One click sign-up: People read your posts mostly through emails and RSS. Make it easy for them to do so—sign up with free services such as FeedBlitz and FeedBurner to manage all your sign-ups and mailings automatically. And place the forms, chiclets, links and icons they provide on all your pages and even emails you send for your readers to subscribe with one click.
Maximize your storefronts: Nike and Starbucks generate volumes by ensuring a presence in all marketplaces to make for easy access; links to your blog are your storefronts. Make these present on as many websites, blogs, comments you leave and emails you send—never be too far from your customer, who is the reader in this case.
The 4th ‘P’
It is usually the price, but content being free on blogs is almost a given. At the same time, the fourth P is relevant for adding other ingredients to the marketing mix, and these could be:
Positioning: Is your blog about getting high traffic to generate advertising revenue or catering to an audience seeking quality content? “Why does someone visit a blog? Because they want to learn something. My audience is the thinking Indian. Quality causes stickiness. If I only wanted traffic, I would be doing very different things,” says Bhatt. For Lalwani, his blog achieves its purpose when someone reads it and leads to some consulting business; he does not need to be in the numbers game like Agarwal does.
Presentation: Keep your layouts neat and easily readable. Let not the untidy, garish blogs be your inspiration. Try to write good copy, with catchy headlines and minimum language errors.
Passion: Be passionate about what you write—it is like a book writer who has to feel for the subject, to be with it for years while writing it.
Patience and Persistence: “If you are on the quality path, it will be a long and lonely marathon. Do you have it in you to undertake it?” asks Bhatt.
Did you have a good blog lying packed away because you could not get readers? It may be time to do some spring cleaning, and start off again.
Ajay Jain is a technology analyst and journalist who blogs at www.TechGazing.com. Write to lounge@livemint.com