Day 1 at the South by South West festival and Aussie Darren Rowse (@problogger and problogger.net) took the Day Stage to talk about his book (which is about to be released in 2nd edition) and gave some great tips for successful blogging. A few minutes into his presentation the room was evacuated when a (false) alarm went off but we were back 20minutes later to hear his great tips again. I managed to catch up with him quickly and invited him to give some of his strategies for successful blogging. In summary:
- Be as useful as you can.
- Enhance the lives of others.
- Produce content that others want to share.
- Put yourself out there and promote your content.
- Where are your readers gathering online?
- Interact with your audience as much as you can.
- Ask questions, start debates, engage with people, highlight your readers’ blogs.
- Capture people’s details (not just RSS) then you can email them update, drive traffic and promote product to them later.
- Look at the style you write in and experiment in different voices e.g. humorous, technical, use of video – readers will respond well to some but not others – and helps your style and voice evolve.
Thanks Darren! Suzi PS here are a few of the tweets from his presentation. A few more good tips contained within:
- Simple tips can work really well – writing for beginners is really powerful. What do you know that’s simple but important #sxsw @problogger
- Think a successful blog is an overnight thing? @problogger suggests 2yrs of building foundations
- Write content that solves problems.
- More posts is more doorways to your blog.
- Promotion: You can’t just build it and they will come – you need to promote your content, seed the content to the web.
