Hola!
This
is our last blog and we wanted to sign off by sharing some of the techniques we
have used to publicize our blog and its effectiveness in general. We also
wanted to share some of our learning’s from this exercise in order to help
students like us be more effective in promoting blogs for free.
To
be honest it was not an easy task to get people to our blog. We started off by
using the most common social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and
Google + to attract visitors. However, with a topic specific about a recent
technological innovation, we found little interest for our blog. With so much
content on the Internet awaiting people’s attention, it was hard to even get noticed
from our friends and families. Luckily,
things improved half way through the term when we sought feedback from our Technology
Professor and friends with previous experience with blogs. One message that
consistently resonated across all feedbacks was the lack of a unified message
in our content. While we focused mostly on diverse applications, we did not
have a story connecting the posts or any structure that covered all aspects of
the technology. So the message became clear to us – we needed to improve our
content first and then focus on publicity.
We
therefore took a step back and posted a message that attempted to connect our previous
postings with a message around why people should care about this technology. Overall,
this exercise renewed our motivations and we publicized the blog using direct
communication channels such as email and word of mouth in addition to Facebook.
We particularly targeted the influencers among our friends and families –
individuals who spent lots of time on social media and had a big following as a
result. Throughout the period we constantly monitored the free statistical
analysis provided by Blogger. The direct marketing through email made it easier
for people to view our blog on mobile devices such as iPad and iPhone. Additionally, our international backgrounds
helped us generate interest from across the world.
Lastly,
we wanted to leave you with some of the techniques that we learnt along the way
and which are particularly applicable to technology related blogs.
Ø
Having a rough idea of the broader story
or picture you want to share with your blog is critical. Thinking about this
right from the beginning can make it easier for your publicity campaign. Connecting
the technology with a story can also attract a broader audience base that is
less familiar with technical jargons and terminology. We learnt this later but
it made a huge difference to our page visits!
Ø
While everyone uses Twitter, Facebook,
Google+ and LinkedIn to promote blogs for their popularity, we believed that in
the future we could get better attention on smaller but lesser-known networks
such as Quora.com and Empire Avenue. This becomes even more relevant for a
niche blog like ours seeking out focused audiences interested in emerging
technologies.
Ø
Although it’s a known fact that adding
graphics, photos and illustrations improves site visits, we wanted to emphasize
this one as our posts with pictures definitely got more clicks that the ones
without.
Ø
Finally, an interesting way to
publicize a well-written post is to directly post the link to that specific post
instead of providing a link to the blog home page. This technique of sharing
the link of your best post will not only maximize the chances of the audience reading
the entire post, but also the positive experience can increase the likelihood
of other posts being read in the blog. We could measure the effect of this easily
as the post we shared emerged as the one with the highest number of views and
helped us increase the overall number of page views for our blog.
Gracias
y Saludos,
N2 Team B
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