Lisa Harris Marketing

Mark Cahill has written an interesting post claiming that some of the ‘sacred cows’ of building blog readership are becoming less relevant:

1. The value of trackbacks has been destroyed by spammers
2. Technorati has now been overtaken by Google Blog Search as the key source of linking information.

He suggests that this new world requires a new strategy: a focus on depth of reader engagement rather than counting the volume of passing eyeballs, and the encouragement of links, links and more links.

Here is a summary of Mark’s excellent action list:

Content – create compelling content and more open calls to discussion.

Linking - provide more links to people writing on the same issues.

Value - find ways to provide better value to the reader.

Understand the readership – think more about what the market really desires than simply writing for yourself.

To develop community, use community - spend more time reading and commenting on other blogs in your sphere of influence, using your url in your signature.

Increase post volume – increase the number of interesting tidbits on which you comment.  Not every post needs to be a definitive guide on a subject.

Social networking – don’t forget to direct blog posts into Facebook and Twitter, but without inundating your network with overly specialist material J

More community – get more involved in communities where you will be in front of people whom your blog is written for.  Social networking should lead to more face to face marketing opportunities, not less!

Dive deep into Google – use the free analytics tools to find out what is going on, and then make changes as required.

No doubt this list will look very different again a year from now, but that makes it all so much more fun!