Zack Miller's presentation at the International Jewish Bloggers Conference (photo: Jacob Richman)

Two of the bloggers who presented at the 2nd International Jewish Bloggers Convention spoke about the importance of building trust. What was interesting is that their blogs are so different – Zack Miller writes the “New Rules of Investing” financial blog, while David Bognor is the man behind Treppenwitz, a very personal diary about his life, family and current events in Israel.

A participant asked Zack Miller, “How can you take a non-commercial blog and monetize it without selling your soul?” Zack, an investment advisor who presented on “The Business of Blogging”, responded that everything is built on trust, “Once you have built trust with your readership, you can introduce a useful service that they will clamor for.”

Zack stressed that creating a successful blog is all about content, “Produce the kind of content that people are looking for.” Some of his examples:

a) He spends some time in researching what terms people search for on Google, to check that he is writing on topics that do interest people.

b) If there is fresh news on topics he wrote about previously, he goes back and updates those posts with links to the new information.

c) He regularly goes through his list of followers, particularly on Twitter, to block spam accounts.

d) He uses Linkedin, a business social network, to develop business dealings, particularly through their InMail service, “I have found people to be twice more likely to respond to an InMail message than to a regular email.” Zack adds that Twitter has a similar effect, and has proven to create a more personal relationship with high level business executives who do not use Facebook, but direct emails can only be sent to people who already follow you, which is a little trickier.

Zack admits to being a twitter addict, using it for marketing purposes. He tweets 3-5 times a day about topics in the market that his readers would be interested in, in addition to maintaining his blog, publishing a book and more.  To learn effective online marketing techniques, he recommends CopyBlogger as an excellent resource.

In explaining how to build a relationship and sense of trust on the part of his readers around the world, David Bognor focused on the comments section of a blog, where readers can respond publicly with their reactions to each posting. David encourages comments and recommends anti-spam software to avoid having to heavily moderate comments. A proponent of allowing unrestricted posting of comments, he was asked how to respond to anti-Semitic or anti-Israel comments. He responded that while he prefers all non-spam comments to be posted, when necessary, he has used comment-software that can remove all the vowels in a post, or make it invisible to everyone but the poster. If someone addresses an opinion that others may silently hold too, “then I take the opportunity to respond and explain the error of somebody’s ways.”

Tags: Israel, Jewish Bloggers Conference, social networking, Treppenwitz, Web 2.0, Zack Miller

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