Blog Building: What's the Big Idea?

A modified age-old Zen mondo: If Matt writes an excellent blog post in the forest, and no one zooms in using Google Earth to view the forest and read the blog post, has Matt really written an excellent blog post?

Matt has, of course, written many an excellent blog post, blog posts that contain useful information to help small business owners craft better-informed business strategies. And so what we’d like to do is make more business owners and entrepreneurs aware of the information that is out there. That’s what is driving the blog building plan introduced in an earlier post.

What can be done to draw attention to our particular offbeat brand of business resource blogging in a marketplace saturated with options? Let’s assume, if this little experiment is to be at all helpful to our small business audience, that we don’t have the budget, dedicated time, or specialized expertise to do anything revolutionary in terms of marketing. Rather, how much can we accomplish by combing through various suggestions for building a popular blog and leaning on the advice of wiser ones who have gone before us?

In this post, we’d like to outline the major tactics we’ll use in our attempt to increase traffic, and some goals we’ve set for ourselves in determining what success we have. Click the 'More' link to read all about it…

There are really four main steps we’ll take to boost our blog’s readership, and each step will be explained in more detail in its own upcoming post. But to lay out the strategies at the outset, we’ll be exploring the inherent possibilities of:

• Adding this blog to blog directories
• Using social media tools
• Incorporating guest bloggers to help with evangelizing
• Increasing participation and networking with other blogs

Again: none of these tactics will blaze new marketing paths, but taken together with posts that we hope provide genuinely useful information for our target audience, we’re hoping this will be just the recipe to increase visibility, and demonstrate to you the possibility of applying these tactics to your own enterprise. Also, we’re hoping for comments and feedback from readers and others regarding either additional strategies, or the efficacy of the ones we’ve chosen.

Failing all of this, we could follow the lead of another shameless business information company and drive traffic to our blog using links to Britney Spears and popular YouTube videos (oh, Hoover’s --- how could you?). But we’d prefer not to take that route.

So one way or another, we’ll aim to increase the readership of our sleepy little blog, and to motivate us to bring our best game, we’ll remember an inspiring old management adage: that which gets measured, gets done. And we’ll add the extra motivational tool of the threat of ignominious defeat, by publicly pronouncing our goals, right here on our soon-to-be-widely-read blog. We’ve arrived at our own specific goals, but found a useful tool in gauging which blog metrics to track from web analytics expert Avinash Kaushik.

1. Onsite audience growth. We’ve applied the library’s own web analytics software to our blog in order to be able to measure things like unique visitors to the blog. Our goal for onsite audience growth (as well as an unfortunate measure of our starting position) is to get to 1,000 unique visitors within the next three months.
2. Offsite audience growth, via RSS feeds. Use this link to subscribe to our blog feed through your own RSS reader. Please. If you do, you’ll help us reach our goal of seeing 100 new RSS feed subscriptions within the next three months.
3. Increased comments on blog posts. Kaushik calls this a "conversation rate", and measures it by dividing the number of visitor comments by the number of posts on his blog. We’re frankly not ready for that kind of math, so we’re going to leave our goal for comments decidedly more abstract. Our goal in terms of comments could be more neatly summarized as this: more would be nice.
4. Citations, or what Kaushik calls a "ripple index" --- that is, in this interconnected world of blogsy fun, is anyone else talking about or citing the things we’ve posted. We hope they will, on blogs of their own. And we hope they will do so to the extent of averaging 10 blog links per post for all posts over a one-month period. We might even be willing to compromise on the actual number if we could get a link from a prominent blog or two that we read and/or borrow from regularly. (Hey, ResourceShelf, how about it?)
5. ROI. Well, we have no specific return-on-investment goal, but we will try to keep an informal and anecdotal tally of the hours and type of labor associated with our blog building project, so you’ll have some idea of what kind of investment you’re looking at if you take on a mission like this with your own blog.
6. And finally, we include one goal that is not at all quantifiable. For a blog from a library whose mission is to provide folks with access to and assistance in finding the practical business information they need to succeed, we’d like our blog simply to reach more businesses and entrepreneurs, increase awareness of both the Hill Library and the wealth of resources available to help small businesses make smart decisions.

So there’s the outline, complete with goals. If you’ve managed to read this far, feel free to leave the obvious advice in the comments ("Maybe more people would read your blog if the posts weren’t so blessed long…"). And do please keep checking back regularly, for more posts in our blog-building series, or for our usual fare of helpful business research reports, tools, and tactics. Here goes nothing…!