Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

Maryam and Robert Scoble are now on stage at the Blog Business Summit. they’re talking in simple terms how to blog. It’s entertaining and fun so far.

1. Blog because you want to… Robert pressured Maryam to blog for some time, and she resisted until she was ready. (I’ve done that to my love for the past year… not sure when she’ll start blogging, but I guarantee it’ll put my blog to shame when she does.)
2. Read other blogs… If you want to be a blogger, you’ve got to read other blogs. If you want to be a thought leader, read what others are thinking.
3. Pick a niche you can own (be different)… Non-technical people (Robert calls us all geeks) interact with the world through a search engine. If you believe that people negotiate the internet through a search engine, you need to come up on search terms. People who focus content on a single niche gathers a much bigger audience than a large or defocused audience. And, by the way, Robert says there are 100,000 blogospheres, so you can find a niche more easily than you might think you could.
4. Link to other blogs… When Robert started at Microsoft, he linked to a bunch of people who hated Microsoft - it made them know that Microsoft listened to them. And it diffused issues. You can also see who links to you easily - and it’s human behavior to want to know what others are saying about you. You should go over and comment on those posts, and get more link love.
5. Admit mistakes… Maryam was afraid to start blogging because she read Robert’s comments and saw the personal attacks. But she loved how Robert admitted mistakes - it gained him credibility in the blogosphere.
6. Write good headlines… The world is moving from feeds to keyword searches, in order to find information about very specific information. Think of how people scan lists to find information. Great headlines make you stand out.
7. Use other media… Techcrunch is a good blog to look at in terms of “blog 2.0″ - there are graphics, logos, screen captures, etc. Consider podcasts and video in order to bump up your credibility. Halley Suitt mentioned busblog as a master of using photos in blogs. (She has a great post up now on the IBM presentation from this morning, by the way.)
8. Have a voice… A passion makes people want to connect to you.
9. Get outside the blogosphere… Go to conferences, meet people. Coming to the blog business summit and other blog conferences, you’ll gain relationships that can turn into power structures later. And something that you can blog about. This is where some of the PR people go wrong. (Why aren’t there flocks of PR people here meeting with people in this room?)
10. Market yourself… Robert put about 1400 business cards into a book when he moved from Microsoft, and most of the cards didn’t have the URL of their blogs on their cards. Do the basics of marketing for yourself. Bonus tips…
11. Write well… Do a spell check and grammar check before you post. Check your state of mind, Maryam says, before you post emotionally. She always writes and then waits a bit before hitting publish. Robert recommends mixing up the length of paragraphs in order to grab attention.
12. Expose yourself… but not necessarily Chris Pirillo style. A lot of corporate types are reserved - and are erring too far to the safe side of blogging. If you stay too far to the safe side, you’ll never gain readers. If you become a real human being, you will make interesting connections that you may not have made otherwise. As you move to being more interesting, you’ll have more engaged readers.
13. Help other people blog… Share and build community. Bring new voices into the blogosphere.
14. Engage with commenters… Too many people neglect comments. Robert recommends commenting on others’ blogs in order to get them to realize you have something to say, and they may link back to you.
15. Keep your integrity… You are what you appear to be, and if you’re taking advertising or are taking free product, disclose it. Never try to hide what you are or who you are, or when people find out you don’t have integrity, they will ‘out you’ to the world. Robert publishes his cell phone on his blog so people can do fact checking before they publish information that he’s commented on.

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