I discussed writing good content and posting consistently for a decent amount of time in the first Every Dot Connects Blogging Basics post – How to start a blog, and whether you’ll ever make money from it.

The next obvious question is, “How do I get anyone to read my blog?”

It may surprise you to learn that marketing and publicizing a blog’s content (thereby increasing traffic if the content is good) doesn’t happen on the blog.

Sure, outbound links to other sites from your blog posts are seen by those sites as inbound links/backlinks, and their authors may click back through to see what you’re saying and what you’re all about. That’s why it is important to pay attention to who links to you, and respond.

In that sense, you are publicizing your writing directly from your own blog, but that is only part of the battle.

Blog publicity happens via a whole ecosystem of online and face-to-face interaction.

• It happens via Facebook, because a blog post link that you put on your Wall or in your status is seen on the Home pages of everyone in your network.
• It happens via LinkedIn the same way, through your network’s Home pages.
• It happens via your comments on other people’s blogs or in an online forum, because usually your name on a comment is a hyperlink back to your blog (so think before you comment. Ever wonder why more readers don’t comment?)
• It happens via Twitter, both because your blog URL should be listed in your bio, and from the occasional post URL of your own that you tweet. You don’t just auto-post everything onto your Twitter stream, do you?  Good; didn’t think so.
• It happens via StumbleUpon, which is especially nice when someone Stumbles one of your posts. Give back;  Stumble other people’s good content.
• It happens when you bookmark on Delicious.
• It happens when you do any of the above and it shows up in your FriendFeed.
• It happens via Flickr photo – I try to remember to put applicable links in the description of photos that I put online. Here’s one of my Chicago photos with links, as an example.
• It happens via YouTube videos; put links in the description of those, too.
• It happens via email – when people see your blog’s hyperlinked URL in your email signature line.
• It happens when people see your blog’s URL on your business card.
• And finally, it happens when you go “Old School” and meet people in person at conferences and networking events, and you mention your blog if it is appropriate.

Be everywhere, representing your writing.

Be ubiquitous, along with your content.

Marketing happens OFF of the blog.

More from Every Dot Connects

• Blogging Basics: How to start a blog, and whether you’ll ever make money from it
• 6 ways to improve your destination marketing (and why you’re toast if you don’t)
• Social Media Blog Carnival – Your Best Shots

Thinking of starting a blog? Already started one and wondering when you’ll rake in the Big Bucks?

I’m going to lay it out for you….

Here’s some advice I gave to a journalist who wanted to start a parenting blog, but since people ask me the same questions all the time, I thought I’d back up from relative esoterica  –  like how business communicators should respond to negative blog reviews –  and give you my standard answer to two common questions:

1. How do I decide what to write about, and then get started?
2. Can you actually make money blogging?

My basic advice for beginning bloggers is this  –  go to Aussie Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger site, and read everything. That’s not meant to be a cop-out, but seriously, you can’t do any better than Darren for great starter advice. At the bottom of the front page of his site is a box, Best of Problogger, so click the tab For Beginners and just start reading. That’s exactly what I did when I started.

After that, read Liz Strauss’ Successful Blog and Chris Brogan’s blog for how to nurture your blog’s community and grow visibility and readership.

In between reading the three sites above….

• Write good content
• Post reasonably frequently (2-4 times a week)
• Keep at it for at least 4-6 months, which is about how much time a blog usually needs to gain traffic and attention traction.

That’s it, really. But do you see the problem? Anyone toting a keyboard can start a blog – it’s keeping one going month after month, year after year that’s the hard part.

Key for my journalist questioner: there are thousands of parenting blogs out there, and that’s probably underestimating. What’s her special angle?

What’s your special angle? What will make yours particularly unique? What is your blog’s “elevator speech?” Hone in on that and work the bejeebus out of it to bring value to your readers.  I assure you, there’s no simpler answer.

Now, on to the money round….

I know very few people who make much money directly from blogging (myself included.) Most people’s blogs are simply part of their writing portfolio, or a storefront to/demonstration of their expertise. You have to have a really specific, lucrative niche (or a big presence) to have enough traffic to live off of blog-generated ad revenue.

Two examples of success -

1. Heather Armstrong’s dooce (longevity, quality and HUGE traffic) and
2. Darren Rowse’s other site, his Digital Photography School (longevity, quality and camera equipment-related affiliate sales plus ads.)

Right now, I do get paid a combined US$100-$200 a month for my work on the BootsnAll Family Travel Logue and for the Perceptive Travel Blog. They are largely ad-supported.

I used to be paid for my Fast Machines drag racing posts, but the editor can’t afford it anymore, so I’m wrestling with whether I can continue that, although I certainly want to. As a benchmark, I’ve been paid US $20-$50 per post when I’m paid by the post on that site and others.

