In my first round, it was not unusual to find that, even after Digg-ing my best stories and releasing news about a  big social cause event to 257 of my friends (and friends of friends…) on Facebook, I got a less than breakthrough response.

No worries, I kept on trekking with these laws in mind: 1) know thy audience and; 2) know thy medium.

Since then, I got a photo of who I think my blog readers are and I stuck their picture on my desk.

That said, don’t miss this Business Week article, which provides a sweet matrix describing blog readers and how they use Web 2.0.

Once you know your audience (and your potential audience), become a great storyteller. If you have just begun to collect donations for a climate change campaign that involves you living in Central America using nothing but the sun to power your laptop and a wood-fire to cook your yucca, then use your blog to track your progression. After that, get on YouTube (the UK guy who actually did this didn’t film or link his adventures to the mammoth video site but you can).

When you are done that, head over to Facebook to set up a cause. The beauty is that big organizations (UNICEF is on it) and regular people alike can set up a cause and have the benefit of their friend’s contacts at their fingertips. That means that if you have a massive amount of friends, you can set up a run for your uncle that rivals those of the big players (think: “5K Run for Al”).

In Facebook, I went to their application page and added the Causes application to my profile. Then, I was taken to their browse causes page. From here, I clicked on back to my causes and I was taken to a page from where I could start my cause.
Once I found the right page to do it from on Facebook, starting a cause was pretty straightforward. Once I clicked the start cause button, I was redirected to Project Agape’s page to start the process. There were five sections of information I needed to fill out.

1. The basics: I filled in my cause name, its mission, positions and description.
2. The categories and tags: I filled in primary and secondary categories and the tags related to my cause.
3. Geography: I chose the region that my cause affects, i.e., global, Antigua, non-U.S. country.
4. The photo: I chose a picture or logo to go with my cause. You can’t get to the next step unless you add an image.
5. Then: I chose a nonprofit organization that will benefit from my cause. Choose one yourself or let the application match you with one.
6. Last of all: I invited all of my relevant friends (taking care not to accidentally invite any “conflict of interest” friends or colleagues). You can also wait for people to add themselves to your cause.

As you will recall, the technique involves doing multiple posts, as opposed to one big, long post on the person, organization you are targeting. What this does is make Google and other search engines stand up and take notice. If they notice you enough your message or voice will eventually be indexed on the first page of search results. The first page of Google is one of the best places to get traffic, and it is also something organizations hold near and dear to their heart.

To demonstrate the technique I chose the SUV Owners of America, an organization run by auto-industry friendly people who are supposedly standing up for the rights of Americans to drive SUV’s.

Here’s the result after doing multiple (4) posts on the SUVOA over the last few days. When you type in SUVOA as a search term in Google now, you will notice that at the bottom of the first page is a link to my posts on “trickle blogging.”

Here’s the screenshot:

Multiple posts over days with new and interesting content will pay off. Thank god, I was really getting sick of writing about the SUVOA.

Thanks everyone for starting OnlineActivist off with such a bang!

In the last 24 hours, we’ve gotten 1,700 unique visitors to the site!

We were picked up on Metafilter last night, as well as Stumbleupon and some very kindly bloggers linked to our series on “trickle blogging.”

Update 1: just noticed that we’ve been listed #1 today as the most up and coming wordpress blog. Nice.

Update 2: just got posted on links swarm’s front page by a kinldy  individual>.

By the way, I am not doing this in anway to brag about all the cool people that are linking to me. I am trying to highlight some of the Web 2.0 social networking tools that are out there that you can use to promote your own site. Many of these are free to join, easy to use and can sometimes pay off with huge traffic. Just be careful to pick only your best content to post on these sites, or you’ll gain a reputation as a shameless self promotor.

I hope we can keep the momentum going. And of course, I will continue to offer practical advice on how you can make your activist site be heard!

Kindly,

The OnlineActivist

P.S. If you want to swap links with me, send an email to onlineactivism (at) gmail.com

Metafilter is a very large “community” blog, meaning that once you’re a member you can post interesting things you find on your journeys around the “internets.” Take a browse through Metafilter and you will see that is a mish-mash of all sorts of things from brazillian waxes to the lastest in software.

