I was not worried someone else might take away the Paramendra name - my parents saw Google coming, noone else seems to have that name - but I figured why take a chance? So I was on the case promptly after midnight Friday to get myself a facebook.com/paramendra vanity URL? Why have they been calling it a vanity URL? My name is not vain. It is just so much more user friendly, consumer friendly to have a URL like facebook.com/paramendra.
Put your blog's address down as your email signature.
Collect names and email addresses of everyone you know. These are people who can recognize your name and face. There are no other requirements. Reconnect with all of them. Send out one liner emails. More than one line and they might miss out on your punch line, the signature.
Every time you put out a new blog post, promptly feed it to your Twitter stream.
Sometimes feed the same blog post to your Twitter stream twice, with a few hours' gap.
You must give your visitors the option to subscribe to your blog's RSS feed. You must give them the option to subscribe with their email addresses. You can do both for free with Feedburner. That mailing list is key. They say, in the long run, that is the best kind of readership.
Read other blogs. Leave meaningful comments in their comments sections. Link to blog posts by others from your blog posts. That works great if they have the trackback thing. Zemanta makes it easy to link to blog posts by others. I got quite some traffic from the Google Wave Developer Blog that way. I have a feeling this post will get me a lot of valuable trackback traffic: Mashable Did It.
Engage those who leave comments in your comments sections. I recommend Disqus.
Find your passion. Find your niche. You discover your passion as the topic you blog about the most. Your niche is what Google Analytics tells you it is. If you are lucky, there is an overlap.
Once you find your niche, you have to work very hard to occupy it. There should be at least one word, one phrase - not your name - that when you google up, your blog shows up on the very first page. Work at it. You can do it. In the short run most of your traffic will come from the referring sites. But in the long run, if you are meant to be a professional blogger, most of your traffic will come from the search engines. That is why it is very important you discover and occupy your niche. You can have several sub niches, but you need one or two very well defined niches that you occupy.
Find a group or two to belong to in your niche. Do a search on Google Groups. Find one with a large enough membership. You have to be an active member of a virtual community or two of people who share your passion. That will bring you traffic. Some groups I have signed up for: Google Wave API, Wave Protocol, Android Beginners, Android Developers.Of course every message by you is going to carry your signature.
Say hello to Arianna at the Huffington Post. When she puts out a blog post, read it, and say something mesmerizing in the comments section.
Remember, every page hit counts. Just like every cent counts. Google makes its billions in cents, not dollars. You are going to 100,000 visits a month one visit at a time. Every visit counts. Every click counts.
Writing top quality, regular content is the number one thing to do to boost your traffic.
But that alone will not cut it. You have to go out there and network feverishly in your part of the blogosphere. You have to read blog posts by others, engage them in their comments sections. Ending up on other bloggers' blogrolls boosts your blog's PageRank. High rank means more show up in search results means more traffic.
Mashable did it. They rose with the rise of social media. While TechCrunch wanted to cover everything tech, Mashable honed on its niche. It refused to cover everything tech and instead honed on primarily social media. Mashable has aspired to be the bridge between the average person and social media. And they have done the smart thing of selling their own
ads. When you do that, you can ask for much higher prices.
Congratulations to the team. Pete Cashmore has been ubiquitous on Twitter, more so than Guy Kawasaki. Kawasaki has been more of a lone shark. Pete has zoomed ahead by building a high profile team around him.
People talk of Dell using Twitter as a marketing tool. I think no other brand name has used Twitter to its benefit quite like Mashable. That just might have been their biggest secret weapon, or maybe not so secret.
Mashable rose by demystifying Twitter for the average person. Mashable rose by having a hyper active Twitter stream.
I find this "coverage" ironic because I am deep into Web 2.0, a big believer, and NYT is one of my favorite news destinations online. NYT need not, should not die. It just needs to go completely online. Put all your archives online. Cover news to be published immediately. 100% ad model. Encourage others to link to your articles. Dominate the search engine results. Go multi-media. Get the top, lone, super niche bloggers to contribute on a per post, for pay basis. Even more important, have thriving comments sections. Readers don't want to just read.
Stop calling them readers. That is so yesterday. Call them consumers cum contributors. Become a megasite that is megainteractive. Appoint a CTO. Don't die. Reinvent yourself. News is more important than ever in this new age. But the old medium has become indefensible. Face the reality and live, thrive. Go for the global, real time audience. Visitors, they are visitors. They are not readers. The paper version has to die for the brand to live and thrive. Life for the NYT will be so much simpler if there was no paper involved whatsoever. Do all business online. 100% online, 100% global, 100% real time.
Get a blog for free at Blogger. Some people also use WordPress and quite like it. Think of Disqus and Zemanta as part of the blog creation process. You don't get extra points for those, and both are free. The same applies to Google Analytics. There is no excuse not to have it.
Blog Daily
Unless you can create good, original, regular content, you are not a blogger. Go do something else. Or blog as a hobby. Do not try to pass for a professional blogger. Maybe you have a day job.
Traffic Is Key
All revenue you generate from your blog is in direct proportion to your blog's traffic. It is almost certain you will not start with a huge traffic for your blog unless you are Oprah, and that is okay. It is not where you start, it is where you end up.
