Building Buzz with Blogging

Continuing our application of the 6 Tenets of Customer Evangelism to the blogosphere, we're now on Tenet #3: Building the Buzz (for a chapter summary and descriptions of the 6 Tenets, go here).

The more buzzworthy the blog content, the more links we generate. The more links, the higher the Google rankings. Higher Google rankings mean more visibility, more hits to your blog, and ultimately more links. We also build buzz by finding the mega-hubs and individual hubs for our content (Fast Company and BusinessPundit come to mind for business and marketing), posting comments and catching people's attention. If we’re buzzworthy, we’ll get public notice on their blogs. And we benefit from real-time feedback; if a hub isn’t picking up on our content, it means our content isn’t buzzworthy. Blog hubs are quite astute in identifying buzzworthy content.

Jackie and Ben respond: That's exactly right. Our blog is the most popular portion of our web site; it gets double the hits of the second most popular page (typically the home page). What everyone had hoped to create with web sites, blogs are now achieving. A blog is much easier to update frequently than a traditional web site, so it will naturally create more interest.

The most buzzworthy blogs are the ones that pose the best questions. Scoble does this very well. He'll ask general industry questions like, "What position should we take here?" He's really interactive with the people who post comments and track-backs, which increases buzz even more.

For more thoughts on building blog buzz, here's a post of mine from December that quotes Phil Wolff: "Is your post linky enough?" It's been terrific advice for me as a relatively new blogger.

So in the interest of posing some good questions and generating some buzz... What have you found most effective in building blogging buzz? What's the future for traditional web sites? Are blogs effective buzz-builders for all types of businesses?

Comments

[George Nemeth]

A friend of mine calls it your "google number" - http://www.startribune.com/stories/308/4125662.html

[Marc Orchant]

These are both good techniques for building buzz for your blog. Another technique is posting comments on discussion boards frequented by your audience (and always including your blog's address in your signature line). Anything you can do to contribute to precipitate a conversation among people with similar interests is going to help build awareness of you and your blog.

[Peter Caputa]

I just realized you were saying the same thing here: http://brand.blogs.com/mantra/2003/12/if_you_build_it.html

good stuff!

[Peter Caputa]

I agree with all of this. I'd like to add that you don't need to be as popular as Scoble to generate buzz, though. For lesser known bloggers and blogs, it is more important to engage in conversations by linking to people and leaving comments on others blogs. Getting discovered is the trick. Going out to other blogs and commenting is the equivalent to saying hi to strangers in a coffee shop when you move to a new town.