I’m liveblogging Session 1 of the How We Communicate track at BlogHer 08. Here’s the official description of the session from the conference agenda:

Elise Bauer is back to give one of the most requested sessions…Building Traffic. Elise focuses on content and community, with a dash of technology know-how thrown in for good measure. The space keeps evolving, and so does Elise’s presentation, so whether you’ve seen it before or not, you’ll find new things to learn.

This is Elise’s third year delivering this presentation at the BlogHer conference. You can access her presentations at Elise.com.

Elise’s blog, Simply Recipes, is a food blog for people who cook. Simply Recipes averages 80,000 visitors and 150,000 page views per day, and she has more than one million readers on feedburner.

Elise noted that the first step in increasing traffic is to think about the goals you have for your website and figure out how increasing your traffic would support those goals. (In addition to her popular website, Simply Recipes, Elise also has a personal blog that averages 100 visitors per day, and she’s happy with that. Increasing traffic for that site doesn’t further her goals.) It’s important to remember that maintaining a high level of traffic requires a great deal of effort—Simply Recipes is Elise’s full-time job. Another potential downside to increased traffic is that you may have an accompanying increase in rude or mean commenters.

Elise organized this presentation around three key concepts—content, community, and technology.

To generate good content, the information you share must be either useful, entertaining, or timely. Pick one (or more) and focus on perfecting it. Your choice will have significant implications for the direction of your blog. Elise focuses on being useful at Simply Recipes. News and political sites are timely. Elise cautioned that people who write time-sensitive content are often completely married to their computer and their blog. They are constantly writing and constantly updating. Heather Armstrong of Dooce is entertaining. Find your strength and build it.

A common mistake for new bloggers is lack of focus. When Elise started blogging, she had six websites. She has a music blog that no one can see but her. She had a book blog, but stopped updating it after kids used the content to cheat on book reports. She has a marketing blog that she updates once a year. She started all of these sites to figure out what she likes to write about and what people want to hear. It’s a big mistake is to be all over the place. It’s fine if you have a personal blog and you’re writing about your life for your family, but if you want your blog to grow, you have to have a focus.

You should post frequently, but not at the expense of quality. A few years ago, Elise averaged 2-3 posts per week. Now she averages 4-5. If you don’t post often, you won’t get new readers, but don’t increase your post frequency at the expense of quality. People feel a pull to constantly post, but readers notice when the quality of your content decreases.

An attendee asked if you can post too much. Elise said that she’s actually unsubscribed from the feeds of blogs that post 5-6 times per day. However, it depends on the type of content you generate. If you have a blog focused on timely information, post ten or more times per day if you need to.
Other keys to good content:

• Use images and photos. The web is a visual medium. Darren at Problogger stresses that you must use images and photos to lead off articles.
• Blogging calls for shorter posts—long posts can work depending on your content, but they’re difficult to read online.
• Write well, check your spelling, and use good grammar.
• Write compelling headlines
• Use polls, top 10 lists, contests, how-to’s (useful), interviews (although Elise believes that interviews don’t actually generate that much traffic), and controversial topics.

You want to use mechanisms to get people participating and reacting. People who run contests can get thousands of commenters and visitors. Pioneer Woman gives away KitchenAid mixers and gets thousands of comments. Think big. Sometimes you can get companies to sponsor contests. People may come just for the contest, but it’s still beneficial as it creates energy for your site.  You’ll also generate a lot of energy by writing about something controversial. (Elise doesn’t like writing about controversial topics because life’s too short to have to defend herself.)

An attendee asked what the average length of a “short” post should be. Elise answered that she typically uses 100-300 words “before the jump”. She also advises that you use bullets or lists to break up longer posts so that the eye isn’t overwhelmed.

Keep it real. Be authentic. Show a sense of humor. The real pull and beauty of blogs is that they are real. A blog isn’t getting filtered by a magazine editor trying to tell you what you should be reading. The more you can be authentic, real, and transparent, the better. That’s part of the big appeal of blogs.

