My friend Beth Kanter has just posted a request for help from a charity based in North Yorkshire and Nairobi.

Alison Lowndes is asking what she can do to attract more interest in the blog she co-writes about the situation of vulnerable children in Kenya. Nedra Weinrich and Celeste at the Studio501c have already chipped in. Alison here are 5 thoughts from your side of the Atlantic.

1 Use your network and your networks’ network. Do more of what you have just done by aproaching Beth for help. E-mail as many people as you can who may blog and ask them (and their friends) if they can write an entry about your blog. It will help increase the number of blogs linking to yours – which in turn will draw attention to what you write (good content by the way).

2 Use more links in your blog entries. Blogging is as much about conversation as it is about sharing information. Write more posts which make linked references to other blogs. Thinks of these as the body language of blogging – each link sends a message to other bloggers that you want to join their conversation.

3 Use tags – your recent piece on Madeleine McCann is pertinent and provocative. Tagging it will help other bloggers (and news organisations) find it and respond to it. If it’s not clear how to do this in your blogging platform you can generate tags using keotagger and other similar sites. You might also like to agree a tag with bloggers who share your interests – so you can find each others work. the Nptech tag is a great example of this.

4 The old blogging mantra of “trackbacks are good”. Trackbacks are a special type of link. If someone uses a trackback link for your site what they write on their blog will also appear as a comment in your blog. That encourages people to write about your material. If your current blogging platform doesn’t allow you to easily include trackbacks think about moving to another platform sooner rather than later. (I think though you can now use trackbacks on blogger)

5 Use Flickr to host photos and link it back to your blog. Kenya is a magnet for British holiday makers, They are likely to find your pics on Flickr and that will attract their attention to your work. From that you may find donors and even online or on the ground volunteer effort.

It won’t happen overnight – but good luck.

Update – the pic is from AVIF’s Flickr site. See also this entry from David Wallace – more on principles than practicalities.  he suggest the four p’s:

• Participate
• Plug-in
• Play
• Persist

technorati tags: madeleine mccann blogging nptechuk nptech kenya charity