Your Voice, Inc.

How often should I be blogging?

How do I efficiently drive traffic to my blogs?

How do I know if anyone is reading them?

Blogging, Twitter, Facebook, shortened urls, click through rates, etc. It can all sound very confusing when you are just getting started. Here are some basics to demystify the social networking world so that you can see the big picture.

Blogging

Regardless of your reason for having a blog, here are some key points to keep in mind:

1. Don’t start a blog unless you can commit to it – regularly. Creating a blog and then letting it accumulate cobwebs (old posts) looks worse than not having a blog at all.
2. Begin with at least one blog post per week and work up from there. If you are in the technology or social networking your visitors will expect more frequent blogs because of the ever-changing nature of your field.
3. Blogs should be professional, yet casual. Depending on your reason for creating a blog, remember that you are leaving an internet footprint and establishing your brand (and reputation) online.
4. Check out my previous post, 12 Elements of a Great Blog for specific details about writing a blog.

Facebook and Twitter

Use these micro-blogging sites to begin conversations and engage a community with similar professional and personal interests by creating status updates (or tweets).

1. Facebook is much easier to connect with people through wall posts and comments. You can also follow conversations on a single page rather than multiple posts.
2. You can build a following much faster on Twitter which gives you the opportunity for more visibility.
3. Like blogging, stay focused with your posts on both social networking sites. Publishing random comments will take away from your online identity and your followers will lose interest.
4. Create posts about your blogs and include links to drive traffic to your site
5. To maximize your efforts, check out this blog post How to Get the Most Bang for Your Book on Twitter about the prime days and times to tweet to get the most visibility.

Bit.ly

http://bit.ly/ allows you to create a free personalized account so that you can create shortened urls. The advantages of this service are:

1. Allows you to create shorter links to fit within the character limitations on Twitter and Facebook
2. Provides you with detailed statistics on who, when and how many people clicked on your link and went to your website. The number of clicks is called a click through rate (CTR). Check out the blog previously mentioned “How to Get the Most Bang…” for how to increase your CTR.

SocialOomph

This personalized account allows you to pre-schedule your posts to your social networking sites. It is free to connect to your Twitter account however they offer fee-based premium accounts to connect additional social networking sites such as Facebook. This account will help you:

1. Be efficient with your social networking efforts. Rather than remembering to write posts throughout the day or getting caught up spending hours on the sites, you can schedule multiple posts for the entire day, week or month.
2. Optimize the key CTR without interrupting your work flow. Set each post up so that it is published at prime times.

If you are interested in learning more about blogging and how to use social networking to drive traffic to your website, check out our Strategic Blogging Plan.