JennieDuong's Blog

Blogging can be a lonely business. And if online blogger communities don’t satisfy you desire to mingle, this is a list of the top 10 events in the real world where you can participate in, meet with fellow bloggers, and share experiences.

BarCamp

BarCamp is a different kind of conference where bloggers, new media enthusiasts, and entrepreneurs gather to learn and discuss various aspects of the new media among themselves. There are no set agenda or pre-decided speakers and everyone is free to join.

The first BarCamp was organized in California by a group of 6 people as a weekend conference. The camp was an instant hit and since then there have been more than 150 camps organized across the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia with more than 10,000 people attending. The second anniversary of the BarCamp was celebrated in August this year.

BlogHer Conference

BlogHer Conference is an annual conference for women bloggers being organised since 2005 by BlogHer, an online community of exclusively working for the fairer gender with a membership base of around 13,000 bloggers. This year’s event was organized for two days in June at Chicago with over 800 bloggers participating. Discussions and sessions were on providing resources and tips to women bloggers. The 2008 event is underway though the venue has not been decided as yet.

BlogHer also organized the first BlogHer Business Conference in 2007. Next year, this is scheduled to be held in April at New York. BlogHer is also starting a new event in 2008, the BlogHer Reach Out Tour, that will tour across six US cities.

BlogTalk

BlogTalk is an European conference for bloggers, developers, and researchers of the social media. The first BlogTalk was organized in 2003, and since then the conference have been organized in 2004, 2005, and 2006. The next BlogTalk event is coming up at Ireland in March 2008.

BlogTalk 2008 will be a 2-day event of meetings, presentations, and exchanges of research. This will include topics on technological developments in social software, new blog and wiki applications, and social software in politics and journalism, among others.

Blog World & New Media Expo

Blog World & New Media Expo is perhaps the most-hyped event that is going round the blogosphere these days. The event is a two day affair coming in November at Las Vegas. Positioned as the world’s largest blogging and new media conference, the event will have plenty of seminars and panels on blogging, video blogging, podcasting, internet radio, TV broadcasting, and social networking to choose from. Some well known web experts and bloggers are expected out there.

Gnomedex

Gnomedex is another high profile blogging and web 2.0 event. The seventh Gnomedex was organized in August this year in Seattle. The conference was attended by hundreds of bloggers, podcasters, and web experts. Popular blogger Chris Pirillo was the main host for the event and Guy Kawasaki was one of the eminent speakers.

One interesting part of the conference was the UnGnomeCamp, the unofficial post-conference gathering for those who couldn’t make it to the Gnomedex.

International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media is the new avatar of the popular workshops on the Weblogging Ecosystem, started this year with over 145 people attending the event. The 2008 event is schedule in March 2008 at Seattle. The conference is primarily for researchers from different fields like computer science, linguistics, psychology, statistics, sociology, multimedia, and semantic web technologies for discussion on blogs and the social media.

New Media Expo

New Media Expo is an annual event for digital media creators, podcasters, and content developers. The 2007 event was held in California with more than 65 companies participating. The next expo is scheduled to be held in August 2008 at Las Vegas. As part of the expo, there will be a conference with sessions on podcasting beginners, attracting & growing audience, monetization & business podcasting, advanced audio & video creation, and new media strategies.

Podcamp

PodCamp is another barcamp style conference for podcaster and listeners, bloggers, and people interested in the new media. Since the first PodCamp in 2006 at Boston, there have been 21 PodCamps organized across the US, Europe, and South Africa.

Postiecon

PostieCon is a popular and free conference organized by PayPerPost Inc. for bloggers to discuss blog marketing, monetization, and building traffic. The upcoming Postiecon event starts on November 9 with an advertisers summit followed by a day-long conference and a distribution of the Blogger’s Choice Awards on the following day.

SobCon

Sobcon is another conference for bloggers on publishing, design and branding, tools, analytics, social networking, marketing, and other subjects of interest to bloggers. The 2007 event has been concluded with 15 speakers and 250 bloggers participating.

Source: http://mashable.com/2007/11/03/10-events-for-bloggers/ 

You are now a blogger! You spent a good 3 hours over the weekend setting up your new blog. It is so great, the 4 posts are so clever and glorious that anyone who reads them will be instantly cured of anything they have and rainbows will shoot out of their asses. Your theme is so fantastic and colourful you almost go blind just looking at it. So why is the urge to kill rising? Why is this wonderfully new, almost sexually attractive blog driving you crazy?

Here are a few tips to maintain you sanity during the first few weeks of blogging for the first time.

1. Do not expect search engine love
The search engine spiders are busy little guys. They will get to you eventually but don’t expect it to happen right away. It will help the spiders if they have a path to follow, like a link from another site that is already indexed. Also, a nice juicy google sitemap is always good food for the spiders.

2. Stop checking your traffic stats
OK, back away from the stat page. They mean nothing to you yet. You will just drive yourself insane! If you just stated up, then stay away from them.

