Broadcasting Brain

Is your blog a “must visit” destination or is it unknown and ignored?

The unnamed island that’s the setting for the TV series Lost looks like a beautiful place to visit – at least if you ignore the fact that the locals aren’t exactly friendly with visitors and that a lot of people seem to die there. Nonetheless, it has beaches, hiking trails, hidden bases, a beautiful little village, limited rain, temperate air, a blood-thirsty smoke monster… you know, all of those things that make a vacation memorable.

The problem is that virtually no one knows that the island exists and getting there isn’t very easy. At all.

No wonder the Others or the Dharma Initiative crew never had to worry about a flock of tourists screaming to come visit. No one else knew about the island and even if they did, they couldn’t find it!

Do you sometimes feel that your blog is an island: remote, cut off from the rest of the world, begging for visitors?

See if your blog suffers from any of the following symptoms:

1.  No one knows about your blog
2.  Even if they know about your blog, they can’t find it
3.  Even if they can find your blog, maybe it takes too much effort to get there and read it
4.  Even if the first three symptoms have been eliminated, maybe people get bored quickly and leave (insert key adjective “remarkable” here) or else it’s a mess

Here are some ideas to help you eliminate these symptoms:

1. No one knows about your blog

Thinking back to the Bridges logic puzzle, you’ll note that it’s easy to find all of the islands because they are contained within a defined grid.

There are no islands hidden outside of the puzzle or off-page somewhere. The islands are all located within certain boundaries, or on a map, which means that they can be located.

If you want to put your blog on the map, you’ll need to promote it so that it gets on the map. Tell friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances, experts, or other potential readers about the blog. You can use E-Mail, Twitter, blog directories, and several other ways to inform the world about your blog. Heck, call someone if you must.

The first step to being found is to get on the map.

2. People have heard of your blog, but they can’t find it

It’s one thing to know that your dream island is on the map – it’s another thing to know exactly where it is. In Bridges, you can identify the position of various islands by their coordinates along the X and Y axes. If you want to fly to an island, then your pilot must know the coordinates to the island.

Similarly, an important part of your blog promotion must include the URL of your blog’s website. And it must be accurate, otherwise your potential visitor will go off course or else fail to get anywhere. Your URL must be accurate in all blog promotion. Maybe you should consider using a very similar domain name to facilitate easy recall.

3. It’s too hard to get to your blog

Even the simplest URLs are sometimes too hard to remember unless they contain popular words like Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, or Google. That’s why it’s important to build up a strong search engine ranking and to get people to link to your blog. We’ve become spoiled by the hyperlink and we dislike typing anything unless we absolutely have to.

Link building kills two birds within one stone: links build “bridges” to your blog (similar to the way to bridges are used to connect islands in Bridges) and they usually cause your search engine rankings to improve.

4. Your blog is a remarkable mess or utterly unremarkable

But even if they discover your blog, visitors may be compelled to leave as soon as they arrive. There’s two main reasons why this could happen:

a. Your blog is a remarkable mess

Would you want to visit a tropical island resort immediately after a natural disaster, when the roads are full of pot holes, power and plumbing aren’t functioning, and the ceiling and walls are missing from your hotel room? Would you want to stay in a place when things are broken, ugly, or otherwise unappealing?

Your blog should have an attractive design, eye-catching graphics, and all links should work. The fonts should be not cause eyestrain. It shouldn’t be difficult to read your blog or navigate around it.

A number of weeks ago I changed my blog layout, changing my template and removing a cool banner that someone had made for me. I felt a bit bad about making these changes, particularly removing the banner, but I had gotten some feedback indicating that it wasn’t a visually appealing combination. So I changed it and I’m pleased with the results. I can’t say for sure that my theme and layout change has translated to the increases in visits and subscribers that I’ve seen since then, but I do get compliments on the new layout. It certainly didn’t hurt.

b. Your blog is utterly unremarkable

Seth Godin helped make the term “remarkable” into a requirement for good blogs. Remarkable things are things that people talk about. They’re exciting, fun, educational, inspiring… they define the phrase “must see”.

You can have the most beautiful island resort in the world, but if there’s nothing to do there, nothing to explore, or nothing to learn… you just aren’t going to get the traffic. If you aren’t getting the traffic, my advice to you to read blogs like:

Problogger.net
Skelliewag
Dosh Dosh
Copyblogger
Awake at the Wheel
IttyBiz
Men With Pens
How To Split an Atom
Seth’s Blog (remember, he’s the guy that talks about being “remarkable”)

There are many, many more out there to choose from.

Read their tips. Examine their styles. Follow their passions. Learn from what they do right.

Read their posts!

Not only will you be entertained, but you’ll learn a lot.

I hope that these suggestions will give you some ideas on how to get people to come visit your (island) blog.

The next post in this series will talk about the reverse problem: how do you get to someone else’s blog or, more accurately, how do you make contact with other bloggers on other islands.

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Other posts that you might enjoy reading:

• I went willingly… to Alltop
• Read and comment day 2008
• A question for you
• Can I Speak To The Proprietor Of the (Island) Blog?
• The Uncanny Evolving Social Media Blog List!