an unlimited budget for positive returns on ROI.

So what other ways does the Internet seem like a small town to you?  or a big town?

Originally posted on jtGraphic.net: The Internet – A Small Town in Cyberspace