You will get a few more visitors everyday for a week, then you will put up what you think was a great article and notice a huge drop in traffic. Then you start analyzing why the drop off happened. Maybe it was the day, or the hour it was posted. Maybe it was offensive or did not have the right keywords. Then the next day traffic doubles and you spit out your milk with glee. Then the next day there is none and you start punching you cat.

Just stay away from them for awhile. Develop your blog, get your own voice. When you have some good content and have learned how to understand and use the stats properly, then dive into them and analyze away.

3. Stop worrying about getting dugg
Just because you wrote something and then posted it to digg does not mean anything. If your content is good and original, it may get dugg eventually. Just don’t hold your breath, keeping writing. Don’t worry about it. Seriously. Your thinking about it right now aren’t you?

4. You are NOT in an elite club
“Who the hell is the Darren Rowse guy? Fuck Shoemoney and John Chow. I just e-mailed them 14 minutes ago about this great new blog and they haven’t even mentioned it on their blogs yet! I gave them a plug and even commented on one of their crappy posts! I better go firebomb their servers…”

Get the point yet? Just because you tell someone about your new blog does not mean they will (a) Have time to look at it (b) like it enough to plug it or (c) even see your e-mail. Give them something they would like to read before you ask them to look at it.

5. You are not Scrooge McDuck, you will not be swimming in a pool of money
You have AdWords Ads flowing all over your blog now and soon you will be rich! Other bloggers make a living from their blogs and now you can too. But why have you only made $0.06 in a week! Google must be ripping you off! You should not even have any advertising on your site yet. Unless your site is about on-line advertising and it is part of an article you are writing on implementing AdWords, then it would be best to have a little content and traffic first.

6. Everyone will trade links with you!
Just kidding, they will not trade links with you. Text links are worth cash-ola to bloggers now and giving them away just for the fun of it doesn’t happen as much. Now you could get some smaller blogs to trade links with you, or you can get a link back by doing some work for bigger bloggers.

7. Content is King
Now before you all go off on me here, let me explain. You can’t just throw up any old content and expect people to rip off their clothes with glee over it. You need some original, good, and relevant content. If your blog is about video games, why are their 14 posts about a self draining tea pot? Sure you have a lot of posts, and they may even be good posts, but people are coming to read about games.

8. Imitation is NOT the sincerest form of flattery
Not when it comes to blogging that is. If a post from a blog you like inspires you to write something, that is great. You may even want to link back to that person to show your gratitude for giving you the idea. Copying an entire post is not quite the same, even if you link back to it at the end. If you must, write up what you thought of the post, and then link to it. Don’t just steal content and then sneak in a link at the end. Same thing with the look of your site. Don’t do what Donnie Don’t Does.

9. Running a contest/starting a train/meme will NOT make you famous
If it does catch on then you will get some benefit out of it, but there is no guarantee. Especially if you are just starting out and have absolutely no name at all. This is the baby growth period, there will be plenty of time for that later.

10. Creating a top ten list will NOT get you dugg!
Although, diggers sure like their top ten lists. And all those diggers are fantastic folks, I sure like them. I really enjoy the service they provide and I wish I could do something for them. Digg.com is great. This is in no way an attempt to garner favour with them, they are much to wise and would see right through it with their superior wisdom.

Source: foximus.com 

First of all a big “thank you” for every one who participated. As I said before the number of entries surprised me (and the quality as well, I will definitely apply some of those tips myself).

Now, without further delay, the 30 Traffic Generation Tips:

1. Sridhar Katakam
Keep track of blogs and leave comments on them. A good way to keep the conversation going is to install a MyBlogLog widget and visit the blog of people visiting your site.

2. Ian Delaney
Nothing creates long-term traffic more than value. Consider writing posts with resources or explaining how things work. Useful things get linked to and they get onto del.icio.us, which is far better long-term than a digg front page.

3. Scott Townsend
Inform search engines and aggregators like Technorati (using the ping functionality) when your blog is updated, this should ensure maximum traffic coming from those sources. (check the List of Ping Services)

4. Kyle
Simplify. Pay attention to complex issues in your field of work. It may be a big long publication that is hard to wade through or a concept that is hard to grasp. Reference it and make a shorter “for dummies” version with your own lessons learned and relevant tips. When doing this, I have been surprised to find that the simplified post will appear before the more complex version in search results. Perhaps this is why it results in increased traffic; people looking for more help or clarification on the subject will land on your blog.

5. Grant Gerver
Try to be polemic. I write obsessively about all-things political from the left-wing perspective in the form of humorous, sarcastic one-liners.

6. Daniel
A simple tip that will probably boost your page views: install a translator plugin. I decided to use a paid plugin for this, but if I am not wrong there are some free ones as well. The translation is not very good, as you can imagine, but it helps to attract readers that are not fluent in English.

