Marketing Your Blog: Grass Roots Edition: Dave Parrack
Welcome our next guest blogger, bringing his Blog Marketing know-how all the way from the UK. The blogger behind Brit Music Scene and Pop Buzz UK, Dave has marketing advice with an international flair.
Blog Marketing – A definite learning curve.
When I started writing Pop Buzz UK, a network blog for 451 all about the British Pop Culture scene, I was so wet behind the ears, I really didn’t know what I was doing. Although I’d been writing a personal blog for a few years, blogging for money was a whole new concept to me.
It’s a learning curve, and everyone makes mistakes in the process of learning. The thing is to pay attention to those mistakes and get better at your craft as you progress on the journey from rookie to pro blogger.
When I started, I thought traffic would come easily, if I just wrote some articles, updated when I could about what interested me, and then I’d be sorted. But after a month of very low traffic and consequently revenue, I realised I’d have to do more. And here is basically what I’ve learnt over the last 9 months and counting.
First of all, I started paying a lot more attention to SEO, and instead of just writing a simple title; I’d play around with it, and start looking at keyword phrases. To go along with that, I made sure the keywords of the story I was blogging about were placed liberally throughout the articles. Traffic started increasing immediately.
Spurred on by this, I started looking at which stories were getting the views, and trying to blog more about those sorts of stories. The readers will veer your blog in a certain direction, and I found celebrity stories to be pulling people in more than any other. You can’t then ignore everything else in your niche, but to not listen to your readers is a grave mistake in my view.
That was Google sorted but I knew I needed more. Next, I signed up for a few of the tracking services, including Technorati, making sure I inserted tags in each post. I’m just about to break in to the top 10k but it’s taken a long time. There were also directories that I felt my blog fitted in to, such as Britblog.com, which I then signed up for. This is an ongoing process, as almost every day I hear on the grapevine of another social networking or directory site. You have to keep at it, or you will lose momentum.
I was getting reasonable traffic by this point, but I needed something big, so I went after the Digg crowd. I struck lucky, with 2 consecutive stories hitting front page, and bagging me 20,000 visitors on each of those days. The problem was the traffic went as soon as it came. It’s still a worthwhile activity though, because even now, I see some traffic coming from Digg and Netscape from the search facility, months after the blog entry was published.
This month has been my best yet for traffic, and I’ve put it down to a combination of 3 things. The first is Harry Potter mania, which I have used for my benefit. I’ve put about 20 blog entries up about the whole saga during July, and it’s bagged me some great traffic. If there is a huge story or event going on which you can spin in to your niche, do it, do it well, and do it hard. Next was my late discovery of StumbleUpon, which I am now using to it’s full potential. Not only is it a great tool to get random readers to trip over your blog, it also works as a kind of social network. And last but not least is Google images, which I am now getting hits from by making sure my picture titles and descriptions are the best they could be.
The one thing I haven’t really done with my blog is go and comment on other blogs in my niche. Which writing this now, I can see is a mistake. That’s the next thing on the agenda, and I’m sure it’ll help get my name and blogs out there even more.
In conclusion, my advice is to learn as you go, from bloggers more knowledgeable than you, sites like this one, and personal experience. What works for some, may not work for others, and it’s finding the right blend of content, SEO, commenting and social networking which works for you. I started a new blog for b5 this month called Brit Music Scene, and using everything I’ve learnt, I’m already getting levels of traffic there that took me 4 months on Pop Buzz UK. That says it all.
Dave Parrack
If you have questions you can email Dave directly for more advice.
Tags: marketing your blog, blog marketing, pop buzz uk, brit music scene
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