How Our VP Public Relations Used Blogging to Promote the Club

2AM. Since I wasn't able to attend Thursday's meeting, I checked this blog for updates. Because I am in the website design industry, my eyes are subconsciously trained to scan anything that has something to do with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). What immediately caught my attention was that something changed in my PageRank icon. This is what I saw.


Unbelieving and thinking that I might just be too sleepy, I pointed my cursor over the icon and found out that my eyes were not fooling me.


The site’s PageRank indeed climbed to PR4.

I was surprised because not many blogs easily reach PageRank 4. PageRank algorithm is logarithmic which means that achieving PR4 from PR3 is much harder to get than going from PR2 to PR3.

Checking the site’s traffic profile surprised me even more when I saw all indicators were up with a whopping 33-fold increase in visitors over the last three months.


That means that if an average of one person visited our site each day last November, we would have an average of 33 visitors per day as of this writing. SEO is beyond the scope of this blog so I’ll spare you the details.

Anyway, I totally forgot I was ready to doze off and I recalled a post-meeting chitchat in Starbucks last October. Our VP for Public Relations, Ed Ebreo, first mentioned the idea of promoting the club through aggressive blogging and site optimization and asked for at least 3 people to join his blogging team. A week later, the ButterNToast Blogging Team was born; that included me!

And there started all the blogging and the link building campaign. One time Ed experimented on dynamic meta elements and titles, which led to the corruption of the template, which left him with no choice but to reinstall the template and all widgets. ;) He really worked hard to make this blog site more effective. And his hard work paid off; the site started picking up visitors. Kudos to Ed.

Do you now see the potential of promoting the club through blogging? I guess not even Toastmasters International knows it. Website and blogging are not on the list of “17 Ideas on How and Where to Promote Toastmasters” found in the TI site. I suggest to Ed to now do the honor of emailing the TI guys with the subject “What Works for Us”. After all, they have this to say at the end of the article.

“Do you have any good tips for promoting clubs? E-mail your story to us and it could be published on this Web site. Send it to letters@toastmasters.org (subject: What Works for Us).”

:owenbraveheart