Great advice on building blog traffic – Blog Business Summit

Blog Business Summit has been great so far. I am here attending a session by two of my good friends Dave Taylor and Robert Scoble on building traffic for your weblog.

Here are some tips that I collected:

1. Headlines are important – they will determine whether someone will click and read your post.

2. Participate in other’s blogs – You need to participate in the
conversations that others started. Take time to visit other blogs and
if there is anything something worthy of sharing post comments there.

3. Track bloggers – Use a newsreader (such as Newsgator) and track what
some of the cool folks out there are writing about and respond with
comments or posts in a timely fashion.

4. Word of mouth is important – Design does not matter much. Design may
make someone subscribe but most often people subscribe for the content.
So focus on the content.

5. Link to others – It’s a give and take policy.

6. Provide full feeds –
   Most people will unsubscribe from partial feeds (says Robert)
   Dave had mixed opinions on that.
   My take – Provide full feeds as by providing partial feeds
even if you are missing only a few subscribers why risk it – anyway
what will you gain by providing partial feeds (a few cents on ad
revenues)?
   Bob Wyman had a
great point – if you are going to have partial feeds, don’t let the
system decide what the partial feed is going to be – take time to write
good summaries.

7. Participate in conversations offline – Attend meetings and networking events. You can’t miss the analog world of connections.

8. Link to items in your industry and marketplace.

It was a truly cool Dave and Robert show!