Triberr: Your Step by Step Guide to Being Heard

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Triberr sends over 2 million visits every month to the member blogs.

2 MILLION!

And these are not big blogs either.

Triberr is built for small bloggers and small blogs, which is more or less 99% of blogs in the blogosphere – blogs that previously got little or no website traffic.

There are ton posts out there that talk about the effectiveness of Triberr to drive more website traffic:

A Review of Triberr and the Spin Sucks Analytics
How To Double Your Web Traffic With Triberr
What Is Triberr and How I Increased My Website Traffic in 30 Days

But, in the words of Dino Dogan, who founded Triberr along with Dan Christo a couple of years ago (I am a bit fuzzy on the exact date), here’s the thing:

Triberr is not really the one driving traffic. Triberr is only a tool.

It’s up to each and every one of us to build quality tribes, and write quality content. Triberr is simply a platform that helps you leverage existing relationships you have with bloggers, and build new ones.

I’ve been using Triberr and recommending it to other bloggers almost since its inception.

It’s about time I actually published a post on what Triberr does, what it doesn’t do, and how to use it to establish your blog presence.

What Is Triberr?

(from Triberr FAQ)

At its core, Triberr is a platform to manage groups called Tribes.

A tribe is a group of people, typically bloggers, who write about the same topics.

For example, if I were a food blogger, I’d look for a tribe that consists of other food bloggers.

More examples of common interest tribes built around a specific subject, topic, or a niche:

Writing
Marketing
Gardening
Pets
etc.

Examples of shared values are tribes built around a specific set of core values:

Democrats
Republicans
Environmentalism
Sustainability
Education
etc.

Examples of a tribe built around a location is a Tucson Bloggers tribe, which includes bloggers from many subject areas (food, marketing, real estate, etc.), all of which are focused strictly on one location. In this case, Tucson.

Example of a tribe built around posting frequency is when everyone in the tribe posts once per week. Bringing someone who posts several times per day would create a sharing imbalance in this tribe.

Example of a tribe built around an event is bringing everyone you meet at a specific event into a tribe built specifically to stay in touch (in a meaningful way) with bloggers from that event.

Once you’ve identified a tribe to join, you can start by “following” the tribe.

When you “follow” a tribe, you are joining the group as an observer. This means you can see and share blog posts from the group, but they can’t see or share your blog posts. This is like an introduction period.

As soon as you follow a tribe, newly published posts from other tribe members will start to show up in your tribal stream:

You’ll have the option of approving and sharing those posts.

After you’ve interacted with the tribe through sharing, commenting and engaging with members, the Chief may decide to promote you to a full fledged tribe member. As a full member, your posts will appear in the Tribal Stream of other tribe members for them to share, comment and engage with.

You may choose to create and run your own tribe, in which case you will have the ability to invite, promote or remove members and followers at your discretion.

I realize that this very short summary of Triberr wasn’t exactly “value-added”, so I took my time to put together this Slideshare presentation to walk you through establishing your own Triberr presence step by step:

Loved it? Embed this presentation on your blog

(just copy and paste the code below)

Use this presentation step by step to establish (or re-establish) your Triberr presence.

For more Triberr tutorials, visit Triberr knowledge base.

You can also check out Triberr community forums (Bonfires) for the latest buzz and to start searching for a new tribe or new tribe members.

One of the best and the most thorough resources I found was this kindle book by Caimin Jones:

Traffic Generation With Triberr – How to use the New Blogging Social Network to Skyrocket Your Blog Visitors

$1.49 very well invested.

Other Triberr Uses

I am all for multitasking.

The more I can do with fewer tools, the better.

Here are just some ideas to how to maximize your time on Triberr.

Use Triberr as a Content curation tool

Whether you do link roundups or comment on other blogs for branding and traffic or simply want to keep up with great content on the web, Triberr can help you to kill all those birds with one stone.

Use Triberr as a Google Reader alternative

Similarly to using Triberr as a content creation tool, you can use it an alternative to the dying Google reader.

Use Triberr to Find Content for Your Blog

Are you familiar with Tumblr reblogging feature?

Well, Triberr has its own reblogging – a feature that allows you to reblog (republish) another fellow Triberr member’s post with a click of a button.

As a result, you get great fresh content for your blog (and no, this is not considered duplicate content – see what duplicate content really means), the original blogger gets exposure he/she otherwise wouldn’t have had and you both share increased engagement via Triberr all-in-one commenting system.

Triberr Reblogging in Action:

Let’s say you are Adam Connell and you just wrote a brilliant and very detailed post: Building Reader Engagement Is Difficult, Or Is It? [25+ Tactics, Tools and Examples]

Next thing you know, your post is reblogged by Dino Dogan at DIYBlogger.net: 25 Tools, Tactics, and Examples for Building Reader Engagement.

