7 Days to Turn Your Blog Into a Social Media Hub – Day 4: WordPress

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Source:  DannyBrown.me

This is the fourth part of a seven part mini-series looking at how and why to turn your blog into a social media hub. You’ll be able to find the complete series here.

So far we’ve looked at prepping the networks you’re going to be using for your hub, and what features you might want to consider. By now, you should have a pretty strong idea on what your hub is going to look like, so all we need to do now is find a home for it.

For that, the best option is setting yourself up with a self-hosted WordPress blog.

While there’s nothing wrong per se with free blogging options like Blogger or WordPress (the .com version; self-hosted WordPress is on the .org domain), they severely limit how much interaction you have with them from a user perspective. Designs are limited as well, and add-ons aren’t supported, and to make a truly effective social media hub on your blog, you need fluidity to design.

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7 Factors on Generating Traffic to Your Blog

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Source:  Problogger.net

Over the last few weeks I’ve had three conversations with readers regarding different sources of traffic.

In each case I had a number of email exchanges with each blogger (all on the same day) and ended up laughing to myself at the common theme but extremely different opinions being expressed by each of the bloggers.

In each case the bloggers had strong opinions (and experiences to back those opinions up) on what type of traffic was ‘best’ and how to get it.

1. In one case the conversation started with a blogger telling me that I focus too much upon social media traffic and not enough on traffic from search engines. Their niche didn’t work with social traffic but with search traffic they did best.
2. In another case the blogger told me that they’d been told to forget about search traffic in their niche and work more on building traffic from other sites and to convert it into ongoing traffic with newsletters.
3. In the last case a blogger told me that in their opinion the best type of traffic was social media traffic and they didn’t see the point in newsletters.

I was reminded through these conversations just how many different valid approaches there are to blogging. I also came away with a few thoughts that I thought I’d jot down here on the topic of driving traffic to blogs.

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Fan Management Lessons From The Grateful Dead

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I remember as a child seeing Dead Heads (what Grateful Dead fans are called) camping out in nearby shopping centers for weeks waiting for the Grateful Dead to come to the U.S. Air Arena.

Source:  Hypebot.com

“The Dead’s influence on the business world may turn out to be a significant part of its legacy. Without intending to… the band pioneered ideas and practices that were subsequently embraced by corporate America. One was to focus intensely on its most loyal fans. It established a telephone hotline to alert them to its touring schedule…They incorporated early on, and established a board of directors…They founded a profitable merchandising division.”

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