A lesson in marketing your weblog

Blogging can be as much about marketing your site as it is about putting out stories - just like the “real” news media.

We had a good lesson about that truth this week after the launch of Innovation in College Media. My interview with James Patrick Gibson (see here) was listed among the “additional items” on Jim Romenesko’s Poynter Institute weblog (see “It’s a hard world out there for newsprint - college editor (IICM)”). Did the mention in Romenesko bring people to the weblog? You be the judge:

My first submission to Romenesko was on the occasion of my interview with Len Witt about “open-source reinvention of the newspaper.” Witt suggested sending Romenesko a short e-mail.

I’ve successfully sent link suggestions to several other weblog authors, with varying levels of success. It’s an inexact science, but one you need to learn if you’re going to start a weblog - even a weblog under the auspices of your college newspaper. The reason is that links drive people to read your site. If you aren’t linking to other people, or asking them to link to you, then you are a stagnant pool of writing in the blogosphere.

As an example, say you write a weblog on state politics for your campus newspaper. Sure, there are going to be a number of people who come by because there’s a link on the front page of the campus newspaper web site, but the potential audience is much larger. Let’s say there’s a political weblog that covers the same topic you are covering, and that weblog has an audience all over the state. Imagine if you could get them to at least come by your weblog for a look? That’s the beauty of asking for a link.

Here is the formula I used to get linked by Romenesko. I’m not saying it’s fool-proof, but it’s the formula that will probably work with any weblog author as well.

1. Have an interesting story: Both of the interviews I was able to get Romenesko to link to had a unique twist. The Witt interview was the first he conducted after his paper was published at First Monday. The Gibson interview was a natural because this was the first college paper to stop print publication and go entirely online.

2. Target the audience: Make sure your topic is of interest to the readers of the other weblog/site. Romenesko’s readers are sublimely interested in the state of the news media, so they should be interested in the topics I sent. If you’re sending a link to a weblog on technology, make sure your article/blog post has something to do with technology.

3. Include a spicy quote: Again, at Witt’s suggestion, I included a quote from each interview that stood out and forced you to click and find out more.

4. Include a link to your post: This should go without saying, but it bears repeating. It does no good to highlight a particularly interesting article/blog post you’ve written if you don’t include a hyperlink to the exact article/blog post. Don’t just send a link to the main page of your weblog and force them to find your article. There’s a big difference between http://www.collegemediainnovation.org/blog and http://www.collegemediainnovation.org/blog/2006/10/10/
reinventing-interview-james-patrick-gibson-ecsu/. Think of it this way: you probably get several e-mails a day from people asking you to respond to them. Imagine you get more than 100 e-mails a day from people pointing out something they think you should link to on your weblog. Everything that takes more time to investigate will decrease the chances of you getting a link.

Even with these ingredients, there’s no guarantee a big-time blogger or Romanesko will link to you. Sometimes, there is more going on in the world than your weblog, and you get pushed out by the news cycle. Such is the harsh reality of marketing your weblog.

So you’ve gotten a link from Romenesko, or some big-time blogger in your state/locality. Congratulations! Don’t expect the hits to keep coming. As you’ll notice from the graph above, our traffic dropped significantly the day after the mention in Romenesko. That’s the nature of weblogs. A few people may come back - if your topic area is interesting to them. But the long-term gains will be marginal.

So why do it? Because it builds credibility for your weblog. Because it gets people to look at your site who might never have done so otherwise. Because it gives you experience “pitching” a story. Because it’s an incredible rush to see your web site statistics spike when people from all over the world are reading your words.

And share the link love. When you get to a point where you’re getting lots of traffic and people send you items to mention on the weblog, remember where you came from. Blogging is not a zero-sum game. At least, it shouldn’t be.

One final word of caution about “marketing” your weblog - do it sparingly. Don’t send out an e-mail every time you write something. If you do, you will fall victim to the “boy who cried ‘blog’” syndrome (I just made that phrase up) and your e-mail will likely end up in a spam blocker. But if you send e-mails when you have something of value, chances are the people who get those e-mails will recognize that and you’ll become a “trusted source.”

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