How to Quadruple Your Blog Traffic in a Single Day

Bradley wanted to know.

Did it work?

Yup, Bradley, it worked. By writing a List Post, I quadrupled my blog traffic in a single day.

Okay, maybe it's not that simple. Maybe it's really because...

1. I included the Dalai Lama in that post.

2. These famous people were included: Melissa, ProBlogger, Shel Israel, Seth Godin, Brian Clark, Glynn Young, Maureen Doallas, Dan King, Katdish, Billy Coffey, and Marcus Goodyear.

3. I included a major Current Event: Super Saver Triumphs at Kentucky Derby.

4. Dan King, Master of All Things Twitter and Facebook, tweeted and Facebooked the post.

5. Not only did Dan King tweet the post, but these really cool people of obvious good taste did too: @dukeslee, @nathalie101, @salamicat, @doallas, @billycoffey, @SandraHeskaKing, @gyoung9751, and @katdish.

6. The headline was a bit unusual: 31 Days to Build a Better Blog: The Dalai Lama Effect.

7. The post is part of a group project. (Note, there are lots of great group writing project opportunities at HighCallingBlogs all the time. From poetry and photography celebrations to book clubs and holiday special projects.)

8. It was just meant to be. :)


All that said, Bradley, do you think Julia Cameron would be offended if I write everything in lists now? Because I'm thinking it is my ticket to Blog Big Time.


UPDATE (THANKS FOR REMINDING ME, BRADLEY)

I meant to say the same thing Bradley just said in the comments. One day of big traffic does not a difference make! Ah, but if we can convert those random visitors into followers, well. ;-) Anyway, Bradley, you must stop by Green Inventions on Friday, when I will reveal the subtle secret of how to accomplish this extremely important undercover task.


Goblets Multiplied Photo, by L.L. Barkat.

Thankful for... More Blog Traffic?

The other day someone asked me how to significantly increase blog traffic. I sent a long email in response, then decided I really needed to do a whole post.

Thus, Increase Your Blog Traffic: Top 5 Book Rec's.

At first blush, it could seem rather selfish to focus on a goal like increasing one's blog traffic. As if such a goal would be all-about-you.

I like to think about that differently. And so do the writers of Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust. In this book, Brogan and Smith ask (and answer) something remarkably refreshing, something I've been waiting to hear because I know it to be true...

"...aren't the people who spend a lot of time on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks being ANTI-social? In a word, the answer is no." They continue, "we're not sure the community is disappearing. Instead, we think it is slowly, quietly making its way online." And their relationship is one proof. Two authors, one from Boston and the other from Montreal, wrote the book together.

Today I'm not at a Thanksgiving gathering, because our local one is going to be on Saturday. So here I am, able to be social in a different arena that spans geography and connects me with others who are also free today.

So, yes, I'm thankful that over the past few years my blog traffic has grown, because it means I know, or am getting to know, you.


Corn at Harvest Time photo, by L.L. Barkat.

Top 10 Steps to Make Your Blog or Book Go Viral

Viruses used to be simple. I'd sneeze, you'd catch my cold. Those were the days.

Yesterday, I perused a bunch of articles about Penenberg's new book Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today's Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves Reading these articles, I learned that spreading a cold just got more complicated. Not impossible, mind you, but way past a simple sneeze.

You can read some of the informative articles (I've linked to them at the bottom of this post). Or you can grab the high points here. These are the Top 10 steps to make your blog or book go viral...

1. MENTION your blog or book a lot. Stone Crossings. (Um, that's just me mentioning my book. I think it's very important to follow these steps with the same level of dedication a germaphobe would have about washing her hands. Because the minute I mentioned Stone Crossings, you may have washed it away (sorry, this does not imply that you are a germaphobe).

Anyway, whether or not you're annoyed by yet another mention of Stone Crossings is probably secondary. As Bill Wasik learned when trying to stop Peter Bjorn and John, even bad buzz can be good. Stone Crossings. :)

In all seriousness, I would be very careful about this step. It's better if other people mention your blog or book; see #4 below.

2. GET COVERAGE on popular blogs. Trust me, a bikini just won't do. It's got to be real coverage, like full body armor. Oprah, Rick Warren, Paris Hilton, where are you? I need coverage.

