The 120 Day Wonder: How to Evangelize a Blog

I know a fair amount about evangelism and a little bit about blogging, so I've combined the two in order to provide some insights into the evangelism of a blog. Granted, I've only been at blogging for 120 days or so, but marketing is marketing, right?

1. Think “book” not “diary.” First, a bit of philosophy: my suggestion is that you think of your blog as a "product." A good analogy is the difference between a diary and a book. When you write a diary, it contains your spontaneous thoughts and feelings. You have no plans for others to read it. By contrast, if you write a book, from day one you should be thinking about spreading the word about it. If you want to evangelize your blog, then think “book” not “diary” and market the heck out of it.

2. Answer the little man. Now that you're thinking of your blog as a product, ask yourself if it's a good product. A useful test is to imagine that there's a little man sitting on your shoulder reading what you're writing. Every time you write an entry, he says, “So what? Who gives a shiitake?” If you can't answer the little man, then you don't have a good blog/product. Take it from someone who's tried: It's tough to market crap, so make sure you have something worth saying. Or, write a diary and keep it to yourself.

3. Collect email addresses. The first piece of advice that I give authors who want to evangelize their book is to accumulate email addresses. (The second piece of advice is to start blogging before the book comes out.) When I launched The Art of the Start, I sent out email to 95,000 people who had made contact with Garage in the past nine years by attending our conferences, submitting business plans, ... whatever. Also a team of student interns compiled a database of every entrepreneurial organization on the planet for me.

When I started this blog, I sent out 10,000 email announcements. (I didn't use the entire Garage database because I thought that was too tacky even for me.) You may not have the ability to collect email on this scale but collect them nonetheless. For example, when a bozo includes you on a large carbon-copy email, mine the addresses. However, don't buy address lists or spam people (I define "spam" as sending email to someone who has never sent me one) because for email promotion to work, you must know the recipient--or be known by the recipient.

Two more email related recommendations. First, when you answer an email, stick in a “by the way” that mentions your blog. (The only email responses that I send that don't make reference to my blog are the ones that are responses to an email about my blog.) Second, your email signature should contain your blog address.

4. Collect links for blog rolling. This is something I wish I had done on day one, but I was totally ignorant of this linking thing. If I had to do it over again, I would look for all the interesting blogs that cover similar topics to my blog. Then, on day one I would have blog rolled them all and ensured that  Technorati pinged my blog, so that the bloggers  might find out that I existed. I use Blogrolling.com to create my current blog roll.

Now that I understand how linking works, I use NetNewsWire and Endo to look for new links to my blog, and I find sites that I would have never seen were it not for their links to my site. Basically, you want bloggers to find out about you because you linked to them. You never know what they might do for you.

5. Scoop stuff. There's a very interesting honor system in blogging. Suppose Blogger A finds an obscure article and posts it to his blog. Blogger B reads about it on Blogger A's blog and links to it. However Blogger B doesn't link only to the article; she also links to Blogger A to give him credit for finding the article.

This means that if you hustle and scoop stuff, other bloggers will link to you. For example, when I found and publicized the Stanford Social Innovation Review article by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Bob Sutton, many other bloggers linked to my blog, not just the article itself. I was surprised by this. Bottom line: if you want lots of people to link to you, read voraciously and find cool stuff first. As a Japanese philosopher once said, "Eat like a bird, and poop like an elephant."

6. Supplement other bloggers with a followup entries. Read the blogs of the top fifty or so bloggers (using Technorati's ranking is fine) and see if you have in-depth knowledge about their topics. Then instead of leaving the typical, dumb shiitake comment (“I think you're an orifice who shouldn't make money recommending products that you've invested in.”), craft a real essay that complements the blogger's entry.

When someone does this for my entries, I want to get down on my knees and thank God because it's less stuff that I have to write. Look at this example that was a followup for my entry about recruiting. I don't know about other bloggers, but one of the biggest challenges I face is feeding the content beast. If you can help me feed it, I'll gladly link to you and give you publicity.

