John Cusack © by Gudlyf

John Cusack: A Mild Obsession

I love John Cusack (as an actor/writer). I will see every movie he’s ever in, forever. I don’t care what the reviews are,  I’ve seen enough of his films to know that he is one of my favorite actors and anyone who disagrees with me can suck it. He works for me.

What works for you?

What this has to do with blogging: micro-fanaticism. Everyone has their fascinations that for business or personal reasons, they want to keep reading about, seeing images about or hearing conversations about. You have something that, if someone gets you going talking about it, you won’t shut up, and you’re probably the smartest person in the room on that subject.

If you aren’t the person that people have decided to fixate on, you can be the curator of best of the topic that  certain people are fixated on. If you’re really good, you can turn the things that go with that into a career, or leverage your knowledge on a related topic into a boost for your current career.

What this has to do with Google rankings: as we will discuss shortly, consistency is often a key element to recovering a slipping ranking. Obsessive consistency to be exact. Think about it – is there anything you used to do that you aren’t doing now? Why?

Have you made changes to your site that might be the culprit? Even design changes may be responsible for a change in results. I once had a very lovely client who sold timeshare resales. At the time we met, he didn’t know the difference between a page view and a hit.

After he changed his web design, hits went down. I pointed out that page views were consistent and that hits were down because technically, a hit is any request for an element on the page, including images.

A page view is what it sounds like – a view of a page. So since the new design had fewer images, of course hits were down.

Of course, hits were as irrelevant then as page views are becoming now. But he didn’t know that.

The point is: for all you know you might not have a problem at all. One ranking may be down while another is up, leaving you with more targeted visitors. If your rankings go down and sales go up, do you really have a problem? Consider all the elements.

GIGO: No One Is Obsessed with Crap (Well. No One Sane.)

Oscar the Grouch Graffiti © by bixentro

I learned this one when I was first learning about computers. GIGO stands for Garbage in, Garbage Out.

The relevance to our discussion is that in order to be knowledgeable enough on a topic that people want to listen to you, you must be consuming the cream of the crop of thinking on the topic or at least a related one. Success in the blogosphere and social media is as much about consuming content as it is creating it.

You have to know how to pore through the yawn of empty, senseless, pointless random yammering to find the sweet golden nuggets.

So many elements are attached to the quality of your content.

Whether anyone will link to it, talk to friends, come back again, bounce back to the search engines – and some of these end up impacting search, particularly in the case of Google.

Now, you don’t need a Bieber-sized fan club to make it online, or for your business to get a steady stream of leads from the web. But a few hundred or thousand coming back every month and buying/subscribing won’t hurt your bottom line. That core repeat business group can also be referred to as a group of fans.

Name ten fans of garbage.

(Oscar the Grouch doesn’t count.)

Blogging:  A Bit More Important All of A Sudden (again)

will write for chocolate © by caparica

If you’ve been watching Google’s last few algorithm changes, you may have noticed that it’s not only the frequency of updates that seems to have saved certain blogs from a dismal fate. It’s the perceived quality of updates, partly the fact that they’re attached to known authors.

For now, I won’t say more than that on this topic. Let’s go back to what that means to you and your Google strategy: content production. Not just in quantity but in quality.

The smart bloggers, writers and authors know that they can’t necessarily spin gold out of straw every day. That is: most of the time, there’s no remarkable news, discovery or observation for you to draw on that’s relevant to what you want to talk about, even when the other content on the web in your area is absolutely stunning. And yet, your job, each day, will be to create this constant stream of readable, actionable, consumable content, day in and day out.

One of the many things bloggers who have either recovered (or never lost) their rankings have had in common has been consistency of quality content, on a tightly structured topic. (Yes, if you have a copy of my Evergreen Traffic System or Rescue Your Blog, I’m repeating myself.)

So if you’ve lost your rankings and you’re already blogging, think about those three things:

1. What’s your John Cusack as it relates to business blogging? Are you still talking about him/her/it or have you wandered off topic too much?
2. How much can you reduce the garbage that’s coming in to your brain on the topic and simultaneously expand the amount of quality content you consume?
3. Can going back to basics fix your ranking problem?

Now, keep in mind this isn’t the only possible solution to recovering a good ranking, nor are these the only possible set of problems you have with your rankings. An algorithm is merely an extremely complex formula when you break it down – so there must be a way to reverse engineer, from positive outcomes, how to fix your rankings.

