How to Get the Right Attention
Yesterday on the Blog Herald I wrote about how bloggers seem to be focusing on just the attention part of the blogging equation. What are the other parts we need to be aware of?
Attraction is just one step in a process. If you think of your blog as being a system then attention brings people in to the system but the rest of your system is where the actual magic happens.
Any blog requires:
- Attention – You could call it traffic, awareness, publicity, visitors
- Engagement – Where a lot of promotion effors fall down is the visitor arrives and is underwhelmed – you need engaged traffic not merely traffic
- Action – What do you want these visitors to do?
- Loyalty – One problem with a lot of traffic generation schemes is the visitors bounce off, you need them to want to come back
- Recommendation – The peak of success is when your loyal visitors love you so much they bring friends
Attention is just the first step, and attention can not be considered without the other elements of your strategy.
Before you even think about attention or promotion, you need to work out
- What your goals are – Are you blogging for adsense clicks? do you want to sell product?
- Who your target is – Who most matches your most likely prospect, what can you do to delight them?
- Appropriate tactics – Not all tactics are going to bring in the appropriate people that will help achieve your goals.
Have you noticed how some blogs scale massively based on Digg and Social Media attention? FreelanceSwitch, DoshDosh, Digital-Photography-School, ZenHabits, all feature (or featured) heavily on Digg and grew very well. Other blogs do badly or barely make a blip even with multiple front page stories. This is because no matter how well the Digg attracts a torrent of visitors they are either mis-targeted (geeky male students arriving at a Mom blog for example) or are not engaged (misleading headlines, blog downtime, bad usability).
As with most endeavors, you have to pick your battles. Match the tactics to your audience and your goals and you will succeed not just attracting attention but also meeting your targets too.