(I was going to mention Stone Crossings again here, but I was afraid to annoy you. However, I SHOULD mention that Penenberg got coverage on popular tech blogs, because his book is technically technical. Still, I bet he wouldn't mind a footnote from Paris Hilton. Viruses aren't necessarily fussy about how they spread. In my case, I figure everybody could use a little grace, so I'm not going to flinch either when Paris decides to make a video about Stone Crossings: Finding Grace in Hard and Hidden Places.)

3. TWEET A LOT. That's what Penenberg is doing. And from what I can tell by cruising his tweets, 'New' is a vital component. He tweets about Newsday, Newsweek, and the New York Times. (Ah, serendipity! I live in New York. Do you think this will tip the scales for sales of Sto.. Oh, seriously, I couldn't bring myself to say my book name again. Maybe you could say it for me?)

4. TWEET Retweetably. Did you know there are scientifically proven ways to get retweeted on Twitter? There are. And there are ways to pretty much guarantee being ignored. I've used a few myself, in both directions.

Unfortunately, the article that will tell you how to get retweeted didn't have any data on the usage of two words very dear to me: Stone Crossings. However, if these words count as self-reference, they would reduce my chances of being retweeted. Because, as the article will tell you, "Tweets about work, religion, money and media/celebrities are more retweetable than those involving negative emotions, sensations, swear words, and self-reference." Oh, and I was sad to learn that I must release my penchant for the semi-colon. It's the least retweetable form of punctuation.

5. OFFER VALUE to people. Penenberg notes that you can't control a viral loop. Bad things might happen if you try (or not). The best thing to do is give people something they want to spread the word about. As Penenberg says, "To get it, you have to give." If you're trying to make your blog go viral, this isn't so hard. Write well. Be generous with links. Highlight the good work of others. Books are trickier. You can do some giveaways or provide excerpts and reviews. But a book is a material object. That obviously complicates matters.

6. Recruit a design firm to DEVELOP an interactive website. I like this idea. It seems simple enough. When someone rolls over the Viral Loop website icons, they pop up messages like, "Click to explore bebo's story" and "Click to explore Tupperware's story."

How hard could it be to do this for my book? I could have little messages that say, "Click to explore the Evocative Creek Story" or "Click to explore the Fifth-Wife Car Story." You know, stuff like that. The only hard part of this step, in my humble opinion, could be the price tag. (Still, maybe I should talk to cool designer 23 Degrees.)

Penenberg's website also offers visitors a wiki opportunity, where they can add their own information or provide links and commentary. Would this work as well for a non-tech book? What do you think?

7. Find someone to DEVELOP A FACEBOOK AND iPOD application/widget. On the app, include a click-through button to your blog or buy-this-book page. Penenberg's application includes infographic, game, and research project related to his book. It estimates the real time value of users to various social networks, like Facebook.

Btw, did you know that Michael Jackson is apparently worth more than God? The Viral Loop app says so. (Hey, Chris Cree, HighCallingBlogs techno-genius... I need a Facebook and iPhone app for Stone Crossings. Is that too much to ask? Check it out, I already designed the art— see top of this post)

8. MAKE YOUR FACEBOOK APP/widget topical. Not as in topical skin cream, but as in make it relate to what you're trying to spread. This is obvious. The problem is that it's not simple. For someone like Penenberg, it takes creativity, but it's not impossible to create an app that will test and promote the theories of a technical book. However, as you've seen when you looked at my artwork for a Stone Crossings Facebook app (you did look, didn't you? Click picture for enlarged view.), well... who would know whether to laugh or cry at the absurdity of a widget on grace.

9. GET INVITED to be a guest Editor at Publisher's Weekly. (Anybody have some spare PW stationery sitting around? Bring it over and we can secretly pen a few invitations to ourselves. :) Obviously, this step is going to take some finegaling. In the meantime, though it might be a conflict of interest for me, as Managing Editor of HighCallingBlogs to invite myself to promote Stone Crossings at that awesome site, you could get to know me and someday get your blog or book featured.

10. USE EMAIL opportunities. Calacanis notes that he gets about a 60% RSVP rate through email, versus 30% from Twitter and 10% from Facebook. I'd say this is the one to be most careful about. Nobody likes to be spammed with read-my-blog or read-my-book notices in their inbox. Legitimate ways to email a list include offering a Subscribe by Email option in your sidebar.

If you made it this far, I'm assuming you're truly interested in making your blog or book go viral. These days it takes more than a simple sneeze. Still, I can say "God bless you."

P.S. It doesn't hurt to make a video too. Sorry, that's 11 steps to viral success.