However, remember that there are hundreds of variables going into this equation, and that what fixed another site may not fix yours. At the same time, re-committing to what worked before is not to be discounted as a solution to a re-occuring problem.

When I wake up each morning, my breath is not exactly fresh as a spring breeze. So I brush my teeth. It fixes the problem. If I stopped brushing my teeth, I wouldn’t be surprised that my breath stopped being fresh.

Sometimes the simplest thing is the solution.

And if it’s not? Come on back and talk to me, and we’ll see if we can avoid jumping off that bridge.

Kids of conversation © by Kris Hoet

I’m amused by Google’s fumbling around the social space. Some times when they get it right, they turn around and kill good progress elsewhere.

And sometimes they seem like they’re starting to get it right consistently, as some would say they are with Google Plus.

I believe they’re on the right track but like any other network, I want to study it for a year before I let the leash off my cautious optimism, after whatever initial prognostication and reactions I have.

But because they’re Google, everyone is so busy looking at the latest statistics measuring how fast or slow Google+ is growing – or not. Few are examining the value of the platform itself, apart from the Business Pages.

Google’s  Like a New Blogger In That Way

Google!! © by billibala

This isn’t a post about whether or not Google will survive in the social space, but its toil in the space is relevant to the discussion – don’t they remind you of a fledgling business blogger?

I remember what it was like for me – and I had a small audience back then already, but it was no less frustrating.

I had all the data structured in a way that’s appetizing to search engines but tailored to humans. All I did was write passionate posts that I thought people would find useful to read, and want to link to, and let the blog software bear the burden of optimizing.

Yeah, I paid attention to titles, tags, and did as much linking as I could myself. And I employed every ethical technique I knew of to get people to come to my site and stay.

(And yeah, this one time, I tied a person to a chair. Allegedly. Which is not as ethical. But it’s not like I got caught or anything. Okay that never happened. Checking to see if you were with me or just skimming.)

But what ultimately got me from 10 visitors a day to as high as 10k once in a blue moon was creating content I thought my target audience would love. Because then they responded.

Commentary to Conversation

Wide Audience View © by heresiarchic

What I couldn’t figure out at the time, in those early ten-visitor-a-day times, was how to get people to go beyond simple responses.

Isn’t it funny that Google has that down now? The one thing I see on Google Plus that I don’t see as much on Twitter anymore (space/time limitations) or on Facebook (built more for commentary than discourse) is true conversation.

Someone sparks it, and people go back and forth at length, not just with the author but which each other, then off on tangents and back to the point. Like someone poured chatter fertilizer on Google Groups.

And to some? That’s still failure. Because people aren’t talking enough.

Why isn’t commenting enough? What’s the key difference between commentary and conversation? We’ll talk about that next.

Kids of conversation © by Kris Hoet

I’m amused by Google’s fumbling around the social space. Some times when they get it right, they turn around and kill good progress elsewhere.

And sometimes they seem like they’re starting to get it right consistently, as some would say they are with Google Plus.

I believe they’re on the right track but like any other network, I want to study it for a year before I let the leash off my cautious optimism, after whatever initial prognostication and reactions I have.

But because they’re Google, everyone is so busy looking at the latest statistics measuring how fast or slow Google+ is growing – or not. Few are examining the value of the platform itself, apart from the Business Pages.

Google’s  Like a New Blogger In That Way

Google!! © by billibala

This isn’t a post about whether or not Google will survive in the social space, but its toil in the space is relevant to the discussion – don’t they remind you of a fledgling business blogger?

I remember what it was like for me – and I had a small audience back then already, but it was no less frustrating.

I had all the data structured in a way that’s appetizing to search engines but tailored to humans. All I did was write passionate posts that I thought people would find useful to read, and want to link to, and let the blog software bear the burden of optimizing.

Yeah, I paid attention to titles, tags, and did as much linking as I could myself. And I employed every ethical technique I knew of to get people to come to my site and stay.

(And yeah, this one time, I tied a person to a chair. Allegedly. Which is not as ethical. But it’s not like I got caught or anything. Okay that never happened. Checking to see if you were with me or just skimming.)

