IIP011: How To Get More Attention To Your Blog And Make Your Fans Insanely Loyal, With Dino Dogan

Content Is Not The King, Traffic Means Nothing, And Ads Are Not A Blog Monetization Plan

There you have it. If you want today’s interview with Dino Dogan in a nutshell, the above title will give you the major points.

According to Dino, “there is nothing worse than writing a blog post that nobody reads. Triberr solves that problem for bloggers by developing a community of sharing and support with other bloggers.”

Triberr is a new and better way to grow your blog’s readership. It’s better because it connects like-minded bloggers who are interested in reading and supporting each other. This core community, or Tribe, is the secret to a successful blog.

One Wednesday, a few years ago, somewhere in New Jersey, Dino Dogan had a realization: He’d been studying how to get more traffic to his blog for quite a while; consuming everything he could read about it. But the more he read, the more it became clear to him:

It Was Too Little, Too Late!

Dino perfectly understood the “science” of link building, PageRank and website authority, and the roaring power of social media. Because of that understanding, he knew that in a competitive niche with well established megawebsites — his blog didn’t stand a chance. Not with the tools that were available back then.

Blogging Tips 101

As Dino saw it, all bloggers needed to do in order to rank well and get a lot more attention, was:

• Publish A LOT of content.
• Have TONS of backlinks.
• Become a brand that Google respects (demonstrated by being given a higher PageRank, for instance).

The problem was that as the blogosphere was changing. With the rise of social media, no one was linking anymore. Everyone was now sharing via Twitter, Facebook, etc., so it became very, very hard for small bloggers to build (or earn) enough high quality links. As to publishing a lot of content – could you seriously compete with the amount of content that is published on Huffington Post? NY Times? Forbes? (Yeah, that’s a bit of a radical competition to pick on, but any blog that’s a tenth as active as any of these will be a huge undertaking).

And as to becoming a brand – the best way was to publish a lot, get as many high quality backlinks and shares as possible. Which for a new blogger on the block – was almost impossible.

Building A Successful Blog (What if…)

What if. That’s how it all started. What if bloggers could share their audience with some other bloggers from the same niche? By doing that, they could get the attention of the audience of their colleagues and have a lot more content to share with their own audience, who were easily consuming more content than the bloggers had to offer.

What would be the compound effect of creating such a tribe of bloggers?

This is what was on Dino’s mind that Wednesday. So he sat down and started searching for such tool, “surely someone came up with this idea already!”, he thought.  But… No such tool existed. So Dino, born & raised in Bosnia who came to the USA and found work as a network engineer, and spent the last seven years teaching computer geeks how to become bigger computer geeks, found a new position: co-founder. Dino pitched the idea to his friend Dan Cristo, and by the next Wednesday, Dino and Dan where on the same Triberr tribe, sharing audience and content.

Solving The Next Big Problem

As press print was invented, knowledge became more accessible than it ever before in human history. People could suddenly afford access to books. In the late 1990’s, with the rise of platforms like WordPress, Blogger.com and others, the gate to publishing was opened for the first time. Today, anyone can start a blog, a podcast or publish a book on Amazon. It’s no longer a small closed clique of the very fortunate.

As Dino sees it, the next big problem is allowing anyone who wants to publish to get attention. Evidently, this is the biggest hardship for almost all bloggers. This is the mission behind Triberr.

Hitler, Apple and Insane Loyalty

In the second part of the interview, we discuss a subject that has been fascinating Dino and is the ultimate challenge for any business owner: Creating insanely loyal fans.

This is where Dino’s studies of Theology come into play, and make the discussion somewhat controversial. Dino claims that there is a lot to learn from religions and cults when planning your online (&offline) presence. Dino actually gave a fascinating speech on this subject at the New Media Expo in Vegas, where I first heard him speak.

Check out today’s interview to find out more about polarizing, social status, isolation and mythos – for examples of how these tools are used to affect us in our day-to-day life, and simple examples of how you could master some of them, and combined with tools like Triberr – create true focused attention to your brand, business or website.

In this episode you will learn:

• How Dino went from songwriting and blogging about dog training to founding Triberr?
• How can small bloggers get more eyeballs on their content.
• Triberr’s ultimate goal.
• Why Triberr is considered a big secret among the successful bloggers.
• How a small blogger can compete with big sites like or big media properties?
• How to create insanely loyal fans?
• What is polarization and how can it help you succeed?
• How does giving status to your followers (this could be users, members of the site, customers, or employees) help you with succeeding in your business?
• How do you apply these tools in blogging, magazines or podcasting?
• What is the importance of isolation?
• What Dino decided to wear for this interview (caution… you might not wanna know!)

Items mentioned in this episode include:

• Dino Dogan: Main website,  DIYblogger.net (blog), Twitter.
• Insane Loyalty : Dino’s session at the New Media Expo.
• Dan Cristo: Main website, Twitter.
• WordPress.
• Tumbler.
• 2600: The Hacker Quarterly.

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Stay awesome,
Meron

Disclosure: Please note that some of the links above are affiliate links. There is no additional cost to you, and I will earn a commission if you decide to make a purchase.

Transcript

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