Building Your Attention, Traffic, Trust, & Subscriber Base by Owning Ideas

Aaron - I relate a lot to what you are saying here.

You already passed "The Tipping Point", so you no longer need to push. Your ideas/posts move by themselves ;-)

When you are starting out, like me, you need to push really hard to get your ideas out.

After blogging for 4 months, I can say from experience that in order to get the attention you seek; you need to do two things:

• Use creativity to share original ideas that provide significant value to your readers
• Get those ideas to the eyes and ears of the well connected people in your niche

For me, writing unique and useful content has not been difficult. I have my own experiences to share that are different from most bloggers in my field, but as you said, it doesn't matter how useful or unique your ideas are. They need to be said by the right people and/or in the right places.

One way to achieve this is by writing content for high authority sites. I had great success, initially, writing a couple of post for Youmoz that were promoted to the main blog and got me attention I wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

Lately and thanks to Sphinn, I can focus on writing for my blog and Sphinn and StumbleUpon gets me the attention that I need. Some authority bloggers such as Maki, Andy Beard and Ralph have helped increase my credibility by linking to my content or submitting it to Sphinn.

For any new blogger, getting attention is not easy and requires a lot of work, but is definitely possible. Setting high goals and breaking them down in small achievable steps is a surefire way to do it.

Congrats on all the exposure Hamlet
You are a great example of a person who did not let nepotism, etc. stop you from being a new voice in the market, and just kept doing the right things to get noticed again and again.

Thanks for your encouraging words, Aaron. I will definitely keep doing them again and again :-)

Yet again, you raise some excellent points.

When I first started out in the professional web design arena, I inadvertently used another marketing technique that is quite effective and did not require any extra time than I was already spending.

I got involved in a couple large community forums (over 30,000 each) and I established myself as an authority in certain topics by regularly contributing answers to users questions on those topics. Sometimes this would lead to a linking back to my site for reference, but usually not. All the while, my link was in my signature line and profile.

Within 9 months, this garnered my site top search engine ranking in some very competitive terms, a PR7, Alexa top 50,000 rank and unique monthly hits in the 500,000 range. Given that my target market is highly saturated, I was very pleased with these results.

Now, in all fairness, contributing in communities was not my only marketing technique I was using. I was doing some mild self-promotion, submission to directories, link exchanges, releasing free designs, and I was spending $30/mo in AdWords. However, my server stats showed that more than 75% of my traffic came from the communities I was active in and related sites that had found my site from the community.

The point being, there is more than one way to skin a cat, but you are absolutely correct. You have to get out there and "push" your brand. People will not find your site based on search engine results alone.

There is one down side, however. In focusing my marketing to tightly in large communities, my site naturally became associated with those communities, even though they only represented a small subset of the topics my site covered. When it came time to sell my site, I had to take a much smaller amount than the traffic and backlinks would normally earn because of how tightly related to specific communities the site was.

So, I would say that communities are a great way to get you started, but make sure you diversify your marketing portfolio to ensure you don't end up in community lock-in.

Brilliant post Jim. I think moderating forums helped me a lot as well. Hard to measure the exact amount other than to say a bunch.

The other thing with it is that if you sold your site and wanted to do something else you could always change those forum sigs and establish yourself as an expert in other topics to have a wider base and keep some of that traffic. But that depends on terms of the site sale.

Aaron - great post. It's really makes one consider the differences between push and pull marketing. The mind map situation (as posted on the tools site versus the mention on your blog) is a perfect way to exemplify the differences between push and pull. Fresh ideas really drive success, and like anything in life, both push and pull marketing have their drawbacks and tremendous benefits.
Thanks for sharing.

An interresting question is if the things people links to is the same that they read. An example I have noticed for a site with research news but also fact pages about different kind of food.

People who blog about a receip they have made often link to our fact pages about for example ginger or blueberry. Since our fact pages is the best top ten at Google.se they sooner or later get position one.

But that people links a lot to that kind of content isnt the same that a lot of people search for it or that our RSS readers is interresting in it.

I wonder if Google when calculating the value of a link take also count things like that.

I think people give Google credit for being more sophisticated than they are. Having said that, it makes sense that they like the self reinforcing nature of search and relying their relevancy algorithms on older sites because it is hard for most webmasters to fake age and relying on older and self reinforcing positions requires new sites to be significantly more remarkable to gain traction.

There are downsides to this though...in an attempt to be remarkable many people will create various forms of information pollution.