But what ultimately got me from 10 visitors a day to as high as 10k once in a blue moon was creating content I thought my target audience would love. Because then they responded.

Commentary to Conversation

Wide Audience View © by heresiarchic

What I couldn’t figure out at the time, in those early ten-visitor-a-day times, was how to get people to go beyond simple responses.

Isn’t it funny that Google has that down now? The one thing I see on Google Plus that I don’t see as much on Twitter anymore (space/time limitations) or on Facebook (built more for commentary than discourse) is true conversation.

Someone sparks it, and people go back and forth at length, not just with the author but which each other, then off on tangents and back to the point. Like someone poured chatter fertilizer on Google Groups.

And to some? That’s still failure. Because people aren’t talking enough.

Why isn’t commenting enough? What’s the key difference between commentary and conversation? We’ll talk about that next.

Download link added at the end for those who are unable to load the player. Seems to work on and off.

It’s rare that I make an entire blog post just to share a single resource.

But I really enjoyed today’s session of Joe Hackman‘s show today, The Ins and Outs of Blogging – the topic was – Building Community.

Today he had Gini Dietrich from Spin Sucks. For me it was like a favorite people convention – Gini is fantastic. I was on another one of Joe’s shows that he did about Amplify, and that was a great experience during which I grew quite fond of him.

Plus, I’ve had a special interest in maintaining and building community lately, as the newly appointed editor of Women Grow Business, I’ve been looking at ways to bring people together, through the blog especially.

Now, I’m no stranger to bringing people together, I once ran one of the top poetry communities in the world, a top 10,000 site at the time, with 3400 active members and a partnership with About.com.

Since then I’ve run some smaller communities here and there, mostly related to the topic of raising awareness of methods that were pretty successful. But thinking you know everything and refusing to learn and grow from peers and thought leaders is how you stagnate and die.

Tell a friend.

It proved to be an enlightening experience because Joe asks great questions and Gini is a fountain of knowledge. She just knows things off the top of her head.

• Community beyond commenting on blogs

• Should you blog for community? Is that your purpose?

• If so, what should you do first?

• Are there tools that help facilitate this

• How to bring people back into Conversation using certain blogging platforms, and what Not to do
• What’s the foundation of building a healthy community?

• Special Twitter posts Gini does that connect people

• Little things that make a difference in community

• Extroverts vs Introverts and online community building

• Guest Posts and Community

• Community, Traffic, and Gini’s analytics addition

• How Blogging Helped Gini’s company increase speaking engagements, increase credibility and establish thought leadership

• Commenting and Fairness

• The GetClicky Analytic tool and how Gini uses it to measure  progress

• Bounce rates

• What Happens on the Next Show

• How to find other blogs that support your vision or are good to comment on

You can listen to it here:

PS- If anyone can create a great graphic for my “Of the Day” awards, I would love you forever. Leave your info at the tone. Beep!

There’s only three types of pages in this site.

It’s not going to win a usability award, ever, as a whole site. But there’s only three types of pages, that only want three types of action.

At any given point, you’ll either see a sales page, a blog post or sign-up page, and most people here will end up doing one of three things when they land here:

• Buy something
• Read or react to a blog post
• Sign up for the newsletter

Most of the time it’s one of the last two items.

How does this relate to you? What’s all this about thinking and sinking?

In offering a bit of assistance to various clients and colleagues with minor campaigns, I’ve noticed in them one tendency I used to have – making things too complicated.

My site may be a sprawling fixer-upper as a whole, but each page has three or less types of options you can choose from. So the conversion rate for new visitors is higher than normal.

By conversion rate, I mean the % of people who take one of my most desired actions. Which actions?

First, I want to deepen the trust between me and you. It’s always harder to work together if we don’t trust each other. That can entail anything from reading another blog post (to determine whether you trust my information) or interacting with me in the comments (that could help you decide if you want to do business with me).

Second, I’d like permission to follow up with you at some point, mostly with tips that are too juicy or involved to share in public, but also to offer you special discounts on my services and products.

Third, I wouldn’t hate it if you bought something on a whim. I’d rather we get to know each other first, but I get how sometimes, you just don’t have time for the courtship and just want to get on with it. Maybe we can get to know each other later. Maybe you’ll just drive by. Either is cool.

What I don’t want, is for you to have to think about how to go about the process.

