The following is a summary and related resources to my recent talk at the SF Blog Club:

THIS ISN’T THE FIELD OF FRICKIN’ DREAMS

Tim O’Reilly once said, ‘The problem with writers isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.’ It may be hard to monetize fame, but it is impossible to monetize obscurity.”

Rather than worrying about who’s stealing our content, we need to make it sharable, readable and ultimately popular enough to be stolen. We need readers .

There’s no silver bullet, but most writers figure out where their existing traffic and engagement comes from by looking at their Google Analytics. All traffic in general tends to come via:

• search (which is generated through relevant trackbacks and links); and/or
• social media links and other blog referrals

Here are a few ways to optimize for search and link love in order to increase your readership.

CONTENT: BEING NEWSWORTHY
As I’ve said in the past, You’ve got 30 seconds to hook a reader. The same tennets that determine newsworthiness for traditional writers also determine blog-worthiness. If you can find a way to relate your story to an existing celebrity (with a large audience), connect it to a major and timely event, incorporate a narrative that affects millions, demonstrate popular and conflicting opinions, regionalize your post, or bring a unique point of view to light, you’re more likely to find relevance with a larger group of readers.
RELATED RESOURCES: If you’re still unclear, check to see if users are searching for the key terms of your story in Google Trends or Google Insights.

BASIC SEO: TAGGING & HEADLINES
In relation to that last set of resources, don’t be cute with your tags and headlines or pepper them with puns and obscure innuendos. Search engines and frankly social media audiences don’t understand your inside jokes. Think about what they’re searching for and try to attract attention with logical keywords and headlines.
RELATED RESOURCES: If you’re torn between two headlines or what to feature in those headlines, former Yahoo SEO guru and NinebyBlue co-founder Laura Lippay suggests you compare your choices in Google AdWord’s Keyword Tool. You can also compare them head to head on Google Fight. Related articles include this one from Yoast and this one from SEOMoz.

INCITING ACTION: DIRECTING THE READER
BADGES: Rather than adding a thousand sharing options, choose the 2-3 social media badges that are tied to a community that already interacts with your blog or blog topic. Embed those badges above the fold in every post.
RELATED RESOURCES: Again, you can find your most engaged communities by looking at your Google Analytics or you can check the Measurement Wiki for an extensive list of metrics offering you a snapshot of your social media traffic.

LINK LOVE: If you’ve already written a post about something you’re referencing, don’t reinvent the wheel. Link to your old post. This way you can drive additional page views. You can also link to articles by your friends. The point here is to create a blog mafia wherein you work with other like-minded bloggers to validate and highlight each others sites. Link love from big blogs tends to drive direct traffic from the linking blog as well as increasing your Google Search Ranking. The higher ranking you receive, the more discoverable you are in organic search.
RELATED RESOURCES: Of all the browser-based plug-ins you can install to recommend related content, my favorite so far is Zemanta. Basically you install Zemanta and it allows you to enter the blogs you’d like to link to as well as the tags, related articles and images that might be relevant. You can also just create a Custom Google Search Engine to search keywords on just the blogs you want to link to.

TAILORING TO TWITTER & FACEBOOK: According to Facebook Evangelist Justin Osofsky readers are 1.5 times more likely to respond to a status update or “like” when they’re posed a question. So instead of just cutting and pasting your title and post URL into a status update, consider posing a question with your link.
RELATED RESOURCES: The Hacks and Hackers video of Osofsky’s talk is available here. As well, look at how people like my former ReadWriteWeb colleague Jolie O’Dell, Robert Scoble, Chris Heuer, Brian Solis and Tony Hsieh use Twitter to drive readers to their blogs. These people are really engaging and get a great rate of response.

So those are the basic tips I’ve pulled together. If you’re still unsure of which audiences engage with you, check out my post on these six identity tracking tools.
Thanks for reading! Let me know some of your tips in the comments.
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Thanks to the SF Blog Club Sponsors including Viglink and HubPages and to Media Partners Ubergizmo and WebWallflower.