LAST WEEK I provided an overview of the growth in the number of visitors to my website during a one year period. I attempted to show how I have used content and promotion to build it into a media for advertising my writing. This week, I will focus on one of the tools that has helped promote traffic to my website most successfully: Triberr. 

By way of background, let me point out that I hadn't promoted my website prior to December, 2011, because I didn't have a product ready for delivery. My first novel, Rebels on the Mountain wasn't published until the end of that month. I knew from my experience as an ad man that teasing a product too far in advance of its availability was a bad idea. 

Once Rebels was published, I began promoting my website in earnest. Notice on the chart above that visits to my website jumped from less than 1,800 in December to more than 12,000 in January. The only change I made was to join Triberr.

Triberr is simple. It is an Internet application program that helps people form a tribe and collaborate. Several times each day it examines all of the blogs that the members of the tribe maintain and places a link to each new posting into the tribal stream.

Let's pause here and examine the terms I've used. They sound like standard English words with which you're familiar, but they're used in uncommon ways. Their meanings are slightly altered by the context.

• Tribe: bloggers who consent to participate in a collaborative effort.
  
• Collaborate: Work together and help each by promoting each other's blogs using social media.
  
• Social Media: Twitter, FaceBook, etc., used to communicate with friends and followers.
  
• Friends: People who share photos, videos, articles, links to webpages, and personal messages on FaceBook.
  
• Followers: People who voluntarily subscribe to short messages containing with links to photos, videos, and links to webpages as well as brief personal messages on Twitter.
  
• Tribal Stream: A list of articles built from the most recent blog postings of all members of the tribe.
  

Now, let's revisit that last idea. Triberr automatically builds a tribal stream from the most recent postings in blogs of all members of a collaborative tribe. Members of the tribe can see all of the postings of their tribe mates without visiting all of their blogs. The tribal stream only provides a sample of the posting. Members can see the whole posting simply by clicking on the heading for the blog posting.

Triberr also provides automated commands to tweet and share each posting. The tweets will be repeated automatically several times each day. In effect, tribe members are multiplying their power to reach a far larger audience than they could do on their own.

For example, when I joined my tribe, I had less than one thousand followers on Twitter and maybe thirty friends on FaceBook. However, as a member of the tribe, potential tweets promoting my blog postings rose to more than ten thousand and shares with Facebook friends rose to several hundred. Today, I have more than three thousand followers on Twitter. However, as a member of a tribe, my potential audience now exceeds 336,000! The secret is that our tribe has grown as well as our individual followings.

Is it any wonder that traffic to my website has grown since I joined Triberr?

Incidentally, Triberr is free. It only requires an invitation from an existing member to join a tribe. Once established on Triberr, you can begin building your own tribes.

If there is a downside to Triberr, it is simply this: The tribe that you're invited to join may not reach the same audience you'd like to reach. For example, I belong to tribes of writers. Almost all of them blog about writing and would like to influence people to purchase their books. It's kind of like a tribe of Eskimos trying to sell blocks of ice to each other. I think it's time for me to build a tribe of my own. I won't quit the ones I already belong to. My tribe mates have become good friends and I owe them a lot for helping me build my website traffic. However, I think it's time for me to reach another audience.

I will complete my series of blog postings about my tour of duty in Vietnam in a few weeks and plan on launching another series relating to the coming election this November. I belong to that class of persons who believe that it will be pivotal in American history. Inasmuch as history is my favorite subject, I would like to influence it.

There are a vast number of people in the country who want to alter the course of the nation, reduce the size of government, return to fiscal responsibility, and reestablish Constitutional controls, rights, and liberties. Now, I recognize that statement has probably offended some. I also recognize that nothing I say or do will alter your opinion. My objective is to find those who agree with me, and collaborate with them, to make our voices one and participate more effectively in the political process.

I have already created the shell for this collaborative effort: The American Conservatives tribe. I'm looking to fill it with like-minded people. Please use the contact form in this website to reach me, and I'll send you an invitation.

Much has happened in the year and a half since I wrote this. The numbers of visitors to my website continued to grow as I posted more often, almost daily. Then I became tired of "feeding the beast" and dropped back to posting once or twice each week and traffic slowed. I needed time to complete my second novel, Strange Company (to be released later this year).

Now I'm posting four times each week and traffic is growing again, greatly aided by my Tribe-mates. Just last month, more than 22,000 visitors viewed more than 70,000 pages.

The American Conservatives tribe was launched just a few weeks ago and its power to multiply our reach is growing. If you're a political conservative or libertarian, please join us.