BOTD's 2 cents on BLOGGING!

Seems like the theme of the weekend is BLOGGING ~ how, why, where? etc ... The FLY posted his 5 lessons for blogging, Howard talked about building a brand through "vommenting", and AbnormalReturns gives link love to the Econoblogosphere.  

BOTD's 2 cents: 

1)  MUST HAVE A DOMAIN NAME. (no blahblah.blogspot.com) 

   this is so easy to do, yet many bloggers miss this all important first step.  Your domain name is home to your brand, its how people get to your site.   What sounds better? ... Hey go check out buyonthedip.blogspot.com   OR  have you seen BuyOnTheDip.com?    Common sense, but so many bloggers don't know how, or don't take the 10 mins to set it up.   DO THIS FIRST.  Its the foundation of your BLOG.   Once you have your domain name you can effectively brand and market your site.  

2) AGGRESSIVELY MARKET YOUR SITE 

  what good is a blog that no one reads?  ... Use message boards, commenting, link exchange and search engines to gain traffic.  Message boards like YahooFinance and GoogleFinance are our bread and butter ... some call it SPAM when we leave our domain name while commenting in a message board, so what.  It works, that's probably how you got here, right?  ... Then, you can go around to all our "friends"/competitors/colleagues/fellow bloggers and add wonderfully witty banter to their comment section.   Vommenting or spammenting,  it works. 

    Next, is the ever-popular link exchange.  You link to me, I link to you.  This helps create community and makes it easier for "newbies" to get acclimated with the ECONOBLOGOSPHERE.  Link exchange also shows commonality of interest, letting your readers know what sites you like and read.   It's all about us! 

    Search engines are another source of traffic.   Best way to get there is to pay for it, but thats kind of lame for not-for-profit blog.  So the next best way is to be pertinent.  If you really want to come up for a specific term, write about it.  Example, go type "petrohawk hk" into google, guess who comes up #1? 

    Lastly,  you are your audience.  You control your content.  If you haven't seen Big Trouble In Little China while sitting on your couch with 3 friends in middle school, laughing your ass off, eating Pringles,  our previous post about the 6 demon bag probably wasn't that funny and didn't resonate with your childhood.  That's OK, we want all traffic.  But if you have seen it and did laugh, go team! one point for us.  Loyal traffic is key ... we love our audience!   That's why we do this, BLOGGING IS ALL ABOUT EGO.    There we said it.   BLOGGING is about personal ego, it's a way of communicating who "we" are.   Sure you can say you want to "share" knowledge or expertise in an area, philanthropy, hmmm... or maybe its about the ad revenue, hahaha.  How about we put a bunch of ads all over our site? would be worth a few bucks a day, about a $100 bucks a month, a tank of gas .... hmmmm ... "we" are worth more.  

go team!