Chris is right about a lot of things, just not this one. Quite the contrary. Email is not going away, if for no other reason than it's ubiquitous. Almost everyone has an email address, and most of us have more than one. (At last count, I had three, and that's pared down from as many as five in times telemarketing data As you may know, AdAge is now housing and maintaining the Power 150, a compilation of the top marketing and media blogs. Of course, these days they go much further down the Long Tail than 150, even including this blog, which currently ranks at #504. (Hey, I'm proud and happy to be on the list!)
AdAge Editor, Jonah Bloom, sent a letter today announcing some changes to the list. These include the addition of Alexa site rankings and a reduction in the importance of weight given to Bloglines.
If you'd like to read Jonah's letter, read on.
Since we agreed to house and maintain Todd Andrlik's Power 150 this summer, we've been looking for ways to make it better and more useful. We added some badges that you could put on your site to show your ranking on the Power 150, we added an OPML file of the blogs on the list so that anyone who wanted to could track new entries across the 'sphere, and we expanded the list as requests to join flooded in--there are more than 500 blogs today.
I know, email is a pain
Nobody loves it. It's a commodity. RSS feeds are much cooler, and thank God for them. But email is as much a part of the fabric of the web as hyperlinks. And, according to eMarketer, its use far exceeds that of any other form of online media.
So, marketers will continue to use it
And the numbers of advertising dollars spent will continue to rise.
Email is not dead and it's not going away... at least not anytime soon. Let's nail the coffin shut on that discussion.
Most of what I share about how to blog I've learned by doing, usually by trial and error. The same can be said as it applies to growing traffic to my blogs over the years.
In the old days
Options were more limited. You could link to other bloggers via a blogroll in hopes they would respond in kind, reference other blogs in your posts, leave comments and trackbacks, claim your blog at Technorati and list your blog on the few blog directories that were available. And, yes, there was Google.
OK, so the list wasn't quite as limited
as I remember. But, still, that was then. This is now. Today, in addition to those tactics, conversational media has opened the doors to blog traffic growth much wider. Here are five additional steps you can take:
Twitter - If you don't have a Twitter account, you should. It's a great place to announce a just written blog post. My colleague John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing fame uses Twitter for just this reason. Don't limit yourself to Twitter either. Depending on how much time you have to invest, there are other presence/announcement apps available, including Pownce and Jaiku. (Of course, you have to grow a community around you for this to work.)