This is a panel featuring 4 speakers who each have 5 minutes to sway us to their ways.

Chris Pirillo

The “shameless self-promoter.”

URLs:
C:\Pirillo.exe
Rent My Chest
Lockergnome.net

Yes, he is the Rent My Chest guy.

#1 traffic driver
The easiest thing to do is be involved. If you like what you read, become a part of the conversation. Once you are involved in a circle, you become known to that circle.

Jeremy Wright

URLs:
Ensight

Jeremy is known for selling blogging services on ebay, just to name one thing.

His traffic: 150,000 unique visitors/month

How to build traffic:

#1
Give good ways to stay in contact with readers with services such as comment notification.

Suw Charman

URLs:
Chocolate & Vodka
Strange Attractor

New media and journalist specialty. Blogging as a business context behind the firewall is her interest. How to use it for team building and knowledge sharing.

#1 Interact in genuine and honest manner

Derek Miller

URLs:
Penmachine.com

#1 Be useful. You need to have things that are useful to the people visiting it. How?
- Post what you’re interested in
- Solutions you’ve found to your everday problems
- Post your email exchange if it helps show a process

#2 Know why you are promoting your blog.
- for people to come?
- who should visit?
- business building?
etc.

If it’s for your family, and they all visit, that is 100% success. Be realistic.

Here is the portion from the Question period:

Q. Advantage to being on multiple hosting sites (Blogger, Blogware etc)
A. Stick with one. Linking to yourself in all these varieties won’t help you and makes your life complicated. Own your URL - when you change hosts, you can take your URL with you. No feeds need to be updated this way. If you have >1 blog, you may need various ones depending on which type of blog and services you intend to provide.
However, if you are a part of a LiveJournal community, you may choose to opt into more than one blog tool with a redirect. It depends on which type of community you want to belong to. You need to make the best out of what each tool offers

Q. What is a long tail?
A. There are very few people with a lot of popularity, and many with a little popularity. You can make as many sales in the long tail overall as you can with the instapundit or the Robert Scoble. (I think I got this right)

Q. Why do you have different blogs, does this not dilute your brand?
A. No. People see you in different ways. Some people only want to find certain parts of who I am. For example, if I talk about business and talk about family, people who come to me for business information may be disappointed in my content and thus dilute my brand. [Jeremy] A focused blog can give you an expectation of what you will see when you get there. Suw says that a generalist blog is ok too. If that is who you are, and it just reflects what interests you happen to have at the time is ok too - not everybody wants to self brand, they just want self expression. It depends on what you want your blog to be. “If you are interesting, people are not going to care.” You may open up your readership to other interests that may be unfamiliar to your readers but not necessary disliked.

Q. What is a realistic expectation for growth in traffic?
A. Look for trends not the detail. If it’s increasing, that is good. But don’t get dogged down in the details of the exact numbers, the ups and the downs that are not indicators of trends… or, what we are still in, the obsessive checking of the stats. You may be surprised about what drives your traffic. You may be the first person in Canada to write on X, so people who search for X within Canada find you. Things you find entertaining may be the key to what people find interesting - something you draw, doodle, or take a photo for example.

Q. How do you deal with explosive growth (Slashdotting!)
A. Get Google Ads to cover your costs, as well as perhaps other sponsors. Get in touch with who hosts your server and let them know - they can likely put together a package for you that avoids the problems of a) the bill and b) going over your bandwidth limit. Also try to get your site mirrored - your posts can be replicated elsewhere. Give them a lot of opportunities to find out who you are so the spike in traffic can continue. See the slashdot effect.

Q. How do you look at your web stats?
A. [Chris] Google AdSense is what he looks at because his goal is monetizing his content. All about the money. Suw uses StatsCounter (JavaScript stats package) and the BlogWare stats. StatCounter undercounts the actual traffic. It is suggested to try and look for which interface you like. They are not 100% - they can show trends and referral links, but they depend on the person coming to your site actually enabling JavaScript. You can monitor your RSS feeds with Feed Burner. Remember hits do not equal the number of people coming to your site. For example, one web address (IP) may be one person or 100 and one person may show up under multiple IPs. If there is an article that comes up a lot over time it can show you to keep it updated and easy to get.

