Six Ideas for Getting More Eyeballs on Your Blog

Image There are millions of blogs out there – more than 120 million on just Wordpress and Tumblr platforms – with this much content circulating cyberspace, getting your’s discovered is not a simple feat. A solid content-promotion strategy is just as important as the quality of the blog content itself. Luckily, there are a lot of ways to promote your blog and build your audience. Here are six ideas from me. Leave us a comment with the tips that work for you.

1. Make it easy for readers to come back. This may seem obvious, but if you want people to come back and read your next post, include an easy way for them to be notified when you publish. In blog platforms like Blogger, Wordpress and Tumblr you can easily add widgets for Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds or “subscribe to this blog” options. Also, readers who enjoy your content are likely to be connected to others who may like your content, so include social sharing options so that readers can tweet, like, + or even pin your post without having to leave the page.

2. Use keywords in your posts so that people searching for the topic you write about are more likely to find you through search engines. Search engines love blogs for their fresh content and drive the majority of traffic to blogs. In fact, many companies start their blog strictly for the purpose of search engine optimization and traffic that this can drive to the site. Don’t go crazy with keywords though. If it reads like you are writing for a search engine, your reader will probably lose patience and leave.

3. Call attention to like minded bloggers to expand your readership. This can be as simple as creating a blog roll on your site that lists links to similar blogs and influencers in your field. In the AEC world this could be blogs that inspire and inform you as well as those of your clients, your subconsultants, industry allies or even other blogs that support the same causes as you do. If you can help drive traffic to these blogs, they are more likely to promote yours. If these blogs influence you in some way, give them credit by writing about them. A feature story or even a guest post from someone you’ve done business with is likely something that they will want to promote through their own social media channels. This opens your blog up to their network of readers. Don’t know any AEC blogs? Here’s a list of influential blogs from this week’s AEC Social Media Twitter chat (#AECSM Tuesday 1pm PST).

4. Participate in other forums with a similar audience. Look for other blogs, publications, LinkedIn and Facebook groups that target the same demographic as you do. Spend some time reading these and when you have something to add or a question for the author, leave a thoughtful comment. You can also include a link to one of your blog posts when it is relevant to the topic, but be careful not to be overly self-promotional. No one likes to be spammed. Participating in other forums and contributing useful information and knowledge helps to build your reputation around the subject at hand and provides visibility for your firm and brand. If you leave a compelling, interesting comment in one of these forums, other visitors may be curious about you. Remember that the social web is a very connected space, so make sure your profile on each of these networks is up to date and includes a link back to your blog.

5. Approach the blogger, editor or community leader about writing a post for their publication or ask if they would reblog a post you’ve already written. All bloggers are hungry for good content, so if you have an essay or a point of view that is in line with their blog’s purpose they may just take you up on the offer. Not only are these opportunities good content for your social media channels, they help you gain exposure within the industry and a credible introduction to a new community.  Don’t forget to include a link to your blog in your byline.

6. Tap into a blogging community. Many companies develop their own proprietary blog. The “pros” of a customized blog is consistent branding and style with the firm’s website. The “cons” of having a customized blog is that you don’t have access to the sophisticated platform that these companies have created and are continually updating. I’ve watched clients with beautiful custom blogs get frustrated when each little tweak requires a whole new change order and days or even weeks of programmers’ time just to add a simple function. The Wordpresses and Tumblers of the social web give this to you for free. Your proprietary blog won’t be a part of a community of bloggers and you won’t have the advantages that these networks provide. On Wordpress, each time I post I’m informed of a handful of similar new posts that I may be interested in – and I often am interested in these. The community of bloggers can help you activate your blog with dialog. After all, only a very small percentage of internet users are actually content producers and content producers are the ones who are more likely to leave comments or ask questions. These blog networks are serving you up a community of very active and very vocal contributors. Seek out blogs of interest within your platform, follow them and follow back the blogger that follow you. Reciprocity goes a long way.

What do you think? Are there other tactics that work for you?

 

Blog Favorites for Week of July 23

London 2012 Olympic Park opens. After six years of planning, preparation and construction, the Opening Ceremony on July 27 will mark the start of the 2012 Summer Olympics.

