Blasting Your Blog Into the Blogosphere and Beyond

The Ft. Hard Knox (FHK) project has had over 12,000 visitors to its blog in the first 2 1/2 months of service. The FHK project was started to assist politically-conservative bloggers, social-networkers, and citizen journalists to navigate the wild, wild world of Web 2.0 more effectively.

During that time, we learned some valuable lessons we would like to share.

• 1. Write to a specific audience. They may be conservatives, liberals, self-help groups, or others but be focused on that core audience.
  2. Write about front page topics in the news or social news sites such as Digg.com, Reddit, Del.icio.us, and others. Use those topics with your audience in mind.
  3. Entice your audience with articles of those willing to view your site regularly. For us, we wrote to a conservative audience. However, those opposing such views also visited.
  4. Use provocative headlines. The general rule is this–if your headlines are boring your blog is viewed as boring. We found people judged us on our headlines at news sharing sites and decided to view the article if they thought it was intriguing.
  5. Confucious said, “By hearing I forget, by seeing I remember, by doing I understand.” Always use pictures in the articles or provide embedded videos from places like Google Images, Flickr, YouTube, etc. to get them to remember. Add a poll, comment section, or other interaction effect to get readers involved (doing).
  6. Promote, promote, promote. You must go to readers; they will not come to you. Submit your articles to news sharing sites, forums, and discussion groups.
  7. Create a social network of friends who can help you.
  8. Learn and keep on learning about blogging. It is a continuous process.
  9. Have at least one catchy paragraph in your articles that would entice readers on news sharing sites like Digg, Reddit, etc. You literally have seconds to get readers attention so don’t waste it.
  10. Mix it up–articles, content, headlines, videos, etc. but maintain your core principles.
  11. Seek controversy (but don’t go overboard). Readers like something spicy as compared to bland.
  12. Be creative and have fun. That means stretching yourself to think outside the typical blog box. If you find your blog is work and not fun, seek to be fun. Remember, if you have fun, readers will have fun.