Social Media: Using Twitter Trending Topics to Boost Readership

Like most of you, I’ve been ignoring the Trending Topics on the sidebar of my Twitter page. In a real Homer Simpson moment, I hit my head and moaned “doh!” when I realized the opportunities missed by not utilizing this free and totally useful tool.

Looking at October 21sts’ trending topics I saw two related topics to posts that were already online. One was “Halloween” the other was the “Google Wave”. While I haven’t written anything on the Google Wave itself, Astroblogging has two posts on using Google Analytics. No matter that these posts were already in the blogosphere, people want to know about these things NOW. So it was off to the tinyurl page to make bite sized Twitter friendly links to the posts and up they go.

To get your two seconds of fame on Twitter make sure that you post tags about your content. Tags are very easy, the sign “#” signifying a tag plus your keyword. For A Neptune Tale: The Devil You Know the tag looks like this #astrology, #Halloween.

Let me know if this works for you.

Blog Challenge: Make New Friends

Network

When I was a Girl Scout, (yes, I was) there was a little round we sang:

“Make new friends but keep the old,
One is silver and the other gold.”

Neeti Ray has shown through her own blogging efforts how networking can help promote a blog. Barely a year old, her blog is on the blog roll of many sites that I ‘m not on after two years of blogging. It doesn’t hurt that her posts are beautifully written and insightful, but clearly she has the Leo gift for charming new followers. And how does she do this? She makes friends.

She follows blogs. She comments regularly on them. She engages the blog authors in conversations. Recently, she posted an article that shows just how many astrologers with who she’s had conversations. Networking plain and simple.

Sometimes, some of us that have been blogging for a while forget this simple concept. Either we are engaged in our writing efforts or trying to manage the flow of communication that comes at us from our readers, or life happens and we have to pay attention to something other than blogging. Yet if we want to grow our audience, we need to draw attention to ourselves.

Here is your challenge for today. Go to five other astrology blogs and leave an insightful, meaningful comment on the most recent piece. Lets AMP up the challenge and let’s say you visit only two that you’ve visited before and three you haven’t. Keep tabs on the results and see who visits you because of it.

Go out and make some new friends and let your old ones know you are still around. Then drop me a line and let me know how it worked for you

Promoting Your Astrology Blog: Keywords and Search Words

To the left is not an instance of blog deja vu, but an illustration of Google’s Search Engines’ inventory of the keywords and search words on a recent blog post. Its no secret that to drive traffic you need to get the attention of the search engines, though some people aren’t sure how far to go with them. This recent post shows quantity counts. The more of a keyword or search word that you use, the more likely it is that Google will recognize that your post is actually about the subject you are writing about.

What you don’t see from this illustration is that Google inventoried everything on the page to see if the content was relevant to the search. The blog title was inventoried, as well as the titles of recent posts categories and also the titles of the Blog Roll. Talk about being thorough!

Since Saturn, from the way the post was written was mentioned umpteem times, the Search Engine felt confident enough, even though in Google’s eyes this blog is only days old, to list this post within the Top Ten results on the search “Saturn Astrology”.