The $1.1 billion Olympic Park contains several of the 2012 Games' biggest sporting venues, including the Olympic Stadium and the Zaha Hadid-designed Aquatics Centre, as well as the Olympic Village. And towering over the Olympic Park is Anish Kapoor's controversial ArcelorMittal Orbit observation tower, which is made from recycled steel and has received mixed reviews from observers.

Via Inhabitat

 

Park in Singapore shows what a river can do. Singapore is heavily dependent on Malaysia for its water supply but is now creating new sustainable parks designed to reduce its reliance.

Atelier Dreiseitl has designed a 62-acre Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park that recreates nature, transforming a 2.7-kilometer concrete-channel lined river into a 3-kilometer natural meandering system. At the same time, the new system slows down and stores some of the rainfall that hits the city-state. The park is a model for how cities can transform outmoded, broken systems into natural systems.

Via The Dirt

We need another kind of place. Tim Pittman blogs about how most of our current workplaces are designed around connection, and how mobile technology has affected our work and home lives.

“That invasion has collateral damage. The victim, as I see it, is the ‘third places’ that make our neighborhoods and cities vibrant, pleasant, and engaging places to live. These places, originally defined by Ray Oldenberg as places that are non-work and non-home, allow us to maintain time and space (both mentally and physically) outside the formal responsibilities of our daily lives. These are the spaces that let our minds wander and push us to develop productive social connections.” – Tim Pittman

Via Gensler on Cities

Transforming NYC’s High Line to public space. Mayor Mike Bloomberg this week announced the City’s acquisition of the High Line at the rail yards from CSX Transportation, Inc., a historic milestone for the High Line.

The elevated railway viaduct, originally built in 1934 to carry freight trains, now marks the latest step in a long history of CSX’s visionary support for the transformation of the High Line into a public park.

Via the High Line blog

Buildings that evolve with the city. Resilient cities need infrastructure that lasts and planning teams that are willing to step up to the plate. Developing cities that thrive through the ebb and flow of time are not simply about creating infrastructure that can persist, but about designing buildings that evolve as cities evolve.

The Tempe Transportation Center in Tempe, Arizona, has been constructed to adapt to the City’s needs for approximately 100 years. The longevity of the structure is depicted in its fundamental design plan as it focuses on combining resilient building materials with the natural benefits of a desert environment to create heat and water systems that are more energy efficient and spaces that provide natural sunlight and shading.

Via Sustainable Cities Collective

Weekly Design Blog Favorites: Week of July 16

Hyperspeed train from LA to SF. Tesla Motor’s CEO Elon Musk recently revealed his plans for a new green vehicle, dubbed the “Hyperloop,” that would transport people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 30 minutes flat. Musk says the new transit system would be twice as fast as a plane, three to four times faster than a bullet train, and entirely powered by solar energy.

Via Inhabitat

Urban sprawl affects drought. The U.S. is currently experiencing its worst drought in over half a century, and suburban sprawl is only exacerbating the impact of the drought.

Large residential lots need significantly more water than neighborhoods built to a more walkable scale, contributing to water shortages. In addition, there is more pavement around watersheds that sends billions of gallons of rainwater into streams and rivers as polluted runoff, rather than into soil as groundwater. Sprawl and smart growth both need to be considered in how to move toward a more resilient future.

Via Sustainable Cities Collective

Gold Nugget Awards for Orange County firm. LPA of Irvine, California, won three Gold Nugget Awards – an award that honors creative achievements in architectural design and land use planning for residential, commercial and industrial projects.

The Student Recreation Center at Cal State Northridge received the Grand Award for Greenest Sustainable Commercial Project. The Multidisciplinary Building at Palomar College earned a Grand Award for Best Educational Project. The third Gold Nugget Award was for SoCal Campus for Southland Industries, a successful interior renovation of a 1970s warehouse into a thriving, collaborative office space for the company’s mechanical engineers and detailers.

Via LPA Inc. Blog

Preserving the Manhattan Project. What started as a small research project to develop an atomic weapon in advance of Germany grew to include thousands of scientists working around the clock and in laboratories across the country.

These laboratories retain architectural integrity and are eligible for National Register of Historic Places and National Historic Landmark designation. The Manhattan Project is part of the National Trust’s portfolio of National Treasures, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation seeks to designate these sites as the Manhattan Project National Historic Park.

