Creating Blog Buzz

Blogs are everywhere. I subscribe to more than 24 blogs and I skim the posts
every single day. When I find useful information, I take the time to read the
entire posts, to follow links in the posts, and in general to gather as much
information as I can from the snippets of daily information I find in the blogosphere.
Those snippets are the very information that makes blogs of all kinds
useful to me and to a large percentage of the world’s population.
Without useful information, blogs are worthless. Sure, you can blog about
your daily antics with Aunt Betty and her hairless pugs, but what’s useful
about that? Not a darn thing. That translates to three whole subscribers —
your mom, your Aunt Betty, and maybe your best friend. The chances of generating
any kind of cash from those endeavors are exactly zero.
But, say you blog about how to use technology to generate big bucks in business.
Now, that topic will garner you some traffic. If you don’t believe me,
check out all the blogs that come up in the results when you search for something
like making money in technology. Astounding what’s out there.
Hot topics work because they mean something to subscribers, they cover
valuable information that people are looking for, and they create buzz. Think
of buzz like the conversations that take place in a bee hive. One worker bee
goes out to gather nectar. Along the way, he comes across a field of the
most flavorful flowers of the season. Mr. Worker Bee gathers his share of the
nectar and returns to the hive to share his good fortune.
Upon his return, Mr. Worker Bee tells everyone he comes in contact with
what a great field he’s found and provides directions to the other bees in
the community. Within seconds, there’s buzz of both sound and activity.
Welcome to Internet buzz, which works exactly the same way.
You generate a post on the Web that contains secrets for how to make real,
living, growing slugs in your bathtub, and then along comes a visitor who was
searching for that very thing on the Internet. He reads your post, decides it’s
worthy, and immediately shoots off an e-mail to everyone he knows who has
the same interests. Those people then visit your site, and they share the news
with all their friends. Before you know it, buzz about your post is everywhere.
Buzz only works though if the information that you’re sharing is valuable to
more people than your immediate family. Your first step in creating blog buzz
is to choose a topic that other people find useful — and there are thousands
of such topics. You can write about nearly anything and find an audience for
it, but the idea is to find a topic that interests a large number of people over a
long period of time.
A good way to figure out a great topic is to pay attention to the media. Yes,
you have to wade through all the blather about the latest hot celebrity, but
the media doesn’t spend all it’s time on the newest starlet’s latest psychodrama.
For example, you’ll probably find a lot of economic issues and trends.
When you break down economic topics, you come up with everything from
making money to saving money and investing money.
Now, take that topic and divide it a little further. What do you do that helps
you make money, save money, or invest money? For me, I could write a blog
about making a very good living writing about technology. And I have, in fact,
written such a blog in the past, which was quite successful, thank you very
much. I don’t write it anymore because of time constraints, but it was a topic
that I know well and could help others with.
Choosing a topic that other people want to know about is relatively easy.
(Hey, getting rich off the stock market sounds like it might be a popular topic!)
The hard part comes when you have to figure out enough about that topic so
that you’re in a position to give useful advice to other people. That doesn’t
mean you have to be the best-known expert on the topic. You do have to know
enough to share useful information and to figure out what you don’t know
though.
After you have a blog in mind, all you have to do is create it. Fortunately,
creating a blog is easy. Dozens of services allow you to create a blog for free,
and it takes just a few minutes to set up one. Look at several different services
to find the one that’s right for you. The top three are
Blogger: Blogger is Google’s answer to blogging. It also happens to be
the easiest way to add AdSense to your blog. If you’re going to start a
blog, I suggest you start here.
WordPress: WordPress is also a pretty powerful blogging tool with free
accounts. Here’s the rub though — if you want to have AdSense on your
account, you have to pay for the premium account and even then it can
be a difficult chore to put the code in the right place.
TypePad: TypePad is a hugely popular blogging application that allows
you to use AdSense ads in the footer of blog posts. It’s also not difficult
to use, which makes it another good option for a blog that includes
AdSense ads.
As I mention earlier, dozens of other blogging services are out there that you
can try. Some companies offer business-specific blogs, and others offer blogs
as part of a larger community of users. But for your purpose, I look at blogs
that you can use AdSense with, and the service that’s most AdSense-friendly
(of course) is Blogger. So, the remainder of this TOPICf ocuses on how to
put AdSense on your Blogger blog.