I’m not paid directly for my Every Dot Connects posts, but Connie Reece, Jennifer Navarrete and I make money doing consulting, corporate training and workshops about social media, so the EDC blog is simply another entry into that work for our prospective customers.

If I didn’t have a military pension and wasn’t married to someone with a steady income (my husband is a high school math teacher) I’d never make it, frankly. I still do print work that pays much better (Texas Highways is one of my favorite clients, and so is National Geographic Traveler) but I haven’t pitched article ideas to them lately because I’m busy with online work. I’d kill to blog for them at per-word print rates, but their business models won’t support that yet.

Bottom line  –  the vast majority of us won’t make much money any time soon from blogging. Where we CAN make money is having the critical skill set of being able to create good online content and understand how the online ecosystem works (including eventually mobile content, which will be huge, in my opinion.)

WHEN will that make you money? As soon as more value shifts from dying print work to burgeoning online/mobile work.

And when will that be? Well, if I knew that, I’d be rich myself by now!

We simply don’t know yet, but sitting around waiting for magic answers is not a good idea.  Content is shifting to the Web and to mobile; just because a good pay structure isn’t there yet doesn’t mean you can ignore it.

You’ll have competition – there are a ton of writers and journalists finally figuring out that they’d better know this stuff.  I thought I was late to the game when I started my family travel blog in Feb 2006, on the advice of this smart journalist. Now, I have a three-year head start, and don’t you think I’m not very grateful for that.

For writers and journalists, in the end, the winners will be the ones who can deliver quality content anywhere, including online.

Congratulations to those of you who are starting a blog, and it’s OK if your purpose is simply to teach yourself how the social Web works, not necessarily to make income.

It’s still a smart move.

Related Posts:

• Blogging Basics: Getting traffic, readers and attention for your blog

More from Every Dot Connects

• 6 ways to improve your destination marketing (and why you’re toast if you don’t)
• Today’s lesson: your private conversations ain’t so private
• Blogging Basics: Getting traffic, readers and attention for your blog

“Birds of a feather….”

Connie and I do realize that when you spend a lot of time around the feathered tribe of tech-savvy folks (thereby miraculously becoming two of Austin’s Social Media Mavens) it can be easy to forget that not everyone’s world revolves around LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and blogging, aka “the tech-o chamber.”

As my teen would say, “Duh.”

We know that lots of people find social media to be one big confusing alphabet soup of applications, jargon and insider jokes.

That’s why we run classes and workshops; to demystify the gobbledygook, and that’s why we love speaking engagements with great organizations like Austin’s venerable Metropolitan Breakfast Club.

From the MBC Web site:

“The Metropolitan Breakfast Club is a 20-year Austin tradition that’s anything but traditional.  Every Wednesday morning our members are informed and entertained by a variety of local and internationally recognized experts in business, politics and education. Our speakers share stories of Austin’s past, our current challenges, and future opportunities in and around Central Texas.”

Since 1984, the Club has been renowned for its extraordinarily eclectic speakers – everyone from the city Police Chief to historians to company CEOs to astronauts to the person who organizes the local rodeo.

Connie and I are thrilled to be included in the distinguished lineup on this coming Wednesday morning, March 11 – you can RSVP here if you happen to be in Austin.

We will do our best to rock the house with a combination of two of our favorite presentations:

• Email is for old people – Connie gets laughs and lots of attention with this one because, just like me, she IS one of those “old people.” More mature and particularly more skeptical audiences tend to listen to someone who does not appear to be 22 or live in her Mom’s basement, especially when she cheerfully blows up preconceived notions about social media for businesses and nonprofits. 




• Follow the bouncing blog post – I use a series of tabbed Web pages to show audiences how the information in a single blog post moves through the Web on other blogs, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, StumbleUpon and even (how retro!) email. Newcomers to social media say that it gives them a clear visual demonstration of the power of Web communications.

We’ll then open the floor for lots of questions and answers.

If you’re in town, we hope to see you bright and early Wednesday morning!

My first piece of advice is that you DON’T want to “quick-launch” on LinkedIn; do it slowly and deliberately and do it right the first time.

What?

You say you’ve just been laid off, or there’s some other career crisis, and you didn’t “dig your [networking] well before you’re thirsty?”

OK, it happens.

In our Every Dot Connects social media workshops, here are some of my top tips for starting a good LinkedIn profile:

• Upload a photo. People like to see a face, and when you connect with folks after conferences and meetings, it also helps jog their memory about who you are and what you do. Get a professional headshot, not some fuzzy picture with your head against a blank wall taken with the family Kodak by your long-suffering spouse.  If you are located in Central Texas, I recommend Korey Howell.
• Personalize your public profile URL.  The default URL for your profile is an alpha-numeric jumble, but you can change it to read “www.linkedin.com (slash) YOURNAME.”  It looks a lot more professional, especially when you add your profile URL to your standard email signature, which essentially attaches your resume to every email you send.
• Spend a lot of time crafting your one- or two-line “elevator speech” that goes under your profile name.  Freelancers are sometimes too quick to demonstrate “versatility” by saying they can do everything.  No one will search for that or want to spend money to hire that – they will look for specific expertise.  I do lots of things, too, but in my own profile, I aimed for a pithy distillation of the most important skills:

“Sheila Scarborough – Travel and motorsports writer, Web 2.0/social media trainer and teacher. Austin, Texas Area. Writing and Editing.”