Content Creation
There is the stuff you write.
There are photos you post.
There are images - say from Zemanta - and videos - say from YouTube - that you integrate into your blog posts.
There are websites and news articles you link to.
A blogger is a writer, but also an editor. Links are not sly, they are integral to your blog posts. The stuff you write has to be the center of what you do, but stuff you write can't be the only thing you present.
Boosting Traffic
Referring Sites
Direct Traffic
Search Engines
Mark Penn, Hillary 2008 campaign manager, says in his famous Wall Street Journal article that at 100,000 unique visits per month, a blogger hits 75K in income. There is a suggestion that there is a direct correlation between how much traffic you get and how much you make as a blogger.
That comes to about 3,300 uniques per day. You might start out at 50 a day. You have to set goals. How about 200 per day? How about 300? 500? How about 1,000 uniques per day? It is very hard to move from 50 to 300. It is like a rocket taking off. A lot of fuel gets burnt during phase one. You can't give up along the way. Trying to get to 500 uniques per day is also where a lot of the learning takes place. So think of that early stage as the education part, not the income part. The money comes later, when you go up in page hits.
Seek Out Revenue Sources
You can get all the traffic in the world and still not have monetized your blog. In that case, you don't make any money. Monetization is key, it is conscious effort. And this talk should have been part of the first paragraph. Here are a few sources, there are several other good ones.
There is a reason why several of them require that you have been blogging for a while. If your blog has been up less than three months, stick to the dollars and cents from GoogleAdSense, mostly cents.
By the way, just yesterday I made about $13 each from each of these blog post ads, I worked about five minutes on each.
What is your primary passion in life? That should be the primary passion at your blog. If you are lucky, that will also end up being your blog's niche in the market. What is your niche? Google Analytics will help you determine that. What keywords do people use at the search engines to end up at your blog? Which of your blog posts have received the most traffic? Which referring sites have generated the most traffic for you?
50% of your blog posts should be about your passion/niche. 25% can be about anything and everything that you might fancy. That is how you end up with tech bloggers waxing eloquent about politics, in the same breath. 25% can be about you and can read like journal entries. Does it have to be 50-25-25? Not really. 53-26-21 would be fine too. I am just suggesting. 60-20-20 might be better, 70-15-15 might be better still.
Every time you get a blog post idea, write it down. Better still, start a blog post, write down the idea in the subject line like you are about to write a full blog post, and save it as a draft for later.
Do You Have To Blog Daily
Not really. You could put out two great blog posts per week and still do fine. There are some successful bloggers who do that. But guess what they do for many other hours? They visit other great blogs, read their posts, participate in their comments sections, make friends, network in their part of the blogosphere.
But if your goal is to become a full time professional blogger, blogging daily is not the goal, that is the minimum. Eventually you are going to have to blog several times a day. So how often you blog depends on what you want out of the blogging experience.
More On Boosting Traffic
Creating great content, boosting traffic, and seeking out revenue sources are topics you will keep learning about for as long as you keep blogging. Those are the fundamentals. At each new traffic level, your perspective changes slightly.
Starting out you have to try out anything and everything. You have to experiment a lot to find out what is right for you, what works for you.
Blogging is not for everybody, but it is for many people. I happen to think it can be a wonderful secondary career. I think of it this way. Blogging is a fundamental skill for the knowledge worker. So if you think of it as a secondary career, you are more likely to keep polishing your blogging skills, which would be a great thing for your primary career. And if you are the entrepreneur type, you better believe it that every cent counts. Google makes its billions in cents not dollars.
The Google Wave team, or at least those who look after the official Google Wave Developer Blog and The Official Google Blog have been nice to me, they have been nice to my blog. They have given my blog posts on Google Wave special status. I am honored. But more than honored, I am excited. I am so excited I feel like I could be putting out blog posts on Google Wave daily. Right before that Google got me excited with Android, with the donut talk. And now I am thinking, between Google Wave and Android, Google might just have taken over this blog for the rest of this year, because I can't imagine bigger topics in tech for the rest of this year than Google Wave and Android. Bring it on.
Now I just need one of the Googlers on either the Wave or the Android teams to walk over to the Google Ventures people and put in word for me that they need to go ahead and buy 2% of my company for 100K: Google's Newest Venture: Google Ventures.
Reader Response
One reader wrote in one of my comments sections saying I came to your blog thinking you will throw some light on Google Wave's architecture, but I did not find anything. I guess so far I have been more interested in the implications of the Google Wave architecture rather than the architecture itself. But soon enough I will get around to the actual architecture, the technology of it. But for now let me have one more go at the implications. What will it mean to have Google Wave?
Organizations Will Go Topsy Turvy
You will not be able to prevent your workers, your team members from using Google Wave, it is not like you will be able to say, sorry, it's not in the budget, maybe next year. There will be bigger lines - virtually speaking - forming for Google Wave than ever did for the iPhone or the iPod. Just wait until we get nearer to the release date.
The product will be free. The product will be mind-blowing. Organizations that resist will be blown out of the water.
But email did not kill organizations. Wave will not kill organizations, quite the opposite. Wave will breathe new life into organizations. Collaboration will take a whole new meaning, a meaning that collaboration never had before. And that is a good thing.
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