Advice: stay with your stats package over time to see your trends.

Best advice: don’t get caught up in the stats.

Q. How do you market your site to the local, not global, community?
A. Using Meetup.com or get yourself on Urban Vancouver where your blog can be pulled as a feed. You need to know your community - what sites are dealing on a local basis with your geographic area. Talk to the local bloggers via email and comments. Don’t forget offline, though. Get in touch with community papers - not the entire world is online. This won’t work unless your site is very focused and you choose the same focused offline media.

Q. How did Chris grow his traffic so much using both online and offline media
A. The newsletter (Lockergnome) had a very strong personal voice. More like a personal 1-to-1 communication not just some rant. When moving to the radio medium, he used his unique voice to get people to listen and then used his personality to keep them listening. People remember these things. The same goes for speaking engagements. Trust is important in getting people to actually click on the links. His efforts were very in synch too - promoting each other. You have to answer their “why”’s - your name, your brand, must be compelling online and offline - your personality must be there at all times.

An audience member also mentioned things such as business cards and t-shirts with a very recognizable logo as ways to promote.

The URL to your blog is your currency - business cards, letterheads, email signature, etc. You get passive traffic from this.

Find all the places you can put your blog into. There are many places where you can sumbit your URL.

Q. Are blogs about stickiness?
A. Do you need to keep your readers (have them stick to you) - well, no. This is a website concept, not a blog one. If you want them to stay, give them resources to leave your site. If you give them lots of ways to link off of your site, they will come back for the same value to get more links from you. Google is popular because all it does is send you somewhere else.

Q. How do you do geographic targeting with your advertisements.
A. BlogAds, Google AdSense, and AdBright all have geo targeting. You can save money by just having your ads shown on sites in your relevant geographic area.

Q. How can you get nonprofit organizations to blog?
A. Show people RSS - don’t tell them about it. Show them examples and show them how easy it is. They get it. Actually doing it is the way you can get people hooked and understanding it. Showing them how to trackback, how to link etc. you will get that understanding of what it can do. Most especially, you can show them how others like them, other nonprofits or like organizations are drawing benefit from doing it. Show them what it does to them on Google - how they can be #1 on the search results. Show them how cool it is to have such updated content so easily.

Another suggestion is to preset up the blog, shove in a few posts, get it sumbitted to Technorati and put in the posts. Give it to them and say its theirs to use as they wish. For you, it’s easy to do. You need to let people find their own uses to the tool by providing first the tool.

I definitely agree that blogging is not something you can explain verbally. We have a very hard time explaining what a blog is, how it works, and how it connects in and out. If I could take the blog with me everywhere (and I know some do), it would be easier.

Q. Is blogging popular in Asia and Europe or is it a North American thing?
A. There are 30 million blogs internationally, whereas here there are only 9 million. The Asian blog community is massive and growing exponentially. The growth of MSN Spaces in Asia was instant. South America, France, etc are all healthly blogging communities.

Q. What are the demographics of bloggers?
A. Different surveys say different things. It depends on where you are looking. There is a bias related to some tools, i.e. LiveJournal. You can probably a bell curve for any demographic if you look in the right place. The demographics keep changing in different ways.
The gender split also depends on where you look, different tools show different percentages. For example, LiveJournal has 67% female users.
If you reach out you can probably always find your demographic.

Q. Politics of blogs. I cannot find my site on Google.
A. Google figures out how is important by looking at other sites. If they cannot find a link to you then you probably won’t show up in Google. Maybe Google is not finding the page.
One of the surest ways to increase your traffic is to keep at it for a long time. If you stick with your topic your Google Rank will climb.
If you have older stuff that might be of interest to someone then put it on your website.

Q. Do you actively trade links?
A. Most bloggers find bloggers by being linked from another blog. Sometimes people who try to trade links want to put it in a huge list of links about that topic, this has no real value. You can improve your traffic by getting someone to link to you but it’s better to do it in a way that is more useful and interesting. Links and trackbacks should be done genuinly, there is no point in doing it for the sake of doing it.
Leave a comment, not a plug. I want to see how you are linking back to me. If there are overlapping interests then you might get a link back to your blog.