• Use that billboard just below your photo; the box that asks, “What are you doing?” at the top of your profile. Think of it as free advertising for your business activities. Keep it updated every few days with projects you’re working on, articles you’ve written or professional conferences you’re attending. Every time you update your status, your LinkedIn network will see it on their own Home page.

Filling out the rest of your profile is pretty self-explanatory, but be mindful of the unique challenges of writing for the Web.  Chunk up your text and provide plenty of white space.

Whenever you exchange business cards with anyone, add another step and connect on LinkedIn. You never know when a network might come in handy, and it’s a lot tougher to develop one when the situation is desperate.

In a future post we’ll talk about the benefits of joining Groups, and building credibility by participating in Questions and Answers.

I always enjoy writing for the Marketing Watchdog Journal, published by Austin-based Bulldog Solutions (see my March 2008 piece about how to build a blog that draws a crowd.)

Connie Reece stops into Bulldog as well; check out her article about whether your PR team is social media savvy.

The latest Every Dot Connects offering in the Journal is about networking on LinkedIn….is it a fly-by-night fad – or the best networking tool around?

I wrote about beefing up your LinkedIn profile, then some details about powerful tools on the site that are generally underutilized (Answers and Recommendations, for starters.)

For more details on becoming a LinkedIn power user, click here for the Journal article.

Backing off of PR and marketing during an economic downturn is a natural reaction to bad news, but shutting down too far may not be your wisest business move.

There are still customers out there who will buy quality products and services, but they have to know about them first.  Since money is tight, companies should be thinking about using methods that provide the best value, to ensure they continue to engage with customers and keep their brand visible.

The video below is a hallway interview from PRNewser with two guys who have built semi-empires out of “nothing” but their own drive, talent and Web-based tools and communities — wine enthusiast Gary Vaynerchuk and provocative online video maker and puppeteer Loren Feldman.

Gary Vaynerchuk says that, “In a down economy, the social media play has big ROI numbers.”  He doesn’t quantify other than to say it’s worked well for his wine retail business (and we’re the last ones who want to play drinking games with the social media Kool-Aid) but the fact is that this is where the action is, and if you aren’t at least poking around a little trying to figure it out, you’re late.

Vaynerchuk and Feldman’s methods are certainly not appropriate for every (or even many) companies, but ANY company should take note of how they’ve done what they’ve done online, at very little cost but with a ton of work.

I want to emphasize….social media may be cheap, but it ain’t easy.  Still, as Vaynerchuk says at the end of the video, that “standard” $50,000 ad buy in the dead-tree Esquire may not cut the mustard in this economy.

For our RSS and email subscribers who cannot see the embedded video box, here is the URL to click to see it.

A couple of weeks ago I spent a delightful hour on the phone with Anna Farmery, a business coach, speaker and blogger from the U.K., who interviewed me for her podcast. We got so carried away, she had to split the interview into two parts, each about 25 minutes long.

Anna writes The Engaging Brand, a Top 25 Marketing Blog and #93 on the Ad Age Power 150.

Here are the links to the podcast, hosted on the Blubrry network, along with the show descriptions:

Conversational Marketing: Part 1
Connie talks about how she built a distinctive personal brand and also what is conversational marketing and how we start to think about measuring the effectiveness.

Conversational Marketing: Part 2
Connie talks us through how people are using conversational marketing to engage with consumers and employees, tells us her thoughts on the echo chamber and provides tips on how to write with a conversational style.

I’d love to hear your thoughts — please leave a comment here or on Blubrry or The Engaging Brand blog.

More from Every Dot Connects

• Diva Marketing Talks: Micro Blogging
• NaPodPoMo: 30 days of utterz
• Use Facebook Friend Lists to Create Custom News Feeds

Connie Reece talks about personal branding and her new hair color.

Note: RSS readers may need to click through to the web site to view.

My much-neglected humor blog is Blogabillies. I haven’t posted lately, but browse through the archives and you’ll find some fun stuff from Belle (me) and T-Bone (Terry Taylor).

More from Every Dot Connects

• Blogging Basics: How to start a blog, and whether you’ll ever make money from it
• 6 ways to improve your destination marketing (and why you’re toast if you don’t)
• Today’s lesson: your private conversations ain’t so private