RELATED ARTICLES:
CrunchGear's Viral Loop: Using Facebook and the iPhone to Promote Something Called a 'Book'
The New York Observer's Adam Penenberg's Crazy Viral Book Blitz
Fast Company's Viral Loop: Jason Calacanis Q&A From the Top of the Leader Board
Publisher's Weekly's Viral Issue: The Viral Loop
Fast Company's Report: Nine Scientifically Proven Ways to Get Retweeted on Twitter (this one's pretty cool because it also includes words most likely to get you retweeted and those most likely NOT to get you retweeted)
D: All Things Digital's Viral Loop: What Are Your Facebook Friends Worth?
Mediaite's Viral Loop: For Facebook, Michael Jackson is More Valuable than God
Fast Company's Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg on the Value of Viral Loops
Trenchwar's fun theory What Do Ninja Turtles, Hush Puppies and Pokeman All Have in Common?
HighCallingBlog's 7 Easy Tips to Grow Your Blog Audience

Original Viral Loop art by Studioe9. Viral Loop Christian Parody art by L.L. Barkat.

Let Go, Write Strong, Build Readership

You've seen it before. The burdened poem. A heavy-laden sentence. Blog posts that go on and on. Chapters that would have done well if they ended three pages ago.

We all create overstuffed writing sometimes, much to the chagrin (or boredom, frustration, and unhappy surprise) of our readers and editors. We want to hold on to all of our words, each of our sparkling thoughts or stories. But the poems, sentences, chapters, readers and editors of the world wish we'd simply let go.

I understand. I'm not immune. What to do? Here are 5 things I try to remember, to help me let go and write strong:

1. Aim for arresting details, then trim those that don't add extra force to the text. Refrain from being too sad about this (see number 3 below); remember, this practice wins points with readers and editors.

2. Trust the reader. If details are strong, readers can catch the import without a lot of explanation and application talk. I dare say that religious writers are particularly remiss in this area, as they spend too much time overlaying the God-aspect in their stories, poems and posts. We don't need to say, "He redeemed the situation by His powerful hand," if we've made it crystal clear through redemptive details.

3. Save it for later. This is especially hard for the new author/blogger, eager to fill a book/blog post with everything she knows on a subject. Remember, there'll be other chances. For instance, this weekend I was tempted to add a section to my Hospitality chapter, on the sometimes inhospitable ways we practice communion in our churches. But the chapter was already pleased with itself. So I started a file called "God in the Yard Blog Posts" and sketched my idea for a future blog post (once the book comes out and I want to extend ideas through conversation).

4. Give ideas away. Sometimes it's nice to pass things along to other writers, who have a built-in audience for your idea. (This point is also my tiny plug for Lewis Hyde's The Gift. In Chapter 2, he asserts that we keep a gift by giving part of it away. As Hyde says, "...where true, organic increase is at issue, gift exchange preserves that increase" )

5. Print it out, let it sit. I don't print my blog posts (maybe I should!), but I do print my articles and chapters. Then I let them sit for a day or a month. Creating distance between ourselves and a text, as well as seeing it in a different form (paper versus screen) goes a long way towards helping us appreciate the power of deletion.

So that's it. If we let go, we write strong. (Now let me see, where's that delete button...)


Empty Swing photo, by L.L. Barkat.

OTHER SEEDLINGS POSTS ON 'THE GIFT':
The Gift: Take, Eat, This is My Tweet
When Did You Labor, or will Sabbath help your gift go viral?
Womb, Harlequin, and License Plates: The Gift, 1

OTHER BOOK CLUB POSTS:
Laura's Blowing in the Wind

Searching for Blog Traffic (and finding it)

Okay, so this week's writing project was Searching for Grace and somehow I got my wires crossed and wrote about Searching for Blog Traffic (and finding it). Oops.

Blame it on a confluence of events, like Scott Calgaro introducing me to a new addiction which may just increase my blog traffic while helping me clean house (hey there, husband-in-Vienna, if you are reading this you'll be happy to know I cleaned the whole... [you gotta come home if you wanna to know]).

Speaking of addictions (of the happiest sort... like having chocolate and tea every day at 4:00, but this addiction increases blog traffic instead of endorphins), I also found Zemanta. Oh. Wow. Besides making blog posting simple and powerful (it brings up picture options, tag suggestions, related article options and live-link options all right on your blog compose screen) and giving you the power to reblog articles and posts at the push of a button, it also puts your posts in the blogosphere link-love mix. By which I mean, your posts end up in other people's related-articles options (I've already been getting some nice referral traffic this way).