If you care about building traffic, acquire and learn to use a DSLR camera. You can get the body for $400 on eBay. Get a Rebel if you’re starting out. Add a 50mm lens.  It may seem like a small thing, but in order to get above the background noise and get noticed on the web, your quality level has to be great. People are choosing your blog over someone else’s and they’re going to go to the one that’s most compelling You only have a minute or two to wow them. A DSLR camera is one of the best investments you’ll make.

Blog about something you care about and care about a lot. If you want to run a marathon, you should do it because you like running every day not because you like winning races. Blogging is a marathon that doesn’t stop—ever. You have to figure out what you can write about every day that will keep you inspired. Elise cooks with her parents, who are 73 and 78. Every day, her blog is an expression of love from them. She’s also inspired by feedback from readers who were motivated by her site to start cooking or try something new in the kitchen. blog is an exp of love for my parents.

Keep at it. The first two years of Simply Recipes, there wasn’t a lot of traffic but Elise kept at it. You also become a better writer as you write more. Elise sometimes goes back to rewrite early posts to improve the quality of the writing. Your photography skills will also improve with time and practice.

The next major pillar of building traffic is Community. This is the difference between broadcasting your message and engaging a peer group. Your blog isn’t all about you (unless it is and you happen to be extraordinarily interesting).

What is community? Elise thinks of it as readers, commenters, and fellow food bloggers. This is another benefit of focus—when you focus on a topic, there will be others interested in that topic who will become part of your community.

Why should you care about community? For one thing, a strong community builds traffic. But you also have to ask yourself, what will keep you nourished and supported during this process? For Elise, it’s the community. She can call her blog friends when I’m pulling my hair out and can’t decide what to cook and a commenter left a mean comment.

How can you build community? Link out to other bloggers and be generous always. Bloggers can tell the difference between someone linking to their sites for attention rather than because they like what you’re doing. Elise started foodblogsearch.com, a custom google search engine of more than 2,000 food blogs, as a way to give back to the community. It takes time to maintain, and it took money to get it off the ground, but it’s a useful thing for the community.

Leave thoughtful comments on others’ sites. Lydia of The Perfect Pantry is famous in the food blog community for leaving the best comments ever. Elise is annoyed by “blog stalkers” who come to her site ever day and write “great idea” as a comment, including their URLs in the text box. Don’t do that. That will label you among people who know better as an annoying self-promoter.

Plan and participate in blog events. Kalyn of Kalyn’s Kitchen Links started a blog event called Weekend Herb Blogging. Every weekend, people blog about cooking with herbs and then Kalyn presents a roundup. You can also participate in blog carnivals related to your topic.

Examples of community contribution:

• Foodie blogroll. The Leftover Queen started a foodie blogroll where food bloggers can be listed in exchange for posting a badge on their websites. The list has more than 2,000 food blogs.
• Blogger Blog Lists. Blogger has a blogroll feature that uses a feed to pull in snippets of recent posts from your favorite blogs and put them in your sidebar. Elise created a single purpose Blogger blog for 70 or so blogs that she follows and pulled it into Simply Recipes. (You can go to Elise’s technical blog, Learning Movable Type, for a tutorial.) This is a great way to promote blogs that you like.
• Blogger meet-ups. Get together with bloggers you read online when you travel to their area.
• Guest blogging. Inviting someone to guest blog or guest blogging for another blogger’s site is a great way to get more exposure.

Hints:

• Try to connect with blogs that are at about the same stage as you. A-listers are getting contacted so often that they won’t pay much attention to a new blogger. Try to connect with others who are trying to get established.
• Try to avoid being too self-promoting in your comments on other people’s blogs. Avoid “look what I did on my blog” comments unless the feedback is requested or highly relevant.

