Guest post by Daniel Packer

Like many of you, I want to drive traffic to my site. I want to gain more subscribers, and eventually, I’d like to make money! We all have different experiences with blogging, and we all know what works for us and what drives traffic. For some, that means guest posting a lot, and for others it means getting lucky that someone big notices you and retweets your link.

I had an experience I’d like to share with you because it completely changed the way I think about blogging. I did my fair share of guest blogging, but only got a few visitors each time. I wasn’t growing enough and was getting discouraged. One day, it all changed. I was getting more visitors, more quality visitors, and I knew that my growth wasn’t going to level off any time soon. Read more »

For the past few days, I’ve been offering some video posts here about the cloud that surrounds content consumers today…

• Get Your Content Into the Cloud
• Infiltrating the Cloud In Which People Breathe
• Decrease the Distance by Growing Your Network

Today, I want to get a bit more specific about how to understand the cloud and begin to infiltrate it. The secret boils down to shifting your thinking. Your site doesn’t exist to consume users, it exists to feed users where they hang out.

And here’s the Youtube link to Your Site Is Just a Launching Pad Into the Cloud.

People who are active online have determined the size of the cloud in which they consume content and have a tendency not to venture outside of it. How then do you connect with them? By growing your own network and decreasing the distance of separation.

Here’s a Youtube link to Decrease the Distance by Growing Your Network

Today’s challenge is simple: reach out. Find a new blogger with whom you haven’t connected before and visit their site. Subscribe, comment, or send them an encouraging note. In my next post, I’d like to talk about optimizing your blog for getting your content into the cloud.

On January 12th, I posted a tweet asking the question, “If a business were going to hire you for a few hours per week to apply your social media savvy, how would you best use that time for them?” I asked it because it was asked of me in just that same way.

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“Social media marketing” is a fad, a trend, and it’s raging with popularity right now. Will it last? Absolutely, but not as we know it today. Some of the buzz words will eventually be dropped and social media marketing will finally be seen for what it is – a very effective single prong of a multi-faceted way of sharing news about a person, product, or organization. But it still won’t reach my grandmother.

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I’ll be brief. I’ve created a Google group. The purpose is simple – ask other bloggers to promote your posts that you feel are worthy of the world’s attention. There are several important catches though that will hopefully make it worth while…

• I’m going to close new memberships after 100 bloggers have joined so it never becomes overwhelming.
• I’m allowing anyone to apply since I want participation to be voluntary, but I’m only going to approve people who are unselfish, will give a moment now and then to promote another blogger, and who produce useful and valuable content.
• Members can invite other members, but it still stops at 100.

Participating is as simple as sending a single email and reading one email per day.

If you don’t get in, I’d recommend you start your own group and limit it to 100 also, for all the same reasons.

Ready? Here’s the link: Worthy of Attention Google group.

After the group fills up, this message will self-destruct.

Let me be blunt – five minutes spent on some blogs makes me feel… dirty! No, I’m not talking about blogs with questionable material, but rather blogs that are built on greed. It’s one of my pet peeves, and it’s one of the reasons blogging is getting a bad name – greedy bloggers marketing to other greedy people.

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I’m assuming you’ve heard of this new thing called Twitter. It’s okay. It has a few fans. And maybe you’ve also heard of a tool called Friendfeed.. It used to have a few fans, but they all left when Facebook bought Friendfeed. (I exaggerate.)

Well, enter Cliqset. I’m in love.

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UPDATE 12/28: All is restored. But I think my opinion, below, still stands in spite of the personal cost.

UPDATE 12/27: Hold the phone! There hasn’t been much communication about this issue from Feedburner or Friendfeed, but just a couple of hours ago, Feedburner posted this update on Twitter: “As many have noticed there appears to be a reporting issue with FriendFeed subscribers. The cause is currently under investigation.” So perhaps I’m wrong! We shall see!

Overnight (Christmas, at that), the subscriber count for this blog went from over 2,000 to around 100ish. Ouch. The reason? This blog is fed to my Friendfeed stream, which was formerly counted into the Feedburner count. But no more. For me, this obviously stinks a bit, but I understand the change and even welcome it.

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When I first started using Twitter heavily, the #FollowFriday hashtag was just taking off, and I genuinely looked forward to Fridays because of it (which might be a sign of a social media addiction). I’ve always appreciated anybody that has mentioned me. But has #FollowFriday lost its original luster?

I say, if you enjoy #FollowFriday, keep it up, but I wanted to mention some possible alternatives to it that are also quite valuable.

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