10 Ways to Build Your Blog Community with Twitter
Posted by: Ivan Brezak Brkan on: 25/03/2009
In: Help & Tips Comment
Every blogger, no matter how ambicious or dedicated to his or her blog – wants a community around it. Easier said than done of course. To build a community you have to get people engadged around the premise of your content and then make it as easy for them to interact as possible. Both with you and each other.
3 Reasons Why Twitter Rocks for Your Community
It’s less tedious than forums. As any other type of website, forums have a specific organization scheme that users need to learn. Put in there signatures, private messages, subforums – and it’s not really the simples solution. Also, a forum you create has to start from scratch. From zero users to a community. What if you have both article comments and a forum – what will the user choose to do? With too many choice, he may just end up staying quiet.
to read the rest of this post,
visit 10 Ways to Build Your Blog Community with Twitter « ShoutEm.
More common sense ideas and tools to get the word out, this time using syndication (pushing content to those who want it) and using outposts in your media strategy.
Using Outposts in Your Media Strategy | chrisbrogan.com.
Social networks are great places to meet new people, to build new business relationships, and to learn about information from non-traditional sources. But another great way to use social networking sites is as an outpost. What do I mean by this? It turns out that people getting to know you on social networks might also find your content for the first time, and/or something you post to those networks might bring you an opportunity that wouldn’t immediately come to you in other ways.
Check out the entire post and nifty video from Common Craft about RSS in Plain English by clicking on the above link.
Web Analytics Tips & Tricks: Using Google Analytics to Create an Optimization Plan (posted Tuesday, March 24, 2009 on Google Analytics Blog. Click link for full article)
Let’s face it, your website is never really finished. Testing pages is an inexpensive way to manage a constantly shifting audience and market. It’s great for:
So where do you start? First you need a goal. What do you want users on your site to do? Complete a form, buy something, sign up for a newsletter? Without a goal, it’s difficult to optimize, so you should be sure to define one if you haven’t already.
Once you have a goal, you can use Google Analytics to identify those pages that are having the biggest negative impact on the total number of people “converting,” or achieving that goal. These are the pages to test.
(Content > Top Landing Pages)
This report gives you instant insight in how well (or poorly) your landing pages are performing. You want to find pages that have both high “entrances” and a high “bounce rate.” These pages are costing you a lot of visitors.
(Goals > Funnel Visualization)
The funnel visualization in Google Analytics shows you where people leave during your buying process. For example, the below report shows that 40% of the 200 potential buyers left during “Step X” in the checkout process. Average order value is $100. This means the merchant is losing up to $8,000 in revenue every month due to “Step X.”
I’m on a mission to help streamline all the tools and processes around using social applications for personal and business use.
Aggregators are things that take one act and repeat it for you automatically, so you can concentrate on the real value of finding and commenting on things that you feel are useful or important. Create a post and share it so that anyone anywhere can find it, using any platform.
Because it makes the impossible — or at least the impossibly difficult — possible.
The Build-A-Beard campaign is fun and creative, a definite plus, but it’s such an innovative way to bring the world in as partners to help those who really need it. Nice job guys, and a special thanks to Seth Godin for bringing it to my attention, Kiva for helping people to help themselves, and to Atto for making it fun.
My bearded daughter Jessica has donated to the cause …
Build-A-Beard ... Help a budding entrepreneur
From the “This might seem obvious” department …
from TwitPic: Suksy. Thanks Mary S (Sobie) for the image!
If you’ve been on the fence about creating a partner ecosystem and leveraging it to help you sell, this is a fabulous time to make it happen. Small businesses especially are all in the same boat – fear of the future but a real need to keep their name out there. Tight budgets and even tighter bandwidth should NOT be the reason you sit still.
Food for thought: make a list of professional friends, family, and business associates who target the same general audience as you. Consider what you do and where there are points of intersection between your mutual customers. Do you write newsletters, publish blogs, create brochures, offer programs? Think about how you can build up alliances that generate results.
One quick way to do this is to act as a resource by providing business cards in your shop or on your virtual storefront. Ask your new customers/prospects how they heard of you. Create simple programs that reward your best references (discounts on service, invitation to lunch, referral bonus).
You can of course get way more complicated than this … but start with leveraging your friends. Be a visiting expert on their website or contribute to their newsletter. Include a short bio/business description/reference. Cite examples of how these partners make a difference and ask them to do the same for you.
Spin up the conversations that grow your business one new customer at a time.
or not.
Turns out all those years of being a perfectionist are finally behind me. for real. Returning from Podcamp Boston – a fantastic conference featuring some of the most intelligent, compelling people I’d never heard of (more on this … and them … later), it’s been driven home that making the point really is better than making it perfect.
This fits in great with marketing and partner development conditioning … that making the connections is what matters. Giving people a sense of the VALUE of something, and giving them examples (of which there were so many at PCB3) to chew on, and resources to call on, is the best way to move forward.
Also, creating communities who call on each other to share, explain, validate, collaborate, critique, and of course laugh (the thing that makes most relationships work is that shared laughter). I’m starting to finally ‘get’ Twitter because it lets people reach out to strangers and easily become friends.
Anyway, it’s been an interesting couple of months with AIIM, Enterprise 2.0 and finally Podcamp 3 behind me. Time to bring it all home. Stay tuned … I have some fantastic people and information resources that I look forward to sharing. The goal? help others accelerate their own efforts – whether it’s investing in social applications to bring people together, creating & enabling effective (and mutually beneficial) partnerships, or just sharing really useful tips, tools and insights I collect along the way.
I’m fortunate to live in the wonderful community of Ashland, MA.
I’m also fortunate to work with some pretty amazing technologies that help people work, collaborate, and get things accomplished better, faster, and/or more cost-effectively.
So when I heard that Ashland’s school libraries were in jeopardy if the Prop 2 1/2 override didn’t pass, I knew just what to do to support ‘Keep Ashland Strong‘, the grass roots organization dedicated to getting out the YES vote.
I would enlist the help of talented friends and neighbors to produce an interactive video campaign, based on the FLIMP* platform, to help educate … and hopefully motivate … the community to vote for the override.
Here’s the result. Go ahead!! Launch the FLIMP, learn about the override, and let me know what you think!!
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