7. Acknowledge and respond to commenters. Only good things can happen when you read all the comments in your blog and respond to them. It makes commenters return to your blog. This, in turn, makes commenters feel like they are part of your blog's community which makes them tell more people to read your blog.

(I'd like to do this better, but I've created a monster. I don't have any quantitative evidence, but it sure seems like a I get large volume of comments to my entries. There are days that I simply can't keep up, so forgive me.)

8. Ask for help. If you are providing value in your blog, don't hesitate to ask for your readers to help. If you don't ask, you don't get. You don't have to be as blatant as I am in the desire to climb Technorati's ranking, but in a perfect world, you provide something in your blog and your readership will want to reciprocate by helping you spread the word.

9. Be bold. I'm not saying you should intentionally piss other bloggers off, but if you can't speak your mind on your own blog, we might as well all give up and stay on the porch. This is a fascinating thing about blogging: Even when people torch you, they link to your site. I would have thought that you don't link. My logic was: Why give someone you torched any exposure?

10. Make it easy to join up. A blogger named Steve Nipper showed me the list about this. I had no idea what Feedburner and FeedBlitz did until he  told me about them. The bottom line is that you should enable your readers to get to your blog in multiple ways. It's no different than distributing physical products through multiple channels. 

May you use this knowledge to rise in Technorati and make the A List. Just say hello as you pass me by--someday I'll be sucking up to you.  :-)

PS:

Here are some other resources that I found:

1. From reading Christian Blog Evangelism:

• How to Build Traffic to Your Blog by Priya Shah
• Promoting Your Blog

2. From readers:

• http://www.squidoo.com/blogstarter.    The author of this, Rajeesh Setty, also has a very interesting (and free) ebook here about personal branding.

Comments

[James]

Would appreciate tips for those who weren't known prior to the dot-com era. Would love for you to critique what I could be doing better in terms of my blog?

[Christopher]

This is a great article. I am new to your blog and i like what I see. I look forward to your future work.
I’ve taken a quick look at your postings, which are very interesting. Lots of material and ideas! Congrats on being so focused!
The advice given in your blog is fantastic and very complimentary to my site, check it out http://wayrate.org

[song]

good work!!!!

[Teemu Arina]

Guy, is it a product or a process? The sort of stuff I use is nowadays is less like a product (like a book, encyclopedia, news paper) but more like a process (blogs, wikipedia, aggregation). A conversation is not a product, it's a process.

[adult searcher]

OW mister kawasaki, you are going so deep dude with your blog texts, real japanese style not to say at least. I like your blog even if it doesn't have sexy babes or porn pictures on it like most blogs have.

Konishiwa

Hornylion

[Jori Tokyo]

Thank you so much for sharing this great article. Such high-density power of clear
facts - and all in this funny kind of concentration to the substential - is more than fascinating for me.

bye,

Jori Tokyo

[dorothny]

Now that you've been at it longer, is there anything you'd change?

[Pero]

Hello,

You should consider adding a link directly to your RSS feed, not the feedburner etc. Some of us use software like Mozzila Thunderbird to read feeds and I had to look at the source code to add you.

Best wishes,
Peter

[Russ]

Guy,

I have NetNewsWire but, I am missing something here.

How do use NetNewsWire to "to look for new links to my blog"? Details please.

[charvi]

when I find this blog, I very approve of you.

[ms. mariel]

I stumbled upon your blog and this is really good huh, I give you two thumbs up! yey.

[Rex Barney]

I dipped a toe in the blogging pool for the first time this weekend, so your 10 helpful hints were, well, helpful. :). I wanted to echo props for Rajesh Setty as I used much of his advice on setting up a dynamic blog to get my very first blog set up this weekend. I also wanted to mention he has a follow up post on May 03, 2006 mentioning some pitfalls to avoid "killing your blog". I also got some great information from Seth Godin (www.sethgodin.com) who has provided a couple of helpful e-books as resources.