Via National Trust for Historic Preservation Blog

What design blogs do you follow? Leave a comment with links to your favorite design blogs and you could win a free copy of Social Media in Action: Comprehensive Guide for Architecture, Engineering, Planning and Environmental Consulting Firms.

Could Sweden’s Twitter Strategy Work for Your Firm?

Are you like 88% of the A/E professionals we polled who are using social media to position their firms' experts? Perhaps you should consider Sweden’s approach.

In December Sweden democratized their Twitter account by giving control of @Sweden to a new Swede each week. (You may have seen the headlines about the when Sonja Abrahamsson stirred controversy with her less-than-politically-correct tweets). This approach is now being adopted by other countries with the Netherlands as the latest to try it out.

Granted, Sweden's objective, to entice tourists to visit, doesn’t directly relate to the field of landscape, architecture and engineering professional services. But the concept of associating a personality and their particular point of view with a brand, could be a great way to showcase the many facets of expertise within your organization.

If you have willing and qualified participants (and please be honest with yourself, not everyone is capable of being a thought leader – it takes knowledge, drive and communications skills), ask yourself if you trust your subject-matter experts to operate the account in a responsible way – professional but personal and gaffe free.

In addition to building your firm’s reputation for each of its areas of specialization, this approach could be a fun way to get more employees and leaders involved in your firm’s social media program. Offer your operators solid guidelines and tips so they are communicating effectively. Help them out by scheduling the first few tweets with them, so they can get a chance to learn from you and overcome any fear of tweeting. For those who are already using social media personally, encourage them to amplify what they are doing for the firm’s account by talking about it and retweeting through their personal accounts -- maybe the firm will pick up some new followers as well.

Clearly, this idea is not for every firm, but for the right organization it could be fun. What do you think?

If you decide to try this out, please let us know so we can stay tuned!

Weekly Design Blog Favorites: July 9, 2012

Adventure playgrounds. Brendan Crain blogs how the playgrounds have changed and the how the “play structure” has become something that doesn’t use the child’s imagination and play.

“Over the past few years, we have siloed different types of play within playgrounds, just as we have siloed different types of uses in cities. Pieces of play equipment that might be transformed into fantastical alternate worlds when jumbled together are isolated (a slide here, a tire swing there), underlining that each piece is meant to be used in one specific way. But research and support have been mounting for years to back up what many of us feel on a gut level: these sanitized playscapes are junk.”

Via Project for Public Spaces blog Related: The Strange Case of a Suburban Park

Architecture and a more connected future. What role does architecture play in this technology-driven age? More company leaders are looking to the future when it comes to workplace design.

“The conventional architect is becoming extinct. I believe that the world will cease to be built out of concrete, steel and glass. New buildings must mirror our current reality, which consists of bytes of information, shared technology and interconnectedness. Construction will evolve into something which is beyond architecture. A building should empower people through the materials it use.”-- James Law, CEO and founder of Hong Kong-based firm Cybertecture, believes that great design can inspire creativity and increase productivity.

Via Mashable Related: Cybertecture

Vision for Houston’s bayous. Kevin Shanley blogs that in the last 40 years, more grassroots organizations and programs seek to protect and enhance Houston bayous and reduce flooding in environmentally sustainable ways, supporting the vision of landscape architect Arthur Comey.

While Comey’s vision has demonstrated how parks and greenspaces can improve the economy, environment and health of the city, there is more work to do. Now is the perfect opportunity to purchase distressed properties along the city's bayous in the hopes of further revitalizing and expanding Houston's parks and greenspaces before those properties are sold for development or redevelopment.

Via APA's Sustaining Spaces Blog First published on SWA Bayou By Us blog

Urban biking a global trend. In cities across the United States, bicycles are becoming an increasingly popular form of urban transportation. A survey of 55 major metropolitan areas in the U.S. found that bicycle commuting rates increased, on average, 70 percent between 2000 and 2009.

The growing popularity of urban cycling has led to a proliferation of bicycle infrastructure in many cities. Over the past decade, Washington D.C. has laid down over 50 miles of bicycle lanes, New York is preparing to launch bike sharing programs and Los Angeles has temporarily prohibited cars from driving on designated streets for certain Sunday afternoons,

Via The Dirt