The invention of the phrase “Web 2.0″ was always a thinly disguised publicity stunt.
Supposedly Web 1.0 was about the type of websites first on the Net which were simply publishing content to their readers but nice clean web 2.0 is a new type of website that allows and encourages feedback and involvement.
And that sounds fine until you realise that the first types of website were Bulletin boards – now known as forums which are 100% user generated where feedback is sometimes, er, energetic and feedback is frequently fast and furious.
Anyhow we are stuck with the term and “2.0″ is even detaching itself because today I saw a book called “Barack 2.0″
Here at Expert List Building we are taking the “2.0″ tag as meaning “social” and we are taking a look at how you can make your blog more social.
A few obvious things to start off with:
- Enable commenting on your blog – many marketers want to control what appears and that’s natural. You have to consider your branding in all that you publish. Relax and let Akismet do it’s work!
- Ask people to guest post
- Join in Blog carnivals
And then get to the less obvious more tech side of the socialisation of your blog
- Use plugins such as Sharethis or Sociable to allow readers to bookmark or syndicate your posts to their friends
- A twitter plugin is so important that it’s worth mentioning seperatley
- RSS syndication is crucial and a way to encourage it must be part of your blog and the way you do this may depend on design and taste issues. If you take a look at the top left of this blog you’ll see the “Add to Any” subscription for RSS feeds – feel free
- And then notice the “Contact Us” option on the menu – that is provided by the Contact 7 plugin and gives a good way to er, contact us.
- Next we get to “Join Us – You are Welcome” – this is an invite to opt-in to our email list.
- Looking over to the right sidebar you can see another way to join our opt-in email list. This is a different plugin – MaxBlogPress Optin Form Adder
- The “Subscribe to comments” also encourages people to join in and take an interest rather than just surf by
We could continue but enough already, huh? The social dimension of your blog has to be a prime consideration of all you do.
The more you syndicate your content the greater will be your reach and influence leading to more leverage and profitability.
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Filed under Blogs by on Mar 9th, 2009. Comment. 
Twitter is remarkable. It is a (nearly) new social networking site with many uses.
Amongst others – chatting to friends, asking questions, reporting news events…
Because Twitter involves answering (or ignoring!) the question “What are you doing?”
And you may be wondering what has this got to do with list-building?
Here’s what…
- Image via CrunchBase
When you join Twitter you look and see who you know is already there. Twitter like other social networking sites allows you – in fact almost compels you to invite friends via their email address.
Most people operate a kind of reciprocity – you do them a favour and they will be open to doing something for you
In twitter this works to build your list by invitation. Many people on twitter will automatically follow you if you follow them.
Simply by joining twitter and “following” a boat load of people you can build up lots of “followers”.
Are these people the same as those who subscribe to your ezine?
They may be. They could be people who simply respond to your email saying follow me on twitter.
In that case the purpose
- Image via Wikipedia
of the “follow” is to build the relationship you already have with them.
Others may be totally uninterested in your marketing but may just follow you as a person
Yeah really!
So you can build a list on Twitter but twitter is so new it’s not clear to anyone yet how that can be used in a marketing context.
Feel free to follow us anyhow! As we work more things out we’ll blog about them here and we’ll tweet too!
http://twitter.com/AlexNewell
http://twitter.com/KathyBaker
P.S. If you want a simple guide to Twitter before you try it then just download this PDF : twitter
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Filed under twitter by on Feb 10th, 2009. 2 Comments.
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