The Blog Peoria Project can save you THOUSANDS of dollars
It has come to my attention that people attend conferences about blogging. The whole thing reminds me of journalism conventions and conferences, which are mostly about getting away from the wife for the purpose of doing things you don’t want you wife to know about.
In addition to the fees necessary to attend the damn things, there are consultants who set up booths selling their services as consultants. For a fee — sometimes THOUSANDS of dollars — these con artists promise to attract readers to their blogs. Or to help them gets “followers” in Twitter or “friends” on Facebook.
I’ve been known to do consulting, basically to help folks set up their blogs. My fee is no where near thousands of dollars and I don’t promise to lure hundreds of thousands of readers to your site. But i do have some advice on how to attract readers who keep coming back. It applies blogs and social networking sites:
1. Your content must be of interest. I cannot do this for you.
2. Learn to write well. How to learn to write well? Write a lot.
3. Post regularly. There are sites like FARK and TMZ that I visit many times a day because they UPDATE ALL THE TIME.
4. Don’t talk to your readers like you are trying to get them to sign up for a vacation time share.
5. Post links to your posts on Facebook and Twitter. Remember, FB and Twitter might be tomorrow’s Technorati. Or worse, USENET.
6. Moderate your comments with a gentle hand. But then it comes time to delete, ban and block, do it ruthlessly.
7. Blog mostly about your site’s chosen subject matter. Occasionally post a funny story about your cat, or how bad traffic is. OCCASIONALLY.
8. Send condolences. Send congratulations. If you are not a sociopath, you should already be doing this.
9. You can make money from blogging. But unless you post pics of pantie-less starlets, you won’t make a lot, But you will keep you dignity.
10. If a commenter disagrees with you, you really ought to entertain the possibility, however slight, that it might be YOU who is wrong. In other words, try to be humble, no matter how smart you think you are.
11. Do NOT plagiarize.
12. Before USENET (aka “newsgroups”) was taken over by spammers, it was a place to give & receive help. Make your site like USENET used to be.
13. But down the Doritos and Mountain Dew Red and go outside and go for a walk once in a while.
14. Talk to a pretty girl once in a while with no ulterior motive other than it will put a smile on your face.
15. Numbers 13 and 14 have NOTHING to do with blogging or social networks, by the way.
Testing.