[Live Blogging – please excuse typos, grammar, and lack of linking]
Audience Building
Elise Bauer talks traffic: how to build it, how to understand your site statistics, how to optimize your site to build search engine traffic, how to use syndication and subscriptions to build recurring traffic…the works!
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These are the opinions of Elise Bauer, and things that have worked for her, not ‘shoulds.’
3 Major pillars for building traffic
– content
-community
-technology
CONTENT should be…
Useful (most important)
Entertaining
Timely
… or all three.
Usability gives your site legs – makes it an asset
Think about where your skills are, and how they can be used
Tips on content…
Focus on a topic so a community can develop around that shared interest
Post frequently, but not at the expense of quality. Must be compelling, interesting, well written.
Use images & photos – helps break up monotony of text on a page
Write well – concise. Long rambling posts hard to follow. Short paragraphs, short posts, etc.
Headlines – witty and entertaining, or use good google search terms
Be excellent at what you do/know.
Must be passionate about your topic, so that it compels you to do/be well
COMMUNITY
Link out to other bloggers – blog rolls, in posts. Connect with others who share your interests.
Leave comments on other blogs – participate in community. We all love comments!
Plan/join online events. (i.e. blog carnivals)
Contribute to the community
How to find your blog?
1. from someone else’s website
2. search engine
3. bookmarks from repeat visitors (update url changes or you’ll lose these)
4. newsfeeds (bloglines, etc)
5. del.icio.us, technorati, or other tagging tool
6. press
7. someone forwarded your url to someone else (can build that in to each post through wordpress)
PAGE RANK – what contributes
1. links from other sites
2. text based content (not flash or images)
3. links from high page ranked sites
4. use of keywords in title or text
5. good html structure (header tags, etc) – better to put something in a header tag than a bold tag
what detracts?
1. links to link-farms, spam sites, or pages with spam in it anywhere.
2. 404 errors – links that go to pages that don’t exist
SITE DESIGN
Image size (under 15.5k)
Page length and size (under 100k – including images)
Readable font size on many different platforms and browsers
Reduce clutter
Avoid colored backgrounds – black print on white ideal
Eye-tracking study (focus on upper left corner)
Search bars so people can find content – don’t assume people are only interested in the front page.
Categories – make content easy to find
Screen resolution – 800 x 600
Make it easy for dial-up users!
RSS
Google.com – personalized google
Adding tool for people to add your feed
Feed readers
**Feedburner – can publish your feed, offers statistics of what content people are clicking on
**Feedblitz – allow you to publish feed as an email, for less technical savvy people who would rather get an email.
PROMOTE YOUR FEED
Add buttons: google, yahoo, bloglines, etc
Tags: technorati, del.icio.us, flickr
**claim your blog in technorati and start using tags
MEASURING SITE TRAFFIC
Visitors
Page views
Referrals
Search engine bots represent 5-15% of your numbers
What stats to care about?
# subscribers
# visitors
Page views
Who is linking to you?
Thanks for the clear and concise transcript…I wish I could be there, but at least I can get some of the “goods” from livebloggers. Hope you are having a blast, and I appreciate the reporting!
🙂
Jen – great notes. Even though my name is Kelly, I don’t think I qualify for BlogHer (genetically), so this is really useful for me. Thanks.
Kelly – You’re super duper welcome, though there WERE a few men at BlogHer! 🙂
K – I’m so glad it was useful. I wasn’t sure if anyone would be able to follow my raw notes.