Use Clever Tactics but Keep Your Rep Up

All it takes is a little creativity to boost your blog's popularity or traffic levels. Using a contest, a catchy blog entry or something that hasn't been seen before online can usually give your blog an increased interest level. It's something to consider implementing, but always use tactics very carefully.

For example, there was the "Great RSS Battle" between Shoemoney and John Chow. While it was a friendly battle between the two top bloggers, it also benefited them both quite a bit. They gained a LOT more subscribers overall no matter who the winner was. The Monetizer was already subscribed to both of them, so it was a no contest here. But the point is, they were able to use a contest amongst them to really stir things up with friendly competition. You can do that with your own blog, depending on the subject matter. For example, if you blog about the NFL or another sport, why not have a friendly 'Pick Em'" contest against a fellow blogger. Each of you would of course give credit to the other on your respective blogs with a link to their blog and discuss your predictions. You could do this on other topics as well, but things with predictions (sports, Entertainment awards, etc) are usually an easy and good natured contest.

John Cow, which is considered a spoof of the John Chow blog also had a neat tactic recently. One day he blogged about making sure you back up your blog entries, a very important thing for us all to remember. About a day later, the blog post read "H4acked", indicating Turkish Data Processing Military had taken the Cow blog over. The tactic was to show people just what might happen should you not have your blog backed up. Bloggers blogged about the "security breach" too, so it helped John Cow quite a bit. And John Cow was able to teach readers the valuable lesson he wanted to illustrate in a creative way on his blog (as well as make 1 easy blog post called "H4cked").

Tactics of course should not be unscrupulous. For example there was a recent controversy over someone impersonating John Chow to email John Cow about a new RSS promotion. The fakers were promising to "sell RSS subscribers" to blogs that wanted to up their feed counts. Gary Conn discusses how being a fake can hurt you over at his blog. Impersonating a bigtime blogger is no way to jumpstart your blog, your business or your reputation online. This sort of tactic will only hurt you because it will damage your reputation and possibly result in civil or criminal penalties.

Bottom line: Use creative tactics, but tread carefully because your blog's reputation is at stake.