The reason I’m bringing up Metafilter is that someone posted an onlineactivist story on “trickle blogging.” Did I mention Metafilter is a LARGE site? It definitely is, and that story provided onlineactivist with over 1,500 unique visitors last night alone.

And then the traffic stopped. Dead.

The “editors” of Metafilter took down the “trickle blog” post saying that it was a little to “thin on information.” I guess generating the interest of 1,500 people in an hour or so is thin for them. It is this type of editing lately on a Metafilter that has seen it fall in it’s rankings. That, and the fact that the community members have evolved into a pretty rude and crude bunch who regulalry tell people to f**k off in their comments.

All that being said, I think it is still worthwhile to sign up for Metafilter and become part of the community, which will allow you to post on things related to your activist efforts. The site does not take kindly to using your membership as a means of flogging your own blog, but I find that for every 5 posts I do on Metafilter, I can creatively slip in one or two that will drive some traffic to my sites.

Just don’t take the comments to your posts too seriously, they are a pretty crude bunch!

But back to your blog and how you want to increase the number of eyeballs that graze it each day. When you get that soundbite that you think is genius (and it will come with time as you become an expert on your topic), check out truemors.com.

Here’s what cool about truemors.com: it gives you the bang of the big PR company’s newswire subscription for zero buck.

It’s basically a regular guy or gal’s way to send out a “press release” to a massive online audience in a matter of seconds – a bulletin board slash newswire for the rest of us.

There’s a trick to truemors.com though: with the number of rumours flying on the site, you’ve got to get their attention in a matter of seconds. So make your 1-2 liner sharp.

Here are some attention grabbing “truemors”:

“Did you hear about the Swiss study that found influenza viruses can live on banknotes for 17 days?”

(People always want to know how to stay heathy, get healthy or become healthy. “Study” says authority.)

“Blackberry ban in French cabinet because of fears that the US could intercept state secrets.”

(People love a hint of a conspiracy theory and the French are fun because they are always mad about something or another)

“Have you heard that 20 of the most common birds have lost over 50% of their population in the past 40 years? Whether you like birds or not, this should be a wake-up call. Canary in a coal mine?”

(Stats are always good, as are timeline comparisons. The last line just begs for the reader to be directed to your site).

Okay, so you get the idea. The key is to keep it short and make sure your links work (but even then, do some dummy ones without links to build credibility if you are on it a lot).

If you are really good, you’ll get rated well and then…well, I guess you can keep on posting and getting hits for as long as you want!

In one of four ways (by text, online forum phone or email), plug in your 1-3 liner with a cleverly embeded hyperlink directed to where that soundbite was born on your blog and … voila! you’ve started a viral rumour that’s bound to pay dividends down the road. Go to their help site for more info.

The SUVOA: we make Hummers look pretty

Here’s the 3rd in my five part series on the use of the “trickle blog” technique. Check here for what I am talking about.

The Sports Utility Vehicles Owners Association is in the business of standing up for the American “right” to drive large SUV’s. No surprise that the SUVOA is run by a former lobbyist and PR guy whose major clients were the Detroit Automakers who think “vehicle emissions standards”are akin to the devil himself.

Another company that plays a prominent role in the activities of the SUVOA is a public relations company out of Detroit (big surprise) called Stratacomm. Any guesses who Stratacomm’s client list includes? You guessed it the Big Auto makers.

So is the SUVOA fighting for the “rights” of soccer moms and Lincoln Navigators across the U S of A? Like my grandpa used to say: “If it looks like an industry front group and smells like an industry front group, 9 times out of 10 you’ve got yerself a bonafide “

Grandpa was wise indeed.

Technorati is the “google” of blogs – it is a place where bloggers go to see who is linking to them, what’s going on in the blog-o-sphere, search out blog content and connect with fellow bloggers.

Technorati is must when it comes to being seen and your message being heard.  The first step is to register with technorati here.

Next step is to “claim your blog.” There are few ways to do it, but I find that just embedding the code right into a blog post, like this: Technorati Profile is the easiest way to do it.

All you do is copy the code they provide when you claim your blog and paste it into your blog post, like I did above. Just make sure that you are in “code” mode when you paste it in — trust me, it will be the only piece of HTML code you will ever have to use on your blog!

The reason you claim your blog is that it let’s technorati and its readers know about you and what you are all about. After you have claimed your blog you will be asked to add “tags.” Tags are key words that people can use to search out blogs they are interested in.