Anyway, these blog-traffic-increasing addictions collided with a week of watching Laura's Stone Crossings Giveaway process and working on Chapter 8 of my next little baby (little being the operative word at the moment, but I'm making progress). Which all added up to the absence of my own personal Searching for Grace poem. I'm thinking ya'll will grant me a bit of grace, while I grant you links here and at High Calling Blogs.

RELATED:
Goodwordediting's Demonstrating Zemanta Reblog of Seedlings in Stone

Grace in the Petals photo by Sara. Used with permission.

Increasing Blog Traffic Through Zimbio

In my quest to increase blog traffic (so I can tell writers at Mount Hermon how to increase their blog traffic) I've come upon another thing worth talking about. And that is Zimbio.

Zimbio is a wikizine site. It offers an absolutely simple way to have an e-zine without all the work involved in creating one of your own. (Though you can quickly create your own as well in Zimbio).

Here's how it works. You register at Zimbio. Then you can begin "publishing" your old blog posts or writing new articles in any number of existing e-zines. The e-zines have multiple contributors, which is why they are technically wiki-zines, so you don't have to work so hard to publish enough things to have an active e-zine.

It's worth doing this for a number of reasons:

1. you can re-use valuable content that has been buried over time in your blog. In this way, you "bring it to the top" in a new place, where people can see your work.

2. you automatically get links to your blog, potentially bringing people over from the e-zine to your bloggy doorstep

3. the links you get at Zimbio are more links to YOU at your blog, thus raising your Google rank (which means that Google will also show up at your bloggy doorstep more often too... and I can testify that this is happening here at Seedlings)

4. according to some blogging forecasters, things like the e-zines at Zimbio that are based on focused content, will ultimately be the most powerful ways that bloggers get noticed on the web

So there you have it. Between this post and the last post, I've mentioned several things you can do to increase your blog traffic. Here would be my recommendations as to where you might go from here, in this order, at least for now...

1. Socialize your blog and your posts

2. Register at Zimbio and re-publish some older posts.

3. Join Squidoo only if you have some very specific interests which would be easy to develop a quick page about. Like the way it was natural for me to do Writing Like Annie Dillard.

Oh, then just be yourself like you're used to doing. 'Cause despite your traffic, you know we really like you.


Stone Bridge at Rockefeller Park photo by J Barkat. Used with permission.

When One Thing Leads to Another: Blog Traffic, A Book Idea and a Little Self-Discovery

As some of you know, I'm teaching about blogging at Mount Hermon Writers Conference in March. And I'm so glad that Marcus Goodyear will be at my side for one of the sessions.

Anyway, as some of you also know, I've not been one to be too concerned with increasing blog traffic. Today is my 200th-post birthday and at age 200 this blog has mostly grown through a commitment to write and through the friendly responses of people who stop by (I honestly believe that you all are part of what makes Seedlings work!)

However...

I have been feeling a certain obligation. People at MH are going to want strategies. So.

This past week, I tried a few new things and I doubled my blog traffic. Yes, doubled. At this point I'm still trying to figure out exactly which button I pushed that resulted in such an amazing phenomenon. (Okay, so I've been a bad scientist. I tried too many things at once!)

Two things I want to share in particular are the new Socialize It button at the base of each post and in my sidebar. This button leads to a site that features all the major social bookmarking services like digg and del.icio.us. These may sound like something you'd find at a kid's party, but they are powerful ways to either remember, share, organize or celebrate favorite posts and blogs.

I also opened a Squidoo account. It has nothing to do with marine life, I promise. Instead, it's another way to create a presence on the web and drive traffic to your blog. This is where, for me, one thing led to another. I started innocently enough, by creating a "lens" called Writing Like Annie Dillard. But by the time I was finished, I'd decided to create two more, one of which features a new book idea.

Why did I do that? Well the last post I wrote on talking to editors and publishers through blogging got me thinking. People do get book contracts through blogging. I may not end up being one of them, but the simple act of putting the idea out to the world was an act of finally admitting that I'm ready. Stone Crossings is on its way and I want to put my pen (keyboard?) to a new task.

I was going to tell you how all this led to a little self-discovery, but this post has grown rather long. So I'll save that story for next time. In the meantime, you can try socializing and squidooing. And if it doubles your blog traffic, please let me know. So I can tell my seminar participants exactly which button to push.

Bridge photo by J Barkat. Used with permission.