I feel like I came late to the party and think the blog thing is very cool but somewhat overwhelming. Should I take some solace in the fact that a techie like Guy is only 6 months into his?

[Kempton]

Guy,

I just started my blog this Saturday morning and I am so glad to read your post here. Like you said, a good post (like a part of a book instead of a diary) will have good staying power. And the fact I am reading this post more than three months after you wrote it originally proves that. Now, I am going to apply some of your suggestions in my own blog. http://members.shaw.ca/cfilm/

I have lots to learn from expert like you.

Cheers,
Kempton

[peter]

I've been reading your blog for a few months now, and I've finally been inspired to start my own. These tips were very helpful, even if some of the mass-marketing tips didn't work for a more locally focused blog. The registration on the various sites and the tips about reading / responding to comments are valuable.

[Nils the Geek]

Hi Guy! Thanks for the good advice! I'll use them to get traffic for my Geek blog :)

[Kvetch]

Great list. Never thought I'd go evangelical. Never say never. I think what gets me is that in my world of "mom blogs" one person can say, "Hey I had eggs for breakfast" and get 53 comments. I don't get it. But I sure want it. I think.

[虚拟主机]

very good blog

[bp hosting]

Nice

-----------------
Solid offshore bullet proof hosting and server

[Program Manager]

I've been reading your blog for a few months now, and I've finally been inspired to start my own. These tips were very helpful, even if some of the mass-marketing tips didn't work for a more locally focused blog. The registration on the various sites and the tips about reading / responding to comments are valuable.

[prudish_feign]

interesting article you have here. very informative. congratulations. i think you are making a history in the blogging industry. keep it up.

[Andry]

In extreme situation, I found two kinds of bloggers.

First, the stubborn one, are bloggers who realize about “book or diary thing” yet still they keep blogging as diary. They don’t care about their readers. But some of them are really writing quality content. So in that case, they can actually influence their readers. They’re not following the mainstream river.

The first one, think “blog is a diary” too much.

The other ones are bloggers who drifted in mainstream river. They’ll do anything for their readers. They write about what their readers like to read, instead of their own personal interest.

The second one, think “blog is a book” too much.

Though some branding principles may apply into a blog, blog is a blog. It’s not product. From my point of view, a good blog is the one who keep the balance between focusing on readers (being impersonal, that is) and speaking his own mind (being personal).

Amusing and/or entertaining readers is important, but I think the raison d’etre of why blogging is so popular nowadays because there is “a human face” inside of them.

Yes, I’m expecting to learn one or two things about entrepreneurship here. But I think if you let us know what your favorite restaurant is or photos of your cats aren’t a sin. Just make sure that you don’t write about your breakfast three times in a week ;)

You get the idea.

[jenn.suz.hoy]

Interesting article. Like so many who commented before me, I'm new to the blogging principle, and am hungrily reading anything and everything I can that suggests tips on how to get people interested in what I have to say. I'm also crashing around in the more "subjective" areas of blogging - the graphic artist's blog.

To get back to your article, I completely see your point about thinking book over journal when it comes to bloggin. That is, the mindset to know up-front that people will be reading what you have put down and you should only write what you want read. That's true, but it's more of a gray area between book and journal. I see it as more of a fine line.

This open, community atmosphere is what makes blogging so appealing. It is taking the formalities out of journalism, and bringing it closer to the same line as an editorial.

It's almost like a "best-of" glimpse into someone's thoughts about a particular topic. I say "best-of" because I always feel as if I'm getting a tiny peek into what this person's journal could be like.

Like I said, it's a fine line to dance on, and one that I, and many others, hope to master with time.

[Michelle]

Thankyou for such an informative well written article! I'm sure your advice is going to help me improve my Art blog and build my business!

Thanks again!

Michelle

[not a fan]

For a 'guy' who has only been blogging for 120 days you certainly (think) you know a lot.

[mtv200流行音乐网站]

Really quite good.Study toward you