rare pattern thoughts in a blog

Beth Kanter points to Skelliewag's post with a hype-filled title: "How To Get 1,050 Subscribers in 3 Months":

1. Work out who your target audience is and write your content exclusively for them.

2. Pack your articles with as much value as possible. If time is a problem, post less.

3. Source out your target audience by getting or making links and writing for social media.

I'd also add a 4th point or perhaps add something to point 2.  Find a unique view on your topic.  I learned about this from a personal branding session at BlogHer I attended this summer.

I'd add a fifth point: Offer full-post feeds. A lot of people get worked up with the idea that if they withhold their post content from their feeds, those feeds can drive traffic to their site. But I don't think it works that way.

If you don't offer up your whole post, then you are making the feed less relevant to the reader. I am much less likely to visit a site if everything in the feed consists of a headline and little teaser. Sorry, but a tease is not a happy user experience!

Give me content. Get me interested. Hook me on your ideas. Feed me your thoughts!

And if you're interested, I'll happily do the same.

P.S. - And if you're really interested in making your site linkable by bloggers, forget Feedburner and other services like that. I often write blog posts from my feed reader, and it really is annoying when my links end up pointing to a feed URI. Yes, it leads to the same post, but the Google juice doesn't follow. Wouldn't you rather have more people linking to your domain instead of Feedburner?

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