Publicizing your blog well is a tricky dance between self-promotion and prostitution. You don’t put enough into it, you’ll never reach all of your potential readers. If you put too much into it, you’ll come off as an attention whore.
Today I’ll be going over a few ways to get the word out about your blog.
Be That Guy/Girl That Everyone Likes to Talk to (Online)
Being sociable online is an art. I’m not the best at it. Those that are can get just about anything done for themselves.
Join every social network you can find. Sign up for something like Friendfeed or ping.fm, something that will allow you to blast out messages about new posts once they go up.
Respond to every single email or message you ever receive. This is a note from Gary Vaynerchuk’s book. It’s working pretty well for him. People are already calling him a Marketing 2.0 messiah. Be diligent and sincere in your responses. You’ll find the biggest perks in the strangest places.
Be That Guy/Girl Everyone Wants to Talk to (Offline)
Real world marketing is valuable, too. It’s probably more valuable actually. It’s something that HackCollege neglected for awhile. “IRL” word of mouth still trumps all other methods of advertising. It’s free, it’s sincere and it keeps people coming back. A random hit on digg will see a huge spike and quick decrease in traffic.
With a blog, you now have a topic of interest to talk about at parties. Blogs aren’t the sexiest things, but as long as you own it you’ll come off in a positive light. None of us on the HackCollege team are exactly fending off suitors, but we see people checking us out from time to time in our yellow hoodies. Put yourself out there and be judged. People that don’t read blogs should be your target audience. They are also the most difficult to reach.
This is an interview I recorded with Justine Ezarik (a.k.a. iJustine) on April 29, 2008, concerning her thoughts on student blogging. The video is her little “about me.” The audio clip is the audio of the interview. Transcript is below…
Earlier this week I interview AJ Vaynerchuk about his blog and blogging as a student. He’s currently a student at BU. His blog covers social media, specifically Twitter and Facebook.
If the social potential for Twitter isn’t appealing to you, then the promotional aspects should be. Granted, if you use Twitter merely to promote yourself, you’ll lose followers fast.
Twitter?
Check out this video from commoncraft to figure out what the eff Twitter is if you don’t know already:
Note: Twitter nomenclature yields that every Twitter user shall be preceded by the @ sign. I’ll be using this notation in this post for brevity’s sake.Read on to your heart’s content »
It’s a common misconception that everything “white-boxed” is unprofessional. (White-boxing on the Web is when it’s apparent you are using another service rather than hosting it yourself.) That certainly was the case in the “Web 1.0″ world; you wouldn’t host a personal and professional digital business card on a GeoCities account.
For some reason or another, the evil overhead of white-box accounts seems to have disappeared.
If you aren’t already convinced, you need to start blogging. Right now. Stop reading this post and visit Wordpress.com and sign yourself up. Then we’ll talk. Let’s kick things off with a Common Craft video:
If you haven’t heard our pitch yet, read on.
Every Student Needs to Blog
Blogging is an ugly word. It sounds like “clog.” People associate it with flamers and politicians and Fox News and LiveJournal. Blogs are seen as a place to whine or an extra source of white noise.
Blogging, though, will change your life. In more ways than one. It has for the staff of HackCollege, at least. HackCollege has been going strong for nearly 2 years now. After all this time, there’s still one thing we’re lacking: regret. We chose to start a blog about lifehacking in college.
We’ve changed a little bit over time. If you have a passion, you need to blog about it. (I hate the word “passion.”) Passions usually align with your major, or maybe they don’t. Whatever you know or want to know more about, you need to blog about it. Blogging changes the way you think; you become much more critical of the world around you. And no matter how bad you are at writing, you’ll learn. I’m still working on the writing thing.
Because of the blog and not the podcast, we’ve been approached by multiple larger organizations. It’s awesome. Starting a blog establishes credibility and gives you something to do.
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