7. Rory
Submit articles to blog carnivals (http://blogcarnival.com) that are related to your niche. Your article almost always gets posted, and it must generate a handful of visitors, at least.

8. Ramen Junkie
Newsgroups. I always see a spike when I post a review to a newsgroup.

9. Eric Atkins
Create a new design for your website. Not only will it be more attractive to your regular readers, but you can submit it to some CSS gallery showcase sites that feature great designs. This will give you exposure on those sites while generating a lot of traffic and backlinks from those types of sites.

10. Megan Taylor
Participate in conversations on related blogs. Start conversations on your own blog. Don’t just post about a story and leave it at that, engage your audience, ask questions and call to action.

11. Guido
Comment on blogs, write useful content and make good friends on forums.

12. Brian Auer
You must be active to generate traffic. I post comments on other blogs that are related to mine, and I post my site link in my signature at the forums. Spread the word about your blog and it will certainly attract readers.

13. Shankar Ganesh
Just browse around MyBlogLog.com and you will surely get visitors to your blog. Also try to join as many communities as possible that are related to your topic.

14. Andrew Timberlake
A great tip for generating traffic is off-line by including your url in all your off-line liturature from business cards, letterheads, pamphlets, adverts through in-store signage if applicable. I even have our website on my vehicle.

15. Cory OBrien
Read lots of other blogs. Leave trackbacks. Make sure your blog is optimized for search engines. Leverage social bookmarking sites like digg (both for new ideas and for traffic).

16. Jester
Leave comments on other blogs. If you’re already reading them, it takes
just a couple of seconds to leave a message agreeing or disagreeing
with the author, you get to leave a link to your site, and you will almost
ALWAYS get traffic from your comments.

17. Goerge Manty
Post 3-5 times a day. Use ping services like pingomatic or set up wordpress to ping some of the ping services. Engage your readers. Put up polls, ask them questions, give them quizes, free tools, etc. Make them want to come back and tell their friends about you.

18. Engtech
Community. It’s one word but it is the most important one when it comes to blogging. The only “blog metric” that makes sense is the vibrant community of readers it has. Building a community around your blog will bring you increased traffic, but how do you start? The boilerplate response to building traffic is always “SEO, social networking sites, and commenting on blogs” but it can be simplified to “be part of a community”. The easiest way to seed your blog is with an already existing community. But the only way to do that is to be part of the community yourself.

19. Chris
Squidoo Lenses are a good way to generate traffic. By using a lense,
you can generate your own custom “community” of webpages, including some
of the more popular pages in your “neighborhood.” Including your own
webpage in such a list is a good way of generating traffic.

20. Splork
I’ve had good success writing articles and submitting them to EzineArticles. Articles that have been written from well-researched keyword phrases and accepted by EzineArticles tend to rank very high in Google for that search term. Placing anchor text in the footer of those articles so the reader can visit my relevant website has always increased my site traffic.

21. Jen Gordon
I came upon some unexpected traffic when my blog popped up on some css design portals like www.cssmania.com and www.webcreme.com. If you can put some time into the concept behind and design for your blog, I’d recommend submitting your site to a design portal not only for
additional traffic but to build an additional community around your site.

22. Kat
I’ve recently gotten involved with several “MySpace-like” community sites that focus on my target audience. I share my thoughts in their forums, post intros to my real blog on their system blog and I’ve even created a group for my specific niche. It’s been very, very successful for me.

23. Inspirationbit
Well, obviously everyone knows that social bookmarking sites like Digg, del.icio.us, etc. bring lots of traffic. But I’m now submitting some of my articles to blogg-buzz.com (a digg like site for bloggers), and I always get not a bad traffic from there.

24. Mark Alves
Participate in Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn Answers where you can demonstrate your expertise, get associated with relevant keywords and put your URL out there.

25. Tillerman
Be the first to write a post about the ‘Top Ten Blogs’ in your niche. The post will rank highly in any general search for blogs in your niche and other bloggers in your niche write about the post and link to it.

26. Nick
Participating in forums is a great way to get loyal readers. Either link baiting people in your signature or posting great advice and tips will give you high quality traffic, which will result in return visitors.

27. Brandon Wood
A simple trick I’ve used to increase traffic to my blog is participate in group writing projects. In fact, that’s what I’m doing right now.

28. Alan Thomas
Don’t forget your archives. I just posted a roundup of all interviews I did over the past seven months. One of them generated a new link and a big traffic spike from a group of users that look like they will be loyal readers now.

29. KWiz
Write something controversial. I don’t think it’s good to write something controversial just for the purpose of getting traffic necessarily (especially if it’s only for that purpose and you’re being disingenuous), but it works.

30. Dennis Coughlin
Find the best blogs on your niche and contact the authors. Introduce yourself and send a link of your blog. This might help them to discover your blog, read it and possibly link to it.

Source: http://www.dailyblogtips.com