If you decide to start a blog for yourself or your organization, part of your strategy should include blog promotion. How and where you promote your blog are key elements in engaging your readers to comment, subscribe, and share your messages.
To learn more about blog marketing and promotion, we continue our conversation this week with Paul Twitchell from AIDS Action Committee’s blog and Dr. David Wessner, Professor at Davidson College, of The AIDS Pandemic blog. We’re also joined by James Daugherty, author of the HIV and AIDS News blog, and we’ll share our own blog promotion experiences at AIDS.gov.
Blogging can be an effective way to communicate HIV messages and engage people in a dialogue about important issues and topics. Today, we’ll highlight two HIV/AIDS-focused blogs that bring distinct perspectives to the topic--blogs by an HIV/AIDS service provider, and a college professor and his students.
Three months ago we reflected on whether the blog was working and we decided to continue. We declared that we’d continue blogging only as long as we could clearly define how best to measure our success.
Recently one of our colleagues, Alan Gambrell, asked us if we thought the blog was a success. Alan, a consultant with the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), is an AIDS.gov Planning Committee member and is helping the HRSA staff plan the upcoming Ryan White Program Grantee Meeting. HRSA has invited Miguel Gomez, director of AIDS.gov, to speak on the role of new media at the conference. Alan’s questions were very similar to the ones we’ve been asking ourselves, so we’d like to use this week's blog post to share our responses with you.
This week we build on our June 10 post about virtual worlds and focus on the well-known site, Second Life.
To better understand how Second Life can help share HIV information and provide support to those who are HIV-positive, we continued our conversation with our colleagues from the NIH-funded Health Info Island, Lori Bell and Carol Perryman. Through our own adventures in Second Life, we also learned from two HIV advocates, Felicita Gonzalez from the Bronx AIDS Services and Matt Cox, an Australian and owner of the Planet Positive Group in Second Life.
and Dr. David Wessner, Professor at Davidson College, of The AIDS Pandemic blog 
