Written on this blog a week or so ago was "Like to Write Stuff: Why & How Thus Far"... a posting that covered why I began writing this particular blog and what I've done to get to current point in time. To summarize these two topics very briefly, it's (1) to write about things I find interesting and (2) I've taken the steps to reach where I'm now happy with the content going into the blog.
So... as the overall blog introspection is designed as a three part narrative and the first two have been covered, I'm now on to the third, what I can do to try to acquire a readership (this assumes that the content going on to the blog will continue to be similar to what has been posted to date).
On blogger (which is of course used for this blog), there's a story titled "Promoting Your Blog" which features (among other ideas) the suggestions below:
1. Add your blog to listings and make available for search engines (ex: technorati).
2. Set e-mail post link to be shown.
3. Turn on site feeds (subscribe to) so that people can use RSS feed readers to view blog content.
4. Set backlinks to be shown (not sure how this works).
5. Link to other blogs.
6. Install a blogroll (example from article is a site called blogrolling and addthis might be a similar thing.
7. Leave comments on other blogs.
8. Pitch posts via e-mail, but in an appropriate way. Blogger links to this article for tips on how.
The blogger piece also has some good suggestions around content, as does the article "What Makes for a Good Blog" from the popular life organization site 43 Folders. That said, I'm pretty happy with the content being put on the blog so I'm focusing now on some of the specific activities I can try to get readers.
The suggestions above all make a lot of sense to me and I got some ideas from reading Sarah Lacy's book "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good" (which I reviewed at this blog post).
Specifically, Lacy talks in her book about Web 2.0 companies as being both platforms and applications (with the less successful companies really being just features). From this, I realize that from a platform perspective, I can utilize the profiles I already have sites like Facebook and LinkedIn and think about adding Ning as another platform site.
From an application perspective, I'm fascinated by what Digg does and want to utilize it (also interested in technorati) as a way to try to get readers. The actual steps will be to try to figure out how to alter the html on my posts so that people can easily add or tag either the entire blog or post url.
Seems like things that can be done...