So for this blog, I entered the following key words: social activism, pro blogging, how to blog, blogging tricks, marketing, online activism, activist etc…

Technorati is a must and it only takes about 10 minutes or so to claim and tag your blog.

So last week I started a series of posts on the SUV Owners of America — a “grassroots” (astroturf) group set up by a former lobbyist for the auto industry named Barry McCahill.

This group was set up to assist automakers in their lawsuit against the State of California over tougher greenhouse gas emissions standards for new vehicles. Above is a snapshot of one of their ads (check out the full size version here). This use of “third party advocacy” groups is a classic dirty trick used by corporations who are afraid to say what they really want to say, so they give these organizations money to do their dirty work for them.

So back to the art of what I like to call “trickle blogging.” As I mentioned before, if you have a lot of information to get out on an individual or organization you think is up to no good, it is sometimes better to do a series of posts versus one large post. The idea is that the more posts you do on a particular organization, the more chance there is that Google and the other search engines will notice you. Also, there is more chance that the group you oppose will take notice of what you are doing.

I will get more into the techniques of getting noticed on various search engines once I finish this 5 part series on the SUVOA and “trickle blogging.” I also plan to do a series on how to get the attention of the people you are targetting.

So here you go. My first real-live action post on “owning” someone on Google using the “trickle blog” technique.

For those not in the know, here’s what I’m referring to.

I have a lot of poop on Barry McCahill and the SUV Owners of America.

Here’s what my friend John Stauber at Sourcewatch has on McCahill and the SUV Owners of America.

John Stauber is the master of owing people on Google. Try typing in any corporate flak or lobbyist and 9 times out of 10, Stauber and the folks at Sourcewatch come up on the first page. This is due to many factors, but one of the most important is that Sourcewatch is a Wiki site and it is being constantly updated – which is the equivalent of posting frequently.

With a large site like Staubers that is being constantly added to and updated, he creates a platform that Google and the other big search engines love. Until you have a big and popular site like sourcewatch you can mimic (kind of) the same type of thing that makes John’s site so darn google friendly. You can “trickle blog.”

Anyways, enough about that, I still have 4 more posts to do on Barry McCahill and the Sport Utility Owners of America.

UPDATE: after 4 “trickle blogs” on the SUVOA we made it the first page on Google. Check it out.

But it’s my right to drive a Hummer

So it might not make for interesting content (which is key to a good blog in the long run), but repeat posting on an organization or individual whose actions you oppose is one way to gain that person’s attention and potentially (if you start to get noticed by Google) owning them on Google and other popular search engines.

The point is that when people type in the words, say… I don’t know, “George Bush” they don’t get the site’s George W would hope we are all reading and instead they get your site and your message.

So check out this site, BushorChimp. When you type “george bush” into Google it is the 5th site listed for the president of the United States. Their point? Bush looks like a chimp — okay?!

So how did they get this high up on google for one of the most famous, er… infamous names on the internet? Probably for a few reasons: their web address has the word “bush” in it, they’ve had over 5 million visits in the last 7 years and, most importantly, at least in my opinion, they have frequently updated the site with new pictures of Bush looking like a shit-flinging chimp.

New content, frequently posted on the same person, increasing traffic (which I’ll write about shortly), and boom, before you (and your targeted evil-doer) know it, you own them on Google.

Here’s what it looks like in action. Check out my next five posts, they will be on a group called “The SUV Owners of America.” It’s an organization run by a PR firm with close ties to the Detroit Automakers. The SUVOA purpose is to frame driving a huge vehicle as a matter of American rights, no matter how big and environmentally damaging it might be.

These guys are working against everything scientists are telling us about the environmental and public health effects of vehicle emissions. I want to own them on Google, or at the least, let them know I am writing about them. Who knows, maybe the president Barry McCahill will write me a nasty letter or something.

Each time I post I will add a little bit of interesting content, instead of blowing all the dirt I have on these yahoos at once.

The more I post on them, the more chance I have of owning them on Google. Even if you don’t end up owning someone on Google, you will definitely get on your targets radar screen! So if you oppose the actions of some lowlife corporate apologist, like Barry McCahill, start a blog and just keep writing about them, over and over, and over, again.

I guarantee that the persistence will pay off.