Just to let you know that if you are in driving distance of Baltimore, and you use, contribute or are thinking about making the switch to WordPress, I’m organizing the first ever Baltimore-Washington WordPress Meetup. It will be on Thursday, Aug 23rd at 6pm at the Metropolitan Coffeehouse & Wine Bar in Federal Hill (902 S. Charles St near M&T Bank Stadium).

I’d love to have you come out and help the local WordPress community grow and band together. There’s lots of WordPress users in the Baltimore-Washington area, but the community by and large – both WordPress and the greater blogging community) is fairly disjointed. Let’s share our stories and see where we can help each other.

This is open to any blogger. You don’t have to be a WordPress user. However, we make no guarantees about not trying to convert you either. ;)

RSVP at the meetup page so we know how many people to reserve for.

There are lots of blogs out there that instruct on the best ways to write more effectively or how to tweak your sites for best search engine results. Some folks even go really hardcore and instruct you on a variety of methods to build your site.

Very few people, if any, will tell you the easy stuff. The low hanging fruit. The slam dunks. Sure, it’s unlikely that the following tactics alone will catapult you into a position of being the next media mogul. However, these simple tricks are things that anyone can do, but yet very few people actually employ. As a result, you can gain guerrilla tactics that will place you in an advantageous position over the other guy.

Check it out.

Use your Domain Name as Your WiFi Network Name

Yes indeed. A sneaky, yet effective technique that broadcasts your network to everyone within 802.11 range. That is, if you don’t turn your SSID broadcast option off.

The trick here is that anyone within range of your wifi access point, many of whom are unlikely technically savvy, will see your domain name in their access list and it will spark curiosity. “What on earth is technosailor.com? It looks like a website”

Of course, they will look and who knows if you’ll have a visitor for life. (/me waves at neighbors who just clicked through).

Attract Blackberry Users

It’s not a secret among Blackberry users that Blackberries attract other Blackberries. Try this trick on for size. Next time you go out pubbing, check that Blackberry often. Chances are someone is going to comment on it. When they do, don’t just answer with a humdrum “Yeah I’m checking my email”, or, “I need to stay in touch with whats going on at work.” Instead, tell them that you are looking at your site on the Blackberry browser to make sure it works on a mobile device.

Tangent: Make sure it actually does render properly on a Blackberry so that you have something worth looking at.

Buy a Shirt

Schwag is great, but your schwag is even better. Especially if it looks good. If you’re a schwag wearer (I am!), you can probably testify to the fact that people do actually notice what you’re wearing. The most commented on schwag I wear is my new Mesh Conference tee shirt from RightSleeve.com. People look at the shirt and love to ask what “Mesh: Connect, Share, Inspire” means. Of course I tell them.

Imagine how much a shirt with your website with some appropriately cryptic slogan would do to encourage conversation in line at Starbucks.

Of course, slightly less convincing is getting branded boxer shorts like Mike Arrington of Techcrunch got at Mesh (left).

Ask Someone About Themself

One thing my good friend Mark Evans taught me when he started at b5media was to ask questions. It usedf to annoy me, but it turns out there was method to his madness. He told me that, as a journalist, it’s important to ask questions because people love to talk about themselves. By asking leading questions, people open up and begin to just talk.

Sooner or later, the questioning will inevitably turn back to you and give you an opportunity to share what you do, how you do it, why you do it, etc.

These are just four techniques. There’s literally thousands of ways you can promote you or your blog without using common practices suggested all the time. Naturally, using common practices probably have more reach and will be more far reachingly successful. But these are some low lying fruit that anyone can employ.

What about you? Do you have techniques such as these?

Last year, while at WordCamp, I was posting live coverage of the event for the Blog Herald. This year, I’m here representing b5media along with most of the tech team and Jeremy Wright, our CEO. Good times.

I figured I’d post about WordCamp again but I just don’t find any inspiration in giving you the blow by blow. I’m guessing you really don’t care, right? If you’re not here, you probably won’t really catch the groove.

Instead, I will post questions people have asked me while chatting here at WordCamp. If you are here, please say hi and feel free to ask a question. I may answer it here on the blog.

Q: Do you find it difficult to find inspiration to write posts regularly?

When I first got started blogging, I fell prey to the prison that most bloggers do. That prison is that you must produce content to stay relevant, have traffic and move up in the rankings. In other words, you must produce if you’re going to be successful.

While this is true to a degree, it really is something that bloggers as a whole have to get away from. In the past few weeks, I can count on one hand how many posts I’ve written. In that time, my RSS subscription numbers have jumped from approximately 680 subscribers to 750. Go figure. Why?

I boil this down to a number of factors that I have very explicitly tried to do here at Technosailor.

1. Produce great content optimized for search engines. Recognizing that many people come from Google, I’ve made a point to think proactively about what kind of searches I’d like to have drive traffic to posts and then making sure I follow good practices in ensuring my posts ranks well. This means using keywords, great markup, etc. While this post won’t address SEO for blogs, you can find lots of great advice from folks like Aaron Wall and the people over at SEOMoz.
2. Produce timeless content. This is a problem for newsy blogs or political blogs or current events blogs of any time. At Technosailor, I’ve spent more time trying to create content that, despite a timestamp, is relevant 3 years from now as it is today.
3. Cultivating RSS subscribers. With premium content recently – that is, content that I only offer to my feed subscribers – and otther techniques, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to cultivate RSS subscriptions. RSS subscribers never have to deal with the frustration of clicking over to a site and being disappointed when no new content is available. It’s somewhat like watching paint dry. Why watch? Just get the content when it becomes available automatically. RSS subscribers get the benefit of carrying on doing their own thing and getting the content whenever I decide to write. It’s so much more low maintenance.

These are just three techniques I’ve used to build traffic without having to feel the chains that hinder bloggers. Bloggers feel like they have to keep producing, and producing, and producing. That’s a good way to get blogger burnout. If great content is produced that is optimized for search engines, timeless and you move your readers away from the constraints of “checking out your site” and instead consuming your content via RSS or newsletters, you’ll find a tremendous amount of freedom from the constraints of being a content production slave.