You think that would help your post to find a new and much broader audience? You bet.

Plus, since Adam uses Triberr commenting system (see more on it below), he got a lot more comments with no extra work on his part.

Use Triberr for Guest posting

This is a way for you to turn around the reblogging feature we just talked about and use it proactively to find Triberr members’ blogs that might want to reblog your posts.

Waiting for someone to notice your awesome content is not nearly as effective as finding blogs that are a perfect match for your post and suggesting to the bloggers to reblog it.

As you can imagine, you need to proceed with caution here – building relationships first and asking to reblog later is the best way to go.

Use Triberr Commenting System

Yes, Triberr has its own commenting system.

You can easily implement it on your blog with Triberr plugin for WordPress.

Why would you want to do it?

I am usually not in favor of using third-party commenting systems, but Triberr commenting is different.

First of all, it doesn’t replace the native WordPress system – it can be used in addition to it.

And here’s where Triberr commenting is brilliant: it syncs comments no matter where you post it.

For instance, your blog post shows up in your Triberr tribe’s stream.

Someone comments on your post from Triberr stream – that comment shows up on your blog post on your blog as well. If someone reblogs your post, that very comment will show up on that reblogged post as well.

Time-saver? You bet.

From Dino Dogan’s Time Management Platform For Bloggers post:

Use Triberr to Share Different Content

Here’s a tip: your blog is not that only feed you can share on Triberr.

In theory, you can share your content hosted on any third-party platform on Triberr.

The “good to know’s”:

Think of sites that host valuable content written/created by you; good examples are YouTube and Slideshare.
You can add as many RSS feeds as you want under your account settings (screenshot below), but assign only one RSS feed per tribe.

Go under Account Settings => My blogs => Add Blog.

As you can see, I added my YouTube channel as one of the “blogs”.

Once you add your RSS feeds, under Add Blog, you need to assign each blog to a tribe.

Click on Assign Tribes and pick what you’d like to share with each tribe.

If you are a member of several tribes, it’s nice to share different content you publish on other third-party websites and not just your own blog – as long as that content is of high quality and matches the tribe interests, of course.

You can take this a step further: create tribes that share only YouTube videos or Slideshare presentations.

You can assign a different blog to a tribe every 30 days.

#TriberrFail

Yes, Triberr has had its ups and downs.

Here’s the other side of the coin:

Is Triberr Divisive? by Jack Steiner

The evolution of Triberr has changed so that the average member doesn’t receive the “automagical” sharing of their posts that we once did and consequently people spend more time looking at reciprocity.

In simple terms that means that they don’t want to share your posts unless you are sharing theirs. In concept it sounds simple but in practice it reminds me of my children screaming “play fair.”

Utter Triberr Fail – in this post, Katrina Joyner writes:

[Triberr] it’s a wonderful premise. In a world less centered around teaching our kids not to share hairbrushes, car rides, the air we breathe it would work out great. Lately, however, not so much for me and triberr. I’ve noticed a marked lack of reciprocal sharing. I share others’ posts. They don’t share mine. Week after week, nothing changes. I share. They don’t. To be quite frank, I’ve been feeling a little used.

A Triberr Confessional - Amy McCloskey Tobin at SpinSucks.com

Before I quit using Triberr, I decided to take some responsibility regarding how I was choosing to use it. I stopped sharing all of my tribemates’ posts, and took the retribution from some choosing not to share mine anymore either. I began to see Triberr as a curation tool. I did have a lot of great bloggers in my tribes, so instead of blaming Triberr for how I used it, I started to regard it as a safe keeping spot for blogs I intended to read.

Bottom line: YOU create your Triberr experience.

You want to be respected for sharing only quality content on Twitter – via Triberr or any other means? You can do that.

You want to create a cream of the crop tribe in your niche? You can do that.

You want to pollute your Twitter followers stream with mediocre posts just for the sake of sharing? You can do that too.

My Best Triberr Traffic Generation Advice

Triberr is not about traffic generation; it’s about influence.

Influence can’t be measured in Google Analytics, and that’s why so many bloggers give up on Triberr so quickly. They don’t see enough of tangible ROI (i.e. traffic), so they decide Triberr is not worth their time.

I get a lot of traffic from them [Triberr], it can be hard to tell exactly how much, since a lot of the traffic is derived from twitter or wherever others are sharing your content.

With my personal growth blog, my #1 referrer of traffic is twitter and #3 is Triberr itself. Twitter is the #2 referrer for my author blog and most of my tweets are from Triberr.

~Stacy Claflin in her comment on my Facebook fan page

I am not saying Triberr works like a charm for every blogger in every niche. But I do hope you’ll give it a fair shake.

