At the ACA conference this year in Atlanta, there was a renewed interest in blogging, so I thought I’d put together a list of resources for the investors looking to grow their readership. As social media and personal branding reach a wider audience, I think its a great idea for investors to blog, tweet, and comment their way to a broader reach with entrepreneurs.
Commenting
I judge blogs by the quality of their comments (which doesn’t say much for this one!), and to keep up there are a couple tools that can make your life easier.
First, get rid of your blogs commenting engine and install a third party commenting system like disqus, intense debate, or even facebook connect. I use disqus. The benefit is that your readers won’t have to fill out their information each time they comment, and with system like discuss they’ll get notified via email each time a new comment comes in. See Fred Wilson’s site AVC . He has very active discussions and a great community, but the only way he could possibly keep up with the conversation is by replying to comments via email on his blackberry!
Next, you probably want to know everything thats happening in comment discussions across the blogosphere, and BackType can handle that for you easily. You can subscribe to recieve alerts anytime a particular term is mentioned in the comments section of a blog, and you can even get email updates on comments you’ve made on other sites that might not use a commenting engine like the ones mentioned above.
Distribution
Building traffic by word of mouth and by google can be a slow proposition. Lots of people use 3rd party tools to get further distribution.
Digg is probably the most popular, but Delicious has a very tech focused crowd that could also drive traffic. With Delicious, you can just bookmark and tag your own post to make Stumbleupon, Technorati (more of a blog directory), and Reddit may also help get your writing out to a larger audience, but you’ll have to research the various techniques for doing so, because each community is different.
Its one of the fastest growing social networks, the conversations are real time, and the messages are quick. All of these factors point to Twitter being an integral part of your blogging approach. You can use it to tweet out each time you write a post, follow up with discussions, or to find new people that can feed you interesting ideas to write about. I’ll follow up with a post about which people to follow on twitter.
Analytics
To track your traffic progress, the standard seems to be Google Analytics. Sign up for an account, copy and pasted the javascript code, and you’re ready to go. I also like adding MyBloglog to my site, to get a better visual representation of whos visiting. MyBlogLog has some light analytics, but its really much better for seeing the pictures on the right hand side of your blog of all your visitors (see mine on the right)
Reading
If you’re still reading RSS feeds, then Google Reader is the way to go. Its got amazing keyboard shortcuts, along with powerful sharing features. Its definitely the best tool for processing mass amounts of information. The only shortcoming I’ve found is that it can’t handle password protected RSS feeds, in which case you can just download NetNewsWire for those feeds.
After overdosing on information through Google reader you may come to a may organic process of discovering and reading articles. Twitter is a great way to get news from a hand selected group of people that you find interesting, while Instapaper is a simple easy way to save those articles for later. Instapaper’s bookmarklet “read later” lets you copy the article to your “instapaper”, so it can be read through their beatiful simple text reader, or their iphone app.
My name is Evan Bartlett, and I'm all about connecting people and finding better ways to do things. Every day life should be approached with the eye of an entreprenuer, so here's where I'll hash out my ideas on the intersection of sales, community, and tech (product)!
