Ask a Blogger Part 1: How do I get attention?

Last month I was reading Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World’s Top Bloggers by Micheal A. Banks. One of the thirty bloggers featured in this book is Dave Taylor. On Askdavetaylor.com he answers tech questions of his visitors. He inspired me to start a blog version of this concept. So, do send me your blog questions and I’ll give you my answer. You can reach me by sending a line to ejpfauth@gmail.com or @dutchproblogger on Twitter.

How do I get attention for my blog?

Two weeks ago, Corné Kox asked me on Twitter how he could get some traffic to his blog. Of course there’s a lot to read on this subject. Australian problogger Darren Rowse has written a zillion posts about original, dirty, simple and beautiful ways of driving traffic to your site. So I gladly refer to his posts if you want to know the basics.

My personal advice is short and sweet: do something extraordinary (and nice). In a blogosphere where everybody does the same: “The 10 best …” or “How to…”, the perfect way to gain attention is to do something completely different. Are you still missing something on the web? Fill that gap by creating it yourself! Moreover, you want other bloggers to give you attention yet at the same you don’t want to sound pushy. So you’ll have to do something for them. Help them and be nice. Take these two points in account, and you’ll definitely gain some attention, to say the least.

So here’s an example from my personal experience. The Dutch marketing blog Marketingfacts.nl (featured in Scoble’s book Naked Conversations) started a Top 100 of the best marketing and communication blogs last year. The ranking is based on Google Pagerank, Technorati authority, votes from the Marketingfacts.nl community and a grade by the founders of the Top 100.

The list gave a good overview of what marketing blogs were worth reading in Holland, yet I missed something. It was just a list of names, it didn’t tell anything about the persons behind the bloggers. I wanted to get to know them better and I’m sure they wanted the same. I mean, one of the great things about blogging is meeting people with similar interests. I thought it would be a great idea to email all those bloggers four simple questions about their blog and experiences and put the answers on Spotlight Effect.

So I asked Peter Evers to help me, as interviewing 100 bloggers is quite a challenge. I took us four full working days to complete the series. It was really worth it since it gave an interesting and personal overview of the Dutch marketing blogosphere. Moreover, our colleague bloggers really appreciated our initiative and massively linked to Spotlight Effect. On top of that, Marketingfacts’ editor in chief asked us to create a pdf version as well.

To sum it up: do something useful and extraordinary at the same time. It will probably cost some time, yet it’s really rewarding as well.

Useful links about promoting your blog

• Darren Rowse: How I’d Promote My Blog If I Were Starting Out Again
• Vandelay Design: 99 Ways to Promote Your Blog for Free
• Jason Calacanis: Note to self: stop promoting, start thinking again (or “Scoble’s Law”)
• Seth Godin: May I have your attention please
• Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten: Burning Cat Strategy

Some other posts you might be interested in:

• How killing certain press rules and adopting others makes you a high profile blogger
• Capturing readers’ attention by referring to something greater than you
• Self-obsessed gossip blogger: “blogging is dead to me”