Make your blog Pamela Anderson hot!!!

How to make your blog popular is what I talked about at Barcamp Bangalore 4 in the Bloggers collective.

I didn’t talk much about the search engine optimizing, regular keywords management and other regular tech stuff but more about the real world ways of making others interested to read your blog. I called it a back door entry trick to make your blog popular. A la Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton and Rakhi Sawant. I had power point slides beamed on the background with just one point per slide about which I talked.

Write good stuff or wait till you do!!

We don’t always get everything right when we start writing. It takes a lot of writing till you get the hold of your style and a feel of your readers. That’s when you feel confident and till then its best not to popularize your blog. Let your close friends circle know about it and if others find your blog by some other way, well and good. But it’s always good not to risk the chance of a chunk of readers going away from your blog only coz your blog is not up to the mark. Once you are confident, let the world know. Till then be patient.

Be more human

This point is more applicable for tech blogs. Even though you are wrting about something very technical, try to give it a human face. Build use cases which a common man can understand around the subject your are talking about which will make him interested in reading your post. I really like the way google and yahoo talks about their newly launched features by building a story around it. I consider Robert Scoble’s iphone review as the best coz he gave a human face to it. Instead of just listing down its pros and cons he explained the stuff by telling a story of he and his son going for a walk with the new iphone, taking pictures and making calls.

Keep it short and sweet

Keep the posts short and sweet which will facilitate an easy and quick reading for your reader. Many times I have skipped long posts as usually I don’t have patience to read through long stuff; I read at my leisure time at work and my objective is to cover as much as possible. Respect your reader’s time. The best way of presenting a long post is by cutting it up into different parts and by posting the episodes one by one every day. One thing you have to keep in mind is that the episodes should end in a way that will grip the user to wait for the next part. A la soap operas.

Cross link your posts

Try to cross link your stories whenever possible so that readers who have come to your blog lately wont miss out on your old stories. You can also cross link posts for reference purposes so that readers don’t go unaware of what you are talking about.

Never forget to garnish

Add loads of masala to your stories so that it makes an interesting read. I always cook up stories around what I’m intending to talk about and package it as a bollywood flick.

Interesting side bar stuff

Use your sidebar area to offer more stuff for your reader to go through even though you haven’t posted anything new on your blog. I have put a google reader feed which shows all the latest posts from my favorite blogs, a tag cloud which shows popular keyword/topics about what I talk about etc. Your reader should feel that if he comes to your site there is always something for him to go through.

Make your reader comment

After a point of time you wouldn’t actually appreciate comments like “Good post” and you “Write well”, but you expect more reader participation through the proceedings. To make sure your reader puts in constructive comments or start off a discussion, your posts have to be written in such a way that the reader also has something to share with you. Have the question “Why should anyone comment on my post?” in mind and write stories accordingly. Don’t let your stories be closed ended.

Have a partner in crime

Find a friend who can help you in putting in comments of your choice, moderate a discussion or spark off a controversy

Reply to their comments

Make sure that you reply to all your reader comments. The fact that you are listening to him will boost his ego and makes him come back.

Return the favour

Visit your readers’ blogs, read and comment. There are two advantages. One is that your reader will be happy to get a new reader for himself. Second is that if you can be a noticeable one on his blog, his readers will also visit your blog.

Opposite sex attract

If you are a girl and if you comment on guys’ blogs, there is a sure shot chance of he and his readers coming to your site.

Link them up

Your reader feels good to have his blog linked up on another blog. He feels more connected to your blog and will be a regular visitor.

Write about them

Writing about your reader and his blog makes him happier of course.

Shameless Self Selling

Tell each and every person about your blog. Don’t feel shy. Put it on your email signature, messenger status, biz card etc. Whenever you talk to someone try to bring in the subject of your passion for writing and let them know your blog url. The very reason that I have put my blog url on every slide on this presentation is for the same reason.

Make them click on your name

Have you ever searched for the word “here” in google? It will give you “Download Adobe Reader” and “Download Flash player” as the results. Its coz many sites have linked up the word “here” (Download here/Get here) to those download locations. Whenever a word is linked to a particular url, Google understands it as the word has something to do with the location. And hence it indexes the url under that word. Keeping this in mind, if you want your site to come up on the google search results for your name, you have to make sure that it’s your name which is linked to your blog. When you comment on a wordpress blog, it normally links up your name to the website url you have entered. But on blogspot you tend to login and hence it links up your name to the blogger profile page. Whenever possible use the “other” option in blogspot and just put in your name and url.

Write about Shilpa Shetty

As you know she is currently in news for all the good and bad reasons and one of the most searched names on the web, you wouldn’t want to miss out the chance of your blog coming up on the search results when someone searches for her. Write about stuff that are currently in news or hype. The iphone, google phone, orkut (if you are in India), facebook, twitter, fake steve jobs etc are good choices to talk about.