See, that’s the problem I was talking about in the title. It’s not that I don’t want thinking people at my site — I prefer to work with intelligent people.

What I mean is, you shouldn’t have to figure out how to do the things I’d like you to do.

Because what happens when you open Firefox, Chrome (or IE for the 8 people using it, still love you) and come to a page that you can’t figure out?

You leave.

If you walk into a store to buy groceries and see petals falling from the ceiling, hear harps playing, and see waltzing couples, if you stay it will be out of curiosity, not to buy groceries. Confused prospects leave. So there’s no longer a customer.

And that conversion rate sinks to Zero.

This goes for EVERYTHING if you’re trying to get one particular action, such as a sale or subscription, a click, a vote, a response to a blog post, or a retweet.

Yes, it’s different on a blog, where you want many options, and you want them to take a leisurely stroll around, deciding if they can trust your information or want to do business with you.

But if you want a person to do one thing – don’t make them think. Give them less than three options – only one if you can swing it.

You want someone to click a link?

Link directly to the link they should click.

You want someone to buy something?

Link to the product, directly, with clear instructions on how to buy, and no distractions.

You want someone to sign up for your newsletter?

Send them to a page where there’s no other option but sign up or leave.

Building a relationship first? It’s okay to have more than one option on a page during the courtship – but when you’re ready to close the deal, eliminate distractions that interfere with the buying process.

Try reducing the options on your site for a week. You may find that sales increase so much, you don’t even need more traffic.

But I’ll still be right here if you do.

It’s quite simple really.

It’s the easiest promotional secret ever and it’s staring you right in the face. There’s one tiny thing you could be doing differently that would bring you tenfold the results in sales, subscribers, clients or customers for exactly the same effort or amount of money that you’re expending now.

I call it Magnifying Your Audience.

Before I tell you what process goes with that moniker, let’s look at how many of us, even those of us who are experienced, promote our blogs, articles, videos and documents in social media.

We create content.

We proliferate it among the people we already know – current customers, even peers.

We send copies through our current social media outlets – groups we’re members of in LinkedIn, groups we love on Facebook, our profiles, and on Twitter. If we have staff members, we make sure they duplicate our efforts.

We may prod our friends to help distribute our work or call in favors. We could call out to them using great tools like Livefyre, or organize their efforts using Triberr.

We usually get a response that’s similar to the last response we got — or if we created something incredible, we see a temporary boost. Maybe we’ll do a little advertising.

Then we create the next piece of content, hoping that as our community slowly grows, and as we connect to new people on social media, in person, and via referrals, we’ll have a slow, upward climb to an audience that will one day be huge.

It’s essential to understand that there’s actually nothing wrong with this method on its face.

The problem comes in under two particular circumstances:

1. When you repeat the process the same way each time, or,
2. When you vary it but among a mis-targeted audience.

Why?

In the first scenario, when you simply go through the same steps of promoting each time, you may be talking to the same group each time. That’s great if that’s an active group that’s made up of focused people who are constantly growing, changing and constantly promoting you.

But that’s rarely the case. Usually it goes to the same group of peers as yesterday, who may share your content if they remember or see it in time, but most likely will only do so about 10% of the time. And that’s fine.

Everyone is busy and has their priorities. You can’t expect people to spend all their time talking about you.

But if you’re always talking to the same, unchanging group that isn’t bringing new people to your content, it may be time to shake things up a bit. Don’t forget what you were doing when you first got excited about networking with people on and offline – you met new people, helped them, met their friends, got introduced to new groups of people.

You publicized yourself among groups of people who didn’t know you yet, and were likely to be interested in your products and services.

As you continue to promote to people already in your audience who haven’t bought, shared or subscribed, think of new audiences. Maybe even better audiences.

You get the picture.

The second item is much more in line with my point though. I’ve been guilty of it myself. We humans have a tendency to stick to things that are familiar and safe. And if I publish blog posts and share them with my current peers, many of them will think I’m as brilliant as I think they are and in turn, share them with their audiences.

And I adore them for it. It means so much to me when my peers approve of what I’m doing.

But if my peer group stagnates and I’m not meeting new people, so will the reach of my audience, if I’m only promoting to my peers. It’s great when people are willing to put you in front of their audience. But you also have to using methods that put you directly in touch with the people you want in your audience as well.

