I spend a lot of time discussing blog traffic techniques that focus on what you can do online. While online techniques should form the core of your strategy to grow your blog, ultimately it’s offline communications that will take your blog traffic to the next level. How does this happen? Through word of mouth.
We all know how powerful word of mouth is. If you look back over the history of the most successful websites, those that have millions of visitors, it’s usually because they generated tremendous offline word of mouth that resulted in a “tipping point” for their traffic. No amount of search traffic, or backlinks or social bookmarks or pay per click advertising, or any mechanical traffic method can match the pure power of word of mouth to bring new visitors to your blog.
The thing is, you can’t directly control word of mouth with a high degree of influence. That’s the nature of the beast. Word of mouth is powerful because it’s people talking to people, friends chatting with friends - and sometimes directly, sometimes more covertly - recommending something to each other. If word of mouth is heavily influenced or someone attempts to exert control over it, it loses it’s power because the recommendation becomes tainted. The credibility of the information is lost. People don’t take action when information appears to be a sales pitch, a con, or an advertisement.
There is an art to making use of word of mouth for marketing purposes and in this case, for marketing our blogs. While you can’t directly control word of mouth, you certainly can take action to encourage it. It’s a subtle art, finding ways to generate word of mouth for your blog. The best way of course is to do something worth talking about, and as I have mentioned in previous blog articles, this is the core of successful publicity - and ultimately publicity is all about generating word of mouth. I’ll assume you are already working hard to be a remarkable blogger, doing remarkable things to generate word of mouth.
One Powerful Word Of Mouth Technique
I’ll end this article with one very simple, yet potentially powerful technique to stimulate word of mouth for your blog. You may be surprised at how simple it is, yet most bloggers don’t do it. Have you guessed?
Talk about your blog.
Yep, it’s not complex, it’s not rocket science. You are the perfect conduit for word of mouth since you make up 50% of the key ingredients required - you need at least two people - and you are one. All you need to do is find one other person and you have all the ingredients necessary for word of mouth marketing.
Since you will be promoting something of your own making, it’s harder for you not to appear to be making a sales pitch, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still powerful. All you need to do is mention you are blogging to your friends, your family, even random strangers you meet as you live your life, and I guarantee they will be interested. The fact is, right now, just being a blogger is interesting because blogs are new, cool and still somewhat curious to most people.
Talking about your blog can generate exponential exposure, as your friends tell their friends about your blog, and so on and so on, creating a pyramid growth pattern of word of mouth. Remember too, this will be natural word of mouth, you won’t be involved once you have planted the seed of awareness in people. Your blog will just “come up” in conversation as they talk about you, or about the Internet or any topic that might trigger a thought about your blog. All you need to do is create the initial awareness.
I remember a recent trip I made to a local real estate agent when I was doing some research about property. The admin person at the office turned out to be a guy in a band who knew about blogs because he was a heavy user of MySpace. We talked for a few minutes and of course I told him about my blog. Now I don’t know whether he eventually visited my blog, but I did provide him the URL. If he did, he may even be reading this article right now and may have told some of his friends or family. That one conversation could have resulted in hundreds of people eventually coming to my blog as the word of mouth spread from person to person.
That’s the thing with word of mouth - you can never be sure exactly when or where or who is involved, all you can do is encourage it, then sit back and watch your blog traffic grow. What’s important is that if you aren’t talking about your blog now, if you are ashamed or shy or whatever, that you change this attitude and start being vocal. Tell everyone you know about your blog - it’s one the easiest traffic techniques you have available at no cost - and it can potentially be the most powerful.
Yaro Starak
Blog Traffic King
Technorati Tags: blog traffic king, offline blog marketing, word of mouth, yaro starakInternal Tags: blog traffic king, offline blog marketing, word of mouth yaro starak
