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Yesterday I spoke at the MarketingNow conference here in Melbourne. I shared my story of blogging and then explore 25 or so lessons that I’d learned as a blogger in the 7 years since I started.

Following is the slide deck from the presentation. It might not make a lot of sense without the commentary (the presentation went for an hour and a half and the slides are not that detailed) but I had quite a few people asking to see it and wanted to share what I’d put together.

Over the coming weeks I think I’ll take each of the lessons and put them into a series of posts fleshing them out – but in the mean time – I hope you find the slide deck to give a little inspiration.

A quick explanation – slides 1-22 go with the telling of my story of blogging and slides 23-51 each go with the ‘lessons’.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Confessions of a Blogger (Slide Deck)

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This week I’m featuring a short series of interviews with successful bloggers looking at a popular post on their blog and why they think it went viral. Today Leo Babauta from Zen Habits has agreed to dissect the popularity of one of his site’s most popular posts.

1. What is the post on your blog that has had the most traffic in the last 12 months?

I would never have guessed this until I looked it up in Analytics, but the top post in the last year is “10 Tasty, Easy and Healthy Breakfast Ideas“.

2. Where did the traffic mainly come from?

The page had nearly 500K pageviews in the last year, almost all from Google searches. A small amount came from Yahoo (#2), direct traffic, MSN, and other search engines.

3. Did you do anything extra to market or promote this post or did it just happen organically?

No, I didn’t promote this post any more than other posts. It did well in delicious.com the first day, without my help, and quickly found its way to the #1 spot in Google searches for “healthy breakfasts” and related search terms. I don’t do SEO at all (I don’t believe in it), so this happened totally organically.

4. What can we as bloggers learn from the success of this post?

Google can bring tons of traffic, but the way to get there is not through SEO or overly promotional techniques. It’s by creating useful content that people will want to bookmark, link to, and find in searches, solving problems that many people have.

So:

1. Figure out what problems a lot of people have.
2. Create really useful content to solve those problems.
3. Write a good headline to help the post get spread more widely.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Leo Babauta from Zen Habits Shares a Popular Post Case Study

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Last year I wrote a post exploring how I use Social Media to promote my blogs – the post looked at the idea of creating Home bases and Outposts (a metaphor that I picked up from Chris Brogan).

In this video I extend the idea a little and talk about the importance of not only develping a presence on social media sites but also making connections with and developing a presence on other people’s home bases. You can see the full sized version of this video at How I Use Social Media to Promote My Blogs.

Here are the screen grabs from slides I’m sharing on this today at the MarketingNow conference in Melbourne.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How to Promote a Blog with Social Media

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