You can’t just count on the so-called influencers either – they’re not always the ones who spark viral growth.

The easiest way to get out of such a rut is to ask yourself this question: “What kind of person thinks the work I’m doing is like some kind of magic trick?”

Your parents, yeah, probably, but you want to cast a wider net – you want to think groups of people, who will buy what you’re selling in droves.

Keep asking that until the answer you get is a group that’s in your target audience. Then go find THEM online.

What do you do once you know where they are? Well. I guess that’s the next blog post, right there.

And yes, before you ask, I’m talking about business blogging too.

Not even “too”. Primarily.

The last time I made a blog post about an aspect of social media, I said “I’ll be back with a list of social media tools, time savers and tips from other bloggers”.

But you know what?

I’m bored with tools, lists, and tips lists right now.

I am bored withwhat most people are associating with the term “social media” right now.

And if I’m bored writing it, you may fall asleep reading it. Then you could fall off your chair, hitting your head as you fell, sue your employer/building owner for overly-hard floors, and, well. I don’t want to be responsible for any litigious practices if I can help it, frivolous or otherwise.

I have a feeling I’d find myself on the wrong side of an Alan Shore-eque lawyer, and then too awed by his skills, as well as frightened by his moral but unethical practices, would not fight back.

But let’s come back from the wild fantasies that exist in my imagination, shall we?

Since most people don’t think of blogging as part of social media, which it very much is, I thought, hey, let’s talk about that. I’d gladly link to a list of topics on things that have to do with not boring the life out of people reading your posts. So first we’ll go over my take, and then we’ll link to some unsuspecting bloggers, sending them possible SCORES of visitors. Won’t that be fun?

And you can call this entire happy excursion “research” – and not be lying!

So here we go.

Preventing Eye-Glazement – A Condition Affecting 81.6% of all Blog Readers*

*This statistic is completely made up and is for dramatic purposes only.

The first key to not boring your readers is setting up proper expectations. There’s an agreement here, you see. Unsaid but still agreed-upon.

You have claimed you will write on a certain topic. The reader agrees that if they find you useful/helpful/entertaining, basically anything but boring and worthless, they’ll come on back and read again. Try this exercise. Go to the front page of your blog.

Do 80% of the posts on the front page have a relationship to the topic you agreed to write about? If not, go back on topic and see the difference after a week.

If so, ask yourself this – are people responding? At the minimum, are you getting the laziest possible responses? Are people retweeting? Liking? Sharing on LinkedIn or giving you that +1? Look at your stats, are people spending the amount of time on your site needed to at least scan one of your posts?

If so, you’re likely on the right path, and have met the basic minimum requirements. Now you need to take that baseline and create some community around it. We’ll come back to that another time. Our next step today is to address the vitality of the writer.

Treating Blogkillification – A Viral Malady Akin to the Common Cold

Blogkillification is a serious disease. It is almost as serious as that thing that happens when you think you have a rock in your shoe but then you look, and there’s no rock in your shoe, and then you realize that you have consumed far too many cocktails, way too early in the day, because, hey, you don’t have any shoes on.

Blogkillification is a condition bloggers catch, sometimes from other bloggers, but often resulting from overwork, or taking oneself far, far too seriously. It’s the act of slowly and subconsciously killing your blog by filling it with fluff, and utterly boring content because you can’t think of anything to say.

It’s a bit more serious than writer’s block, because when bloggers have writer’s block, we can also use audio, pictures, other people’s words, infographics, presentations, or even video, to fill the void in our blog day. Heck, we can even ask other bloggers to come by and fill in for us, or even just get away with not saying anything at all for a week or so before our audience completely abandons us.

Writer’s block is no walk in the park, but not working on a novel today doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t eat next week. So, without declaring a winner, blogger’s block is a pretty urgent issue to deal with. Thusly?

Absolutely essential to the life of your blog is the need for you to keep yourself from suffering from Blogkillification at all costs.

How?

• Read other blogs that excite you.
• Comment on other blogs in communities that electrify you
• Read a book, magazine or newspaper, or other offline publication WITHOUT the assistance of technology. That’s right. Hold it in your actual hand and turn the pages.
• Turn on some music and rock out
• Go sit, or even better walk, quietly in nature until inspiration hits
• Call someone who fascinates you and ask them probing questions for 15 minutes
• Call a client you haven’t spoken to in a while and give them 15 minutes of free consulting, for old times’ sake
• Make a pact with another business to donate a certain amount to an agreed charity for every meaningful piece of content you can crank out within a week

You get the idea. Do something that inspires you. Great content often comes from inspiration.

