In the midst of the hurley burley of crisis mode, a news story caught my eye­. Killer George Sodini went berserk in a Pennsylvania gym and killed three, wounding nine before turning the gun on himself. The thing about it is, he blogged about doing it. That’s when the idea sparked.

So I did some digging

It’s not the first time, that social media was used by a killer or a suicide victim to declare their intentions. With a quick search, I found Paul Zolezzi, a model who declared he was going to kill himself on Facebook and did. More interestingly though, I found Hsu Yu-sheng.

Hsu Yu-sheng

Hsu is a gay and lesbian rights activist in Taiwan, who on August 6 wrote a farewell note on his blog in English. After seeing the note, readers of his blog, launched a full scale effort to save him. Friends and strangers alike, thousands of people banded together, to try to track him down and others posted kind comments to his blog.

Police arrived at Hsu’s place just in time and saved his life.

The idea

We use social media monitoring tools such as Radian6 to listen to conversations on the blogosphere and elsewhere to protect brands. It’s not a stretch to deploy these tools to protect people.

How it would work

1. Radian6 set up to listen for a list of keywords
2. Suspect posts are parsed through to a heuristic analysis engine to further determine the sentiment of the post. Radian6 is has a automatic Sentiment engine built in, but we need one that would be tuned to suicidal/homicidal sentiments
3. Results that come up positive there are alerted to the on duty psychiatrist for an assessment and to alert the relevant authorities

There would be many issues that would have to be dealt with to make the system viable, feasible and workable and even then it would never be a certainty. What it would be is another tool in kitbag to tackle an extremely complex and difficult problem.

Whether you’re gearing up to launch a brand new blog, or you’ve been posting religiously over the past few years and have amassed a sizable audience, it’s always a good idea to take stock of the various ways to drive traffic and increase engagement on your blog.

I’ve created a list of 28 blog traffic and engagement driving tips that you can use to ensure you’re doing everything possible to generate ROI against the time and energy you’re investing by blogging. While this list is by no means comprehensive, it’s hopefully a good starting point and may spark some new thinking about how to get more people reading and engaging with your content.

If you have other suggestions and tips, by all means feel free to leave a comment!

1. Promote the Blog on Existing Company Web Sites:  Surprising as it may seem, this is often a missed opportunity to generate traffic and inbound links from long-standing and Google-juice rich sites.

2. Distribute a Social Media Press Release:  For a new blog, using a service such as PitchEngine or MultiVu is a great way to get fast inbound links, which will get the blog indexed by search engines faster.

3. Follow the 2-to-1 Post Rule: Link to two other blog posts in every blog post you write. Others will notice.

4. Comment Regularly: Make a habit of leaving substantive comments on other people’s blog posts.

5. Optimize Your Posts for Search: Craft each blog post around a single topic and optimize the post for search (more on that in a minute).

6. Claim Your Blog on Technorati:  Register and claim your blog on Technorati, a leading blog search engine.

7. Email Signatures:  Another simple opportunity to drive traffic. Make sure your blog URL is included in your work and personal email signatures.

8. Host a Contest:  Sponsoring a contest for even a medium- to low-value prize is a great way to drive traffic to your blog and engagement (through commenting).

9. Grow Your Social Footprint:  Participate in other social media sites and networks (e.g., Del.icio.us, Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, etc.) and include a link to your blog in each of the profiles. Mark Hayward has 25 great tips.

10. Create a Good List:  Creating a good list will get you places in social media. They’re a good opportunity to link to other people and research, too.

11. Post What’s Hot, Not What’s Not. Write about posts that are timely and in-the-news now. More people will be searching for your topic. Yahoo! Buzz and What’s Rising on Technorati are good places to find out what topics are buzzing.

12. Headlines are Vital & Go Viral: Spend the extra 10 minutes to write a catchy, pithy title for your blog post. Unlike books, most people judge a post by it’s title. A good headline is more likely to find it’s way to DIGG and delicious, too.

13. Multimedia Matters: Including an image or a video in your blog posts make the post more impactful visually, but also provide the reader with richer content they can interact with or pass along easily.

14. Offer a POV:  Offer a point of view in your post. Simply sharing a news article, video or image every now and then is fine, but give your readers a bit of editorial. Even if it’s only a few words.

15. Never Say “No Comment”:  Read and respond to every comment left. Blogging is all about conversation, and one main way dialogue happens is through commenting. It’s important to respond to people who take the time to leave a comment, even if it’s simply a “thank you”.

16. Internal Company Newsletters:  A good internal communications tactic, write a quick story about the launch of your blog (or 1-year anniversary, etc.) for your internal company newsletter.

17. Email Interviews:  Conduct email or video interviews with other bloggers or offline experts, many of whom have their own audiences and following. To respect their time, keep the number of questions to a minimum.

18. Write What You Know:  Keep your posts on-topic and stick to your area of expertise.

19. Group Announcements:  When launching a new blog or announcing a major milestone, post a link or send an announcement to your company’s groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

20. Get Points for Group Participation:  Start a group meme – or discussion topic – and ask others in your group to participate by either posting or leaving a comment. See the Twitter Strategy Series.

21. Phone a Friend:  Simply ask friends and colleagues who blog to include a link to yours in their blogroll.

22. Don’t Be Needy:  It’s not appropriate to ask established blogges for a link, unless you’ve developed a relationship with them (by commenting on their posts over time, developing a relationship, etc.).

23. Avoid the Three Deadly C’s:  OK, while not deadly, it’s best to refrain from talking about the three C’s – Clients, Company Information, and Competition.

24. Co-Create Something:  What kind of content could you create with the help of your readers? Our Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics was co-created with the help of 60+ other bloggers.

25. Do Light Keyword Research:  Before writing your post, check out SEO tools such as Google’s Keyword tool to see the words people are actually typing into Google. Then craft your entire post around a single popular keyword.

26. Six Keyword Sweet Spots:  Use the keyword you found in #25 in five critical places – 1) title of the post, 2) first sentence, 3) link text, 4) the URL of the post, 5) within each paragraph (if possible), 6) and in alt text.

27. Link to Previous Posts:  Link to previous posts on the same topic to get the content re-indexed by search engines.

28. Reverse-Engineer Links:  Google the topic of your post plus the word “blog”. Linking to good posts that appear in the top 10 search results will give your post more juice with Google.

Those are my 28 tips – what are yours?  Share your best practices with all by leaving a comment below!