October 23rd, 2009 by Joanna Lee
10 Ways to Build Your Audience – BlogWorld Expo 2009
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