Tap into the thing that made you found your business in the first place.

Get some direct touch with the people who you want to help in the first place.

Give back.

If NONE of that works, even a little, go to the doctor, your problem is probably deeper and may even be rooted in depression. Oh, I’m serious. I’m not a doctor or anything? But I have had my bouts with depression. And not wanting to create, or wondering what the point is, that’s usually early enough to jolt myself out of it with a bit of medical help.

Okay, you’ve suffered through over 900 words of me prattling on about not having a boring blog. Here’s what some other people say.

If you have read or written something about Blogkillification, Eye-Glazement, or similiar maladies, please add them in the comments area.

You could be saving the life of a blog or its community.

More on Blogkillification, Eye-Glazement, Etc.

• I’m not saying rip people off. But, uh, if you do, learn to steal like an artist.
• If you’re going to make boring content sexy, please make sure your content provides contraception.
• There are also many free lists of blog topics you can borrow, all up and down the internet. Wait. Does the web has more like, 6 dimensions, doesn’t it?
• Maybe all you need is a different type of blog post. Works with dating. Try it out.
• You can also check in with other bloggers to see what they find boring.  Good chance there are some bloggers in your audience.
• Here’s one of my fellow SEO folks explaining (without actually saying so) how SEO can get in the way of great writing. Getting found is important. But if people find crap when they get there, will they come back? Not that you make crap. Ah, this is awkward…
• If you beat your boring content blues, please make sure no one is filming it.
• And here are some hard to take tips from a blogger who has clearly been bored to tears by boring blogs before.
• Here’s one from one of my favorite bloggers, Gini Dietrich, on creating compelling content. No jokes. Really want you to read it.
• When the business area of the blogosphere fails to help you with ideas, remember that writers have blogs that have helpful tips as well.
• This bullet is completely useless. Although you have NO IDEA how many blog posts about not creating boring content are actually incredibly unhelpful. Which really makes me hope this one won’t be, because it took kind of a long time.

You know me.

Okay, just in case it’s your first time on this merry-go-round, I’m a capitalist – a compassionate one, but a capitalist none the less. I own a business, and I don’t believe in doing things with my business that are

• pointless
• unprofitable, or,
• inefficient,

Therefore, there’s no way I’d advise you to blog if it didn’t impact your sales in some way. Of course, this doesn’t mean that your blog is supposed to be an endless stream of sales pitches. I’d actually advise you not to pitch in your blog. It reads as desperate.

Besides, there are so many more elegant, productive ways to connect visitors to your sales process.

Sometimes, when I’m not sure if something I’m going to write crosses that line, I think to myself, “if my blog was a how-to manual, would I be comfortable with this blog post as a chapter? Or would it sound out-of-place, like a sales pitch for another book?”

Maybe you’ll think of your blog as a venue for gatherings related to your business. In that case, you wouldn’t get up and make a speech about how great your business is. You’d talk about what your customers need, or what they want to know. And in the program, or on your business card, or after your speech, you’d have plenty of opportunities to talk about what you do and how your company can help.

This afternoon, I had a meeting scheduled about this topic, and for it I quickly put together a few slides illustrating how blog traffic turns into sales. You can view that presentation below, or if you’re reading this via syndication, follow the link to view it in Google Docs.

You know me.

Okay, just in case it’s your first time on this merry-go-round, I’m a capitalist – a compassionate one, but a capitalist none the less. I own a business, and I don’t believe in doing things with my business that are

• pointless
• unprofitable, or,
• inefficient,

Therefore, there’s no way I’d advise you to blog if it didn’t impact your sales in some way. Of course, this doesn’t mean that your blog is supposed to be an endless stream of sales pitches. I’d actually advise you not to pitch in your blog. It reads as desperate.

Besides, there are so many more elegant, productive ways to connect visitors to your sales process.

Sometimes, when I’m not sure if something I’m going to write crosses that line, I think to myself, “if my blog was a how-to manual, would I be comfortable with this blog post as a chapter? Or would it sound out-of-place, like a sales pitch for another book?”

