Conference Buddies

10 Ways to Build Your Audience
Speaker: Nicole Simon, Social Media Mentor & Consultant, @nicolesimon
10/17/2009, 12:45 to 1:15pm

Four different types of visitors:

• Subscribers, (people who already love you)
• Search engine traffic, (they don’t know you)
• Life stream (people come for specific reasons, people pointed others to it)
• Social bookmarking (people who find you interesting)

Other traffic:

• People who want to contact you (journalists)
• People who want to offer you something (other bloggers)
• People who want information from you

Big Questions:

• What do each of these segments want from you and your site? They are all different!
• What do you have to do to help them get what they want?
• What makes me happy?
• What helps me to get what I want?
• What can I do to make me happy?

Learn and Transfer:

• Switch mindset
• Start thinking, “what can I get out of it”
• Know what you don’t know
• Build a support group
• Use examples from BlogWorld sessions, look through the classes offered, try to guess what would be discussed
• Get inspired: learn from others and take notes

1. Think Professional Media:

• If you write like you are advertising something, no one would read it
• Use an editorial calendar: have a plan that helps you to prepare content
• Can you do partnerships? Do you have something to offer them?

2. Cover the Basics:

• Is your blog in the search engines?
• Use a sitemap, use Webmaster tools

3. Work Like a Professional

• Use tools of the trade
• Research and use what works for you
• Buy books and information to learn in the shortest amount of time

4. Think Work Flow & Procedures

• Make a list of things you need to work through without thinking
• What can be outsourced?
• How much time does it take?
• Can you optimize?
• Which tools work for me? Not all tools work for everyone

The Conversation Prism

• theconversationprism.org, get the rough idea of what others are doing
• Engage with your audience, be where your audience are

5. Think Stumble Upon:

• If I see something for the first time, why should I give you a thumbs up or tweet about you?
• Use other pages to gather what you like when you stumble them yourself
• If people come to your article on StumbleUpon, what do they see? What would they know about your blog? Exponential potential for growth.

6. Think Twitter:

• Think in titles which are re-tweetable
• 120 is the new 140. Stop at 120 so people can retweet you without having to edit it
• Can I easily see your twitter name?
• What is your content about?
• Will others have a reason to point to your blog?
• Think landing page, see what people link to so you know what people are interested in
• Think research, networking, and what other people click on

7. Think Offline:

• Look at people next to you & around you, how can you connect with them?
• Point to offline material

8. Think Newsletter:

• What can you provide to newsletter authors?
• What content do you deliver in exchange for visibility and feedback?
• How can I contact you?
• What are you best articles?
• Search for your niche

9. Think Facebook:

• Doesn’t work for everyone
• Think of it as another professional tool
• Know how to use the Fan Page and how it can connect to the rest of your blog or site
• Put HTML pages and images into it
• FBML pages

10. Stop Thinking A-Listers:

• Like “Dancing with the Stars”, they are not A-Listers, but the show is successful
• Learn mechanisms, they teach you the steps, but you need to learn the music
• Trust in yourself: learn & evolve

Bonus: Pay It Forward

• Get in the habit retweets, relink, & Bookmarks
• Forward interesting information to others
• Honor others who make your life easier
• Give feedback & state what you like and missed
• If I make others happy, they will make me happy
• Think of one person you can send information from BlogWorld, if you can explain it, then you understand it
• Give freely from your heart and not brag about it