Give them a reason to come back

At the end of the day it’s all about the quality of the stuff you write about. Give your reader a good reason to come back. Whatever gimmicks you do, there is no way you should compromise on the quality of your articles. All these antics are just to let people know about your blog and make them come back. But if you cant really hook them up after a point of time, consider your efforts have all gone waste.

I concluded the talk by saying

If you still don’t get what I’m saying, read my blog.

I told the audience that the whole talk of mine was also a part of the shameless self selling of my blog and they got it instantly.

Some of my audience have mentioned about my talk on their blogs

bcb4.text.out, BCB4 log, BCB4 - Nearing the EOD

Thats me on a photo blog

Best of both worlds

And there is a podcast too

BCB4 Podcast (Please excuse my terrible accent)

BCB4 Day 2

May be my enthusiasm got killed on the first day, I was late to the BCB4 venue the second day. I was anyway ready with my presentation in case if I could find the bloggers scene better. It was around 11am when I reached and I saw all the bloggers collective slots taken. But when I looked in detail I noticed that there was this 4:30 pm slot available as the session which was booked there got moved to another room. So I quickly wrote my name there. Then I scanned through all the other sessions but didn’t find anything interesting. So I once again decided to hang around with the bloggers and get to know the crowd.

When I went inside the room a talk on ‘how to protect your images on the net’ session was on. The speaker was showing all the possible ways on how to make it difficult for a shady person to flick your pictures from the net but he was constantly reminding us that pics on the net are never safe. Mr AJ was once again there to take the questions and answering and trying to constantly confront the speaker’s every tip to save images from theft. Arun Ramarathnam of Sathyam had a point here saying he wouldn’t mind people using his pictures as it will just make him more popular, or atleast he will know that he was doing a good job which even I thought is right. The talk also went to the levels of if anyone would sue Microsoft if they flick your images and some of the guys were up for it.

Arun then showcased his mobile blog and explained how he does it which was very informative. He explained the advantages of mobile picture blogging vs the normal pictures getting uploaded on flickr. The candidness and the spontaneity did the trick in his case.

We went for lunch after that and met up Prayank of Adobe for a brief talk. I showed my card with his favorite Gapingvoid cartoon on it and he wanted to know where I got it printed etc. I asked him about AIR on iphone and he said he knows nothing about it. Some guys from the UI collective came to me and asked me if I will be there for their sessions but as I had my blogging session in mind, I had to politely decline their invite. We also collected the BCB4 T shirts sans the sponsor’s logo. The sponsors were kind enough to agree to not to put their logo on them but personally I like my BCB T shirt with a multi national’s logo on it. It looks better then.

After lunch it was Thejesh’s session about search engine optimization of blogs and I found it interesting. Most of the stuff he talked were things I knew so I could be an active part of the discussions and connect to the speaker as well as the audience. I noticed that the crowd was more focused and serious bloggers and the discussions and getting more healthy. The best part was that Mr AJ was nowhere in sight.

Arun Ram once again cam back to talk about this photo blog but I think it was just an extension to his previous talk on his mobile blog. Nothing new. The came Sean talking about his Babajob and Babalife. I didnt understand a word what he said as I couldnt follow his accent and I was thoroughly bored.

At that point I noticed one more attempt by the lead of the collective to push in her favorite sessions which were not listed on the board outside. She wrote those sessions on the whiteboard and asked the crowd if they were be interested in attending them. She even asked me to club with Thejesh and finish off my talk. This was again irritating for me coz this was once again against the things I’ve used to seeing at the barcamps. I went to the whiteboard and I wrote “How to make your blog Pamela Anderson hot at 4:30 by Umesh”. I think that worked, I could evoke curiosity from the audience. I saw people reading it and discussing. One guy asked me

Are you going to talk about Pamela Anderson?

I replied

Not only her, but also Paris Hilton and Rakhi Sawant.

He was super thrilled. Next time when the collective lead asked the audience about their favorite talk, many of them pitched in for me.

At 5.30 PM, ie one hour after my scheduled time, I got my session started. I was sure that by that time people would have been tired and so I kept my talk really simple with almost no tech jargons but more humane and of course more spice and humour. I also didnt disappoint those guys who were expecting a talk about Pamela Anderson... I talked a bit about them too. I talked about the tricks they can resort to make people come back to their blogs; how to provoke them and make them comment etc. I gave real life examples, and also called out to do some shameless self promotion to bring in people to read. By the end of my talk the audience was relaxed and was cracking out with me and they also understood that the whole point of my talk was to promote my own blog. It was actually a good moment for me as I considered that moment as a giant leap from the twitter talk I gave at BCB3. Thanks to all of them who waited for my talk and took part in the fun talk we had.