Maybe you’ll think of your blog as a venue for gatherings related to your business. In that case, you wouldn’t get up and make a speech about how great your business is. You’d talk about what your customers need, or what they want to know. And in the program, or on your business card, or after your speech, you’d have plenty of opportunities to talk about what you do and how your company can help.

This afternoon, I had a meeting scheduled about this topic, and for it I quickly put together a few slides illustrating how blog traffic turns into sales. You can view that presentation below, or if you’re reading this via syndication, follow the link to view it in Google Docs.

I’m currently in love with a tool called Triberr.

Triberr Basics

Triberr helps you organize promotion of your blog posts as tweets with a community of other bloggers. You can currently join Triberr by being invited to a Tribe, or by applying to join an existing tribe.

Things That Initially Confused Me About Triberr

When you first sign up with Triberr, you get 3 additional tribes to run, in addition, to the one you have been invited to – so when you first sign in and see four communities instead of one, don’t be alarmed.

Start with the one you were attempting to join and fiddle with the others later. Do come back to those other three groups though – with them you can add other people, and build your own Tribe.

I like to use one to manage my own bookmarks from other sites, and decide which ones will also go to Twitter, or only go to Twitter.

There are two modes for publishing the group’s blog posts to your stream, automatic and manual.

If your Tribe allows manual tweeting, the settings area is at the top to your left, on the same line as “Members.” Automatic means that when a person’s blog post enters the stream of posts to go out, they go out right away. Manual means you have control over whether they go out, and some control over when.

You can set up multiple feeds and Twitter profiles by clicking the upper right link marked “Accounts”.

Bones are the community currency. If you need to do basic things like having more people in your tribe than the standard amount allowed, you’ll have to spend bones, but enough are given to you for free that when you join that if you aren’t in a mega-group, you needn’t worry about it.

If you create a group big enough to need bones, you can buy some.

Yes, Triberr Rocks

In a nutshell, that’s Triberr, tying other people’s blog posts to your Twitter, not just yours. I’ve found it helps boost my traffic, but that since I’m in manual mode, I have to make sure I have a tab open to publish posts. Actually I like that, because it forces me to read my peers work every morning, a step I tend to skip when I get busy. Building community with other people is an essential part of blogging, though.

Another tip regarding timing the tweets – if you’re interested in having posts go out during prime times on Twitter, the only way to change the timing for the moment is not to approve the tweet until you’re ready to publish it.

What About Spam?

Here’s how I look at it. I love the people I’m in Tribes with at Triberr. I love their content, I think they’re brilliant, I read their stuff, I was gonna retweet them anyway.

All Triberr is doing is making sure I don’t miss any. Lots of the most popular blogs on the planet do the same thing, they just organize it themselves.

What I do is set my tweets to manual. This way, I have to approve each one on a case by case basis. More work but then I get to read them first – I’m using it almost like an RSS Reader in that way.

If you work with good people, who are targeted to your audience, and you don’t abuse the system yourself, you won’t send spam out. And you can drop people from your Tribe if you’re an admin, and you can also leave a Tribe and join another if you like.

Not to mention that Triberr has guidelines in place that are likely to prevent spam abuse.

“I Need More Triberr Help”

When you get started, if you need more help, also take a look at the Triberr help section and some of the videos they have up on YouTube. Shout out to Dino Dugan, one of the geniuses I know over there, who you can tweet with questions.

Reply if you’d like to start a community tribe. You’ll have to participate in at least one of our free traffic challenges to join but after the video challenge is over there’s an easier one coming up.

I’ve been building some wonderful new relationships as a result of my affliation with Network Solutions and Women Grow Business. One of them was with a lovely new client of mine who helps other companies grow. Most of her marketing occurs offline, so she sought out my help in penetrating new markets using online resources.

She was especially interested in social media, but she didn’t get how blogs increase revenues. So I told her the analogy in the audio below.

Of course, your blog is not a store. It’s more like the lounge of a store, the area between commerce and window-shopping. But for the sake of the analogy, it works for the syndication idea.

Anyone else have more ideas about how we explain where blogging fits in to pre-selling and pre-marketing to offline-oriented business people? Do share (if you have a blog post about it, I’ll update with a link to it.)