Social sites:

• Twitter. Elise is a self-confessed Twitter addict. (Just don’t use Twitter to post links to your blog—Elise unsubscribes from people who do that.)
• Facebook. Elise doesn’t find it very useful, but some do.
• Stumble Upon. Elise occasionally gets a huge amount of traffic from Stumble Upon. Heidi from 101 Cookbooks did a study and found that Stumble Upon visitors are not “sticky”—they don’t stay on your site.
• Del.icio.us. Elise uses this to keep track of recipes. She has a post on Simply Recipes on how to make a great cookbook using del.icio.us. She also uses it for inspiration.
• Digg. Elise doesn’t really use it because it’s mostly men talking about technology topics.
• Kirtsy. Elise doesn’t use it, but described it as “Digg for girls”.

One attendee had a suggestion for leaving long comments. She uses Google Share to note posts in a reader. Then she’s able to leave long comments without taking up too much space on the person’s site.

The final key to building traffic is technology.

Site design:

• Your site should be easy to load.
• Keep image size under 50k unless you’re a photography blogger.
• Use reasonable page length and size.
• Ensure that your font size is readable (the size will depend on the font that you’re using).
• Reduce clutter. So many blogs are just filled with buttonsand banners—it’s a lot of noise.
• Avoid colored backgrounds for main text—they’re too hard to read. The best bet is black text on a white background.
• Ensure that your search bar is visible.
• Categorize or tag your entries.
• Check your site on multiple browsers. (You can use browsershots.org.)
• Use the proper screen resolution – most readers use 1024 x 768.

Use Google Analytics and Sitemeter to analyze your traffic. Look for the source of drops or spikes. You should also keep an eye on who’s sending you traffic.

Check out these resources:

• Google Alerts. Google will send you an email every time your name or your blog’s name is mentioned on the internet. This is a great way to catch people stealing content. You can also see what people are saying about you. (If it’s nice, go back and thank them!)
• Technorati. You should sign up if you haven’t already. It’s a great way to find the blogs linking to you.
• Twitter search (search.twitter.com). You can find people talking about your site.
• Server stats.

How do people find your blog?

• Google or another search engine
• A link on someone else’s site
• Newsfeeds (Google Reader, MyYahoo, iGoogle)
• Social sites (Facebook, Twitter, Del.icio.us, Kirtsy)
• Links in email
• The press

Use RSS feed to syndicate your blog. It’s a great way for people to keep up with any content that’s been updated on your website. If you use Feedburner to syndicate, you can find useful statistics about your subscribers. You can also subscribe to RSS feed and have it sent to your email through either Feedburner or Feedblitz. Don’t forget to promote your feed on your site!

Ensure that this code is in the header of your site:
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”A title for your
feed” href=”http://the-url-for-your-newsfeed.com” />
It needs to be there for people to find your feed and subscribe to it.

Search engines:
Why are search engines important? You want to make it easy for people to find you if you have what they’re looking for. Most of Elise’s traffic comes from search engines. Search engines care about relevance and importance. Relevance is text-based and keyword-driven. If you’re a video blogger, be sure to include text with your video posts so that search engines can find you. Importance is about how many inbound links you have from other blogs or websites, and the nature of those links (e.g. A link from the New York Times is more valuable than a link from a new blogger.)

Search engines care about:

• Links from other sites
• Links from sites with high page rank
• Text-based
• Use of keywords
• Page title tag (Your post title is very important. It needs to have a keyword in it for search engines to find it.)
• Page meta description
• Good html structure
• Anchor text in inbound links (Don’t use “click here”—use the description of what you’re actually linking to.)
• Your domain name and page URLs
• Bounce rates

What gets you in trouble with search engines:

• Link to spam sites or link farms
• 404 errors – links to pages that don’t exist
• Keyword stuffing (when keywords show up more than the search engine thinks is natural)
• Hidden text on a page (white on white)
• Anything that the search engine would think is “gaming” the system

Points to remember:

• Be useful (Elise believes that it has longer legs than being entertaining and timely)
• Focus your content
• Engage your community
• Tune your site – make it easy to read and easy to load
• Promote your feed
• Be search engine aware
• Create a blog you love

Tags: BlogHer 08

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