Here’s how:

1. Give Triberr time

Just like everything in business, building influence with Triberr takes time. Us wishing it wasn’t so is not going to speed up the process.

2. Use Triberr instead of Twitter

It’s much easier to cut through the noise on Triberr than it is on Twitter.

It’s easier to network, get noticed, create a following.

Twitter influence will be a result of your Triberr influence.

3. Don’t Get Caught in Numbers

Numbers are always tempting, even when we know they are a bunch of hot air. It’s just human nature.

And so it is with Triberr. It’s very tempting to be a member of dozens of tribes with millions of Twitter followers.

However, let me put it into a prospective for you:

Ana Hoffman has just over 3,500 Twitter followers (not much by some bloggers’ standards, BUT these are all organically grown followers – people who actually want to hear from her, read her tweets, and actively share them).
A blogger you’ve never heard of with a mediocre site has over 100,000 followers (many of them have egg-shaped profile pics and constantly tweet about getting thousands of new Twitter followers in a day or two).

Which one would you rather share your post?

I love this word of warning from Nicole Cook.

WARNING: Do not get caught up in a numbers game.

At the beginning, I had a reach of over 700,000 people amongst the tribes I was in. I felt like I was on top of the world.

I was terrified when I decided to leave a few tribes that my stats would fall. But that actually didn’t happen. Guess what? They rose.

Because now I am in Tribes that match my niche, their followers are engaged which is truly the most important part– (it’s hard to be engaged with users when you have thousands of people you’re following and you’re not actually “talking” to them, but just spurting out tweets all day to posts you haven’t read.)

I wound up with hundreds of new followers, tons of new readers that actively visit daily or near daily and engagement – actually getting to know other bloggers. That was my goal and I was successful.

Originally, I was not getting near the number of hits I have gotten in the past several months after removing myself from those huge tribes with no specific niche.

I will stress it again, use Triberr wisely – it’s not as much about the reach as you think if you’re not in the right tribes. So while your reach may decrease by leaving a tribe that doesn’t fit, if you join up in another tribe that is more your niche, even with smaller numbers – you’ll watch your stats climb.

Well said, Nicole, and that quote brings me to my next point:

4. Create Your Own Tribe

Yes, people are fed up with tribe invites. There are way too many tribes out there as it is.

But listen: creating your own tribe with a few highly targeted bloggers that create great content in your niche is the single best (and quickest) way for you (and them) to be well on your way to increasing your Twitter influence and website traffic.

This would be akin to another traffic generation strategy I used to put Traffic Generation Café on the map of internet marketing blogs to reckon with: building your own commenting tribe. Triberr is the perfect platform to give that traffic strategy a face lift.

Building a great tribe will take time. You’ll have to go through a few deadbeats who just won’t share no matter how hard you try. Or they’ll be full of excitement when they first start, share a few posts, but then realize they have to work for it after all, and simply stop showing up.

It’ll happen.

Cut them loose and move on.

Keep looking for people who want the same thing you do: to share quality content with their followers, gain new followers and readers, and building a long-term authority for themselves and their sites.

5. Make Triberr a Habit

Triberr will only work for you if you show up. Regularly.

So make it a habit to stop by once a day. Or every other day.

Just like you make it a habit to visit Twitter or Facebook. Or check your email. Or respond to comments.

Engagement doesn’t happen automatically.

6. Start an Atomic (Automatic) Tribe

Do you use Twitterfeed, Hootsuite, MarketMeStuite, or any other sharing platform to automatically tweet the latest blog posts from your favorite blogs?

I hope you do; it’s a great way to provide valuable content to your followers and avoid blowing your own trumpet all the time.

That’s exactly what automatic Triberr tribes are about – they allow your fans to automatically share your blog posts with their Twitter followers.

It’s good for the tribe members and their followers – they don’t have to remember to share your posts; and it’s good for you – you get retweets without having to beg for them.

It does take true super-fans to build an automatic tribe though. Your content has to be top-notch, but what’s the point of having a blog if your content sucks to begin with, right?

There’s one catch with automatic tribes though: you have to be a Prime member to start one (it was $40/month last time I checked).

Paging Traffic Generation Café super-fans!

My Other People’s Influence (OPI) tribe needs you!

If you love what you read at Traffic Generation Café and want to share quality content with your Twitter followers (I dare you to say no to that!), then you should join my tribe.

My current membership is small, but powerful:

Your turn to join us (just click on the image – the tribe page will open in a new window):

Triberr Marketing Takeaway

Triberr is definitely a powerful tool to launch or expand your online influence and reach.

It simply works.

Whether you figure out how to put it to work for YOU is entirely up to… you guessed it – YOU.

Have fun storming Triberr!