I attended one more talk on how blogging affects other industries. The speaker was on how tech magazines and news papers were feeling the heat from the bloggers who were doing a better job than them.

Nicky and I were exhausted by the end of it and we went for a coffee and some picture shooting. We then headed towards the auditorium and the closing meet was on, along with Shourya and Jayanth on their guitars. Even though most of the people claimed that BCB4 and the collectives idea were a success there were also people who had my points to talk about. After the crazy good bye session, the unband collective started showing off their magic by Shivku also joining them with the “Summer of 69”. We all left the place promising each other to meet again in November for BCB5.

Pictures courtesy Nicky, MyCameraAndEye, Venky, Jace, Arul Jegadish and Peeveeads

BCB4 Day 1

The first day of Barcamp is always crowded and chaotic and Barcamp Bangalore 4 was no different. It’s the second day the Creme de la creme of geeks turn up and most people who are serious about the camp let others speak on the first day and save their talk for the second day. There was a laid back attitude for many people this time as if the passion had gone away. Or may be they were tired or was in the been there done there mood.

After the usual noisy introduction session at the IIMB auditorium, I decided to note down the interesting sessions so that I don’t miss them and to my surprise I found very less of them on the board. So as planned I decided to hang around with the bloggers and attend other sessions whenever I discover them. As BCB4 was the first collectives edition ever, nobody knew how it was going to work. I found the idea good as there was no strict organizer decided taxonomy of the sessions, but the community decides it before getting to the venue. Nice idea. But coz of that most of the sessions got scattered around and at one point of there were many talks happening, the chances of me missing sessions were more than the previous events. And as the collectives needed sessions to fill up their time slot, a lot of low quality stuff happened. May be it was coz of the first time it was tried. It will take some time for public to get into the whole idea.

Nicky and I went to the bloggers collective and sat for the podcasting session. The speaker was a first timer I guess but he was trying his best to show how a simple podcasting can be done. Kiruba of The Kiruba Show was also there to encourage him and give out tips but to our dismay what happened was literally a high handedness of some guys from the Bangalore blogger group over the crowd and the speaker. It was all chaotic again. There was this guy, who called himself AJ (!!) standing next to the speaker and not allowing him to talk at all. He chose to answer all the questions the public had and cut off discussions which were happening at the other end at his own will. That was something which I saw for the first time at an event like the barcamp. I don’t know if those guys were first timers there but the basic premise of barcamp is that everyone is a participant. Its not seminars we conduct, it’s a group talk. We walked out of that room and I was seriously having second thoughts of talking to a crowd like that the next day.

Luckily where we ended up was at the startup collective. Karthik from Picsquare gave a very nice talk about how they started their service and what all did they do to bootstrap their startup. How their business work and what are their future plans. Picsquare provides unlimited free storage, sharing and ordering digital photo prints in various sizes. He took a lot of questions from the audience and it turned out to be a very well done interactive talk. Kiruba was also there and I didn’t have to guess too much the reason behind why he got out of the bloggers room.

Sujai took over the mic to talk about how he bootstrapped his Shloka telecom. He made the sessions extremely interesting by his usual sense of humour; he revisited his BCB3 wisecracks that he had a deal with his employees that they will be put up at Infosys for some time so that they get married and then they come back. Someone asked him how did he conceptualise the product in the first and he said.

People ask me why I got into wireless and I tell them that coz that’s the only thing I know out and out.

The lunch was better than the last time. Met Chirayu Patel of Span Across and had a very interesting talk. Nicky had supposedly used their product and he commented that its very usable. Nice guy to talk to. Should definitely check out their product TaxSpanner.

After lunch we went to the Flex session by Prayank Swaroop of Adobe. It was very informative in getting to know how to build rich internet applications using Flex and how to make them work offline using AIR. Prayank’s presentation had gaping void cartoons featured on some of the slides and that too the one which is there on my biz card.

After that I figured out that there was nothing worth attending and was just lurking around. That’s when I saw Hari, Kiruba, Verner, Jace and all of them hanging around at the biking collective. They were having a very nice time there unwinding from the daily work load and also from the sessions they were already bored with.

I then peeped into the unband collective and saw Shourya Sarcar of GE Healthcare playing guitar. He was kinda conducting a guitar workshop and I found it very nice to hang around there with the music. Shourya was mainly demonstrating the happy and sad sounds of guitar and the main chords. Super cool Jayanth took after after him and he got on his super fundoo electric guitar playing like a rock star. He demonstrated the different styles of sounds guitar can produce and public were all awe. He showed off the processor using which he produces the effects and by the end of it he had already got a steady fan following; including me.

We left the place soon as I had to attend a wedding reception that evening but all that was there in mind was whether I should go on with my plans to give the blogging tips and tricks the next day.

Pictures courtesy MyCameraAndEye