Increase Your Blog Traffic: Top 5 Book Rec's

"He's a great writer. Smart. He should have a wider blog reach. Any ideas?"

This is the kind of question I've been asked many times over.

I often write long emails in response. Because increasing blog traffic isn't simple.

Okay, it's not hard either, for the blogger who is evocative, funny, or some kind of "expert." Still, there are principles and fascinating case studies and techniques and... you get the idea.

To save me from long emails, what I really need is a post to point to that says, "Here are my top five book recommendations that will answer your question. I promise if you read these books you will increase your blog traffic. If not exponentially, at least respectably."

Thus, this post. When I was a wee little blogger (and in many ways I still am! :), these were the books I read that changed everything for me. All right, one is a book I'm reading RIGHT NOW, because... well, I'm still interested in new ideas on the subject.

Here goes, without much explanation...

1. Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers. This is the very first blogging book I ever read, right before I started a blog. It helped convince me that blogging was the way to go. It's a great foundational resource. Lots of tips.

2. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Cool ideas and case studies about being part of groups. Which every blogger really needs to be (unless the blogger has no interest in increasing blog traffic).

3. And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture. Fascinating stories about stories and web experiments that have gone viral. It'll spark your creativity. At least that's what it did for me.

4. Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today's Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves. What Penenberg did to promote this book is as good as the book itself. Really.

5. Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust. A lot of this is just good business sense, framed for the web. Still worth a read. (Okay, and favorite advice from the book: promote others 12 times as much as you do yourself.)

Curious... have you read any of these? What do you think? Any others you'd recommend, so I'd have to change the title of this post to the top 6 or 7 or... ?


Trust Agents photo, by L.L. Barkat.

I Give Thanks for You, and You

Not long ago, I read a sweet post over at Glynn Young's. He took this Thanksgiving season as a chance to celebrate some of his fellow bloggers.

I liked that idea— to use this season in celebration of others. So I thought to celebrate my two girls today by sharing their writing (and a drawing) with the world.

"I Love You, Mommy"

The crickets chirp, the
dog barks, the sounds
arise, the sounds of
dark.

— by Sonia, 10, for me on a day I was sad

• • •

The beginning of a story...

Thunder rolls in the distance. Lightning flashes. The sky is grey above the lands. On the mountains to the north is a stone fortress. Valleys of scrub and small trees, always seeming to be the same shade of dark green, sit between them and the last mountain— a tall hill in the land of forests and lakes.

A castle of grey stone sits upon it. To the west, where the mountains breathe fire, in an open plain surrounded by stones and burning rivers, a castle of obsidian mimics the mountains themselves.

And far, far, farther to the north— where freezing sleet and snow turn the ground polished and blind and white, where the whistling wind is never stopped, where the ice has lain since the beginning of the world itself, a towering fortress, almost a cathedral, spires and arches, domes and spikes, seems to grow out of the land itself— for the whole thing is made of ice.

— by Sara, 12

In the Tree Drawing, by Sara. Used with permission.

____

Come share your Thanksgiving reflection or tradition at HighCallingBlogs. Just drop your link in our comment box...

Help Me Tweet You

The post got 1200+ views. Almost 200 came through Twitter.

That's significant.

Which means it wouldn't hurt to make oneself more tweetable. Here's my new tool of choice: Tweetmeme.

Okay, load it up and help me tweet you. I am SO waiting to click that cool little button and send some traffic your way.

(To load Tweetmeme for Blogger, go here To load Tweetmeme for Wordpress, go here) Note that the new Blogger Layouts template seems to be problematic when trying to get Tweetmeme's generated code. I've written to Tweetmeme and will post their answer here, if they provide one.


Rain in the Pine picture by L.L. Barkat.