The best tips on the internet to Get More Traffic to Your Blog

February 18th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

Well, I think this post has been in the waiting since a long time now. Most of the readers of the blog and some of my friends have pursued me to write this piece!!

Okay, so without any vague stuff, i would probably share the basic points every blogger must keep and take care of to increase the traffic!!

Increase TRAFFIC to your Blog

  1. Concentrate on the topic… write posts that need to be read right now.
  2. Talk like an expert (so you have to have enough knowledge about the subject you are writing about).
  3. If you can break news nothing better!!
  4. Start a topic which has not been started before by many (be amongst the first few) and let people discuss about it in their blogs/posts etc
  5. Share your expertise generously so people recognize it and depend on you
  6. Encourage your readers to help you manipulate the technorati top blog list.
  7. Don’t write about your wife, your boyfriend or your kids.
  8. Write long, definitive posts.
  9. Write neat things about fellow bloggers, daring them to respond (with links back to you) on their blog.
  10. Share linklove and expect some back.
  11. Include polls, meters and other eye candy.
  12. Tag your posts. Use del.ico.us.
  13. Coin a term or two
  14. Do email interviews with the well-known
  15. Answer your email.
  16. Use photos with right tags and names to them
  17. Encourage your readers to digg your posts. (and to use furl and reddit). Do it with every post.
  18. Post your photos on flickr.
  19. Share your blog posts links over Twitter
  20. Encourage your readers to subscribe by RSS.
  21. Include comments so your blog becomes a virtual water cooler that feeds itself.
  22. Assume that every day is the beginning, because you always have new readers.
  23. Highlight your best posts on your Squidoo lens.
  24. Refer to useful but little-known resources.
  25. Write about stuff that appeals to the majority of current blog readers–like gadgets and web 2.0.
  26. Write about Google.
  27. Have relevant ads that are even better than your content.
  28. Don’t include comments, people will cross post their responses.
  29. Write posts that each include dozens of trackbacks to dozens of blog posts so that people will notice you.
  30. Run no ads.
  31. Keep tweaking your template to make it include all the nice stuff that would make it easier for people to share and take you further!!
  32. Write about blogging.
  33. Digest the good ideas of other people, all day, every day.
  34. Invent a whole new kind of art or interaction.
  35. Post on weekdays, because there are more readers.
  36. Write about a whole gamut of different topics so you don’t bore your readers.
  37. Post on weekends, because there are fewer new posts.
  38. Don’t interrupt your writing with a lot of links.
  39. Dress your blog (fonts and design) as well as you would dress yourself for a meeting with a stranger.
  40. Don’t promote yourself and your business or your books or your projects at the expense of the reader’s attention
  41. Be patient
  42. Give credit to those that inspired, it makes your writing more useful
  43. Write about only one thing, in ever-deepening detail, so you become definitive
  44. Write about stuff that attracts a community. You will instantly find a large number of visitors there
  45. Don’t be boring.

Finally write stuff that people want to “Read and Share”

Tell me if you want more such stuff: Leave a comment or mail: paritosh@paritoshsharma.com

Viral Marketing – You’re fool if you think if your VIRAL creation is Marketing you!

February 18th, 2009 § 0 comments § permalink

Well, to start with, I was talking online with one of my friends who is pursuing her HR in Canada this morning. We generally talk about lots of stuff, and today she remarked ‘why be such a pessimist’? And well I realised yes, that’s it!

Being a Social Media Marketing Evangelist –

What do I do she asked, and I started giving her all the fundas and tips and tricks on all what goes on and is going on and what’s the way ahead: which I wrote in my previous post: what would Social Media be in 2009 and then it struck me are we going the right way?

What is Viral Marketing? How do you define the success of your Viral campaign? How do you creae that Oh! So awesome viral message which your followers would take forward?

I know these are common questions anyone can think of, but what I am stuck with is this: Does your Oh! so Viral Campaign really markets you out?

Well, and the next thing I did was to Google on the topic and what I found was this: a classic Seth Godin post, what is viral marketing, Seth raises a very crucial point here:

There are two kinds of Viral marketing:

Viral Marketing
Viral Marketing
  • The original classic sort in which the marketing is the product and which a self-amplifying cycle occurs. Hotmail, for example, or YouTube. The more people use them, the more people see them. The more people see them, the more people use them. The product or service must be something that improves once more people use it.
  • A second kind has evolved over the last few years, and that’s a marketing campaign that spreads but isn’t the product itself. Shepard Fairey’s poster of Barack Obama was everywhere, because people chose to spread it. It was viral (it spread) and it was marketing (because it made an argument–a visual one–for a candidate.

- text taken from Seth Godin’s blog: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/12/what-is-viral-m.html

And I was amazed to think how my thought process connected with Seth’s :)

Well, What I have been rattling my brains over is does your Viral campaign really achieves your marketing purpose?

And Seth does answer this question in a really effective manner: He says Virality is not a feature that you attach to your campaign.

The critical element of viral marketing is this: it’s built in. It was built into Hotmail and built into YouTube. The more people used the camera on their cell phones, the more the idea spread, the more people wanted a camera.

What do I feel?

Well, Viral Marketing is not  a value-added-service. In fact it is in-built. Its inside your offering. So the game changes here.

The Game changes here – for marketers

For all those marketers who have been selling over time and doing all the things possible to reach to the clients, trying to customize the offering according to the needs, and expecting WOMM (word of mouth marketing) to happen, the game has changed.

There have been a number of Un-successful attempts at Viral marketing. To tell you about an interesting one I saw a few days back is the “AdultDost.com” a Viral Marketing message for Tata Sky done by a media company. Well looking at the name doesnot it sound like an adult site? And YES! the message works!

You think it is, and you go there and well, the rest is “I went there, I liked it and I am blogging about it”

Its not about creating that message, It’s about: Creating a message that would be of value to the target market that you are creating the message for!

Go Viral…this new year.