Growing your Blog Audience

Each of you should have a blog post measuring the reach of your blog and the red clustrmap dots.  We did this on Monday. Some of you began your campaign to grow your audience by commenting on blogs.  We will continue this today.

We have discussed the difference between spam comments and valuable comments.  Remember that a valuable comment builds on the conversation.  Your goal for this assignment is to create comments that make people interested to read more about your thoughts.

Building an audience is one of the most important skills we will work on.  Nearly every product, service, and idea is sold via the web now.  You MUST know how to get your work out there to survive and eat.  This blog is practice for that.

I'm also hoping to raise the level of work on your google profile.  For many of you your twitter feed is your #1 result on google.  For many of you this is NOT good.  Seriously.  And remember, swearing is bad.

Today you will do three things:
1. Write blog posts to increase the quality of your blog (see topics below).  You need posts that people will link to, email their friends, post on twitter.  We want people to be saying "Read this!".
2. Comment, comment, comment.  Using google you will find blogs to comment on.  You will leave comments everywhere.  You will make the comments interesting and they will extend the conversation. Be sure to leave your blog address in the comment info!!!
3. If you find an interesting blog post you will write about and link back to the original blog.  This is "polite blogging".  This is how traffic gets generated.  "I read this great blog article about...".

Suggested blog posts (remember to include links, a cool title, embed video/images if needed).  Choose one or all:
1. If you are a football fan: Explain when you would punt the ball and when you "go for it" so anyone can understand it.
2. If you are a cheerleader: Is cheerleading becoming more dangerous?  Describe how cheerleading has changed over time.  Where is the line between OK and too dangerous?
3. If you are a musician:  How have headphones and iPods changed music?
4. If you are an artist/photographer: How has the internet changed how we view art?  Does the internet help or hurt art?
5. If you eat: What should we eat?  Should we be allowed to eat whatever we want?  What if we know what we eat is slowly killing us?
6. If you breath: Whats in the air that you breath?  Is it safe to breath?