One quick note. For those of you who are interested, I had the privilege of doing an interview with Harrison McLeod of Men with Pens on his view of gaming and the new creative writing RPG project over at Escaping Reality. Check it out over at my gaming blog.
The Internet is an odd place; the blogosphere even more so. We have our own language, our own technology, and even our own little games. At times, it can even seem as thought we have this strange community, isolated from “normal” folks.
One of the distinguishing marks of the blogosphere, in particular, is the idea of the meme. By “meme,” I’m not talking about a trope, like LeRoy Jenkins or Niebu. Rather, I’m talking about the “Pass this around” meme, where one blogger writes about something, tags a bunch of other bloggers who write about that same thing, and then those bloggers tag new folks. And so on, and so forth, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
Here is the question I face, however: If your blog is an extension of your business, can a meme affect your credibility? I’ve heard arguments on both sides of this question. I’ve seen some fairly high-profile bloggers whose blog is an extension of their business do memes. I’ve also seen some of those types of folks swear off doing memes.
I’ve never done a meme on this blog, although I’ve done them on my hobby and personal blogs.
But, I’m curious what you all think? Do you meme? Do you worry that it affects your credibility when you do?
I’ll give you my answer tomorrow, but let’s discuss it today, shall we?
I made a point the other day that linking to other blogs is an integral part of being useful to your readers. Specifically, I mentioned this in the context of the link post, and how we tend to put up link posts on low-traffic days. While this isn’t true for everyone (John at PoeWar has link posts every day, for example) many of us follow that convention.
At any rate, an interesting discussion broke out in the comments of that post. Here are a couple of the reactions:
I link out a lot – just about every post I think, but I don’t write that many “links posts”, mainly because I find them dull as a reader.
I often skip over them unless they’re well written (tempting me to explore) Anything with more than 5 links makes me think there’s no way I’ve got time to explore them. So I skip to something else. – Joanna Young
I love to link to other bloggers simply because I LOVE a good blog. I get almost as excited about finding a great new (to me) blog, as I do about a really good book, and I just can’t resist the desire to share it. – Lisa Wilder
Now, I think the value in linking to other bloggers within the text of a regular article is without dispute. Linking to another blog and then adding your own thoughts and commentary helps to carry on the big conversation. But, what about Link posts?
There are several characteristics that can make link posts useful:
Useful link posts provide context.
Link posts are most useful when there is some context to those articles. Offering your reader a link with a headline probably gives them little more than what they already have from their feed reader. If the headline wasn’t interesting enough when they scanned their feeds, odds are it isn’t going to be interesting enough in your links post. By providing context, even if that’s just a few sentences, you describe the value the reader gets from clicking the link.
Useful link posts have useful links.
It’s not enough to describe what’s on the other end of the link. You’ve got to make sure that the page you’re describing is indeed interesting and useful to your reader. This means that, no matter how close you and I might be as colleagues or friends, if I don’t write anything decent in a given week you need to leave me out of your link post. Obligation links don’t serve anyone. If you link to a weak post of mine, the odds that the reader will click through next week decrease.
Useful link posts center around a theme.
In many cases, simply keeping the links related to your niche is enough. However, the most useful links posts will hit on several articles that touch a related topic or question. This puts the meta-talk in context and allows your reader to get the big picture and carry on the conversation. In some cases, a themed link post may become the new hub of discussion for the particular topic.
Useful link posts consider length.
A useful link post might be as small as four or five links, or it may contain several hundred. Each of those two extremes has its place. A post with four links and a paragraph or two about each is not that different from a regular blog article. This sort of link post relies on you to add value to the links, giving them context and telling the reader what you think about the links in depth. Short link posts are likely to create more conversation.
On the other hand, you might create a master link list of every post you can on blog traffic or grammar rules. Those link posts become enduring posts, rarely read in their entirety but often referenced. In some cases a post like my 178 Ways to Improve Your Internet Writing, while not intended as a links post, can fall into this category as well.
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Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that other forms of link posts or that link posts that don’t follow these rules can’t work. What I am saying is this: making your link posts more useful increases your value to your readers. It also increases the likelihood that more readers will click through those links, positioning you as a potentially significant source of traffic to the blogs you’re linking.
The more I read about blog promotion, the more I begin to think that some folks are missing the point altogether.
Heck, even I miss it, from time to time, and yet it is one of the main themes of this blog.
What is it we miss? Usefulness. Blogs are supposed to be useful to their readers. That’s one of the big things that differentiates them from simple static SEO websites. We’re all about building loyal readers, customers and clients by providing something of value to our readers, right? At least, that’s what we say we’re about.
But sometimes, we get off track. Feed stats and page views take precedence over providing true value.
Instead of helping other Internet writers to achieve their dreams, I focus a little bit too much on achieving my own dreams. In doing so, I work against my readers and, paradoxically, my dreams as well.
Take, for example, the idea of the links post. Everyone knows that it’s a good thing to link to other blogs. Not only that, there are almost always a large number of posts out there that our readers would find useful, maybe even more useful than our regular posts.
So, we collect a week or two worth of useful links and put them up on… Tuesday, right?
Nope. Links posts never go up on Tuesday through Thursday – those are typically our highest traffic days. No, we offer links when our traffic is at it’s slowest, preferably on a Sunday afternoon.
In our quest to promote our blogs, we wind up being useful, but not too useful when it comes to pointing out other great resources. We also make the conversation on our blog that much more narrow and secluded by not engaging with other bloggers in our niche.
OK, so you move your links post to Wednesdays. Good form. Promote the pack and, in turn, the pack will promote you. Some of your readers will even remember who gave them all of those awesome links. That’s the first way to increase your blog’s usefulness:
Make links to other blogs a top priority.
What else, though? What can you do to make your blog more useful?
James Chartrand from Men with Pensasked recently, on Twitter, if bloggers ought to be allowed a posting vacation. I’ll leave it to James to gather and analyze the results of his little poll, but it got me thinking:
How often do you I post something truly useful on my blog? Let’s face it: sometimes, you post for the sake of posting, especially if you missed a day or three. Your forced content winds up being, in many cases, less than useful.
There are ways around this, of course. You can do like I did on Friday and count on your readers to make the post useful. (Which you all did, and for which I’m grateful.) You can’t do this all the time, though, or your readers might just catch on and take the conversation elsewhere.
So, how do we apply this idea?
Only post useful content, even if that means posting once a week.
A revolutionary idea, I know. Will it cost readers? Maybe. but so will the alternative, I think. Some of the biggest bloggers post on an irregular schedule, so daily posting isn’t a hard and fast rule.
There’s something else that can make your blog more useful. This one should be obvious, but I think it is so obvious that it becomes easy to miss.
Have you ever tried to read a blog with light gray writing on a white background? I’m 35 years old. I’m not old, but I’m no spring chicken. Reading gray on white is a pain in the ass. I can’t make it out. Same goes for that tiny print that the kids want to use these days.
I know, I know. Get off my lawn.
Seriously, though, your blog layout and design is an important part of being useful to your readers. If you make it difficult for readers to find archives or don’t offer a reasonably easy method of navigation, you’re making their job harder. At some point, readers will decide that it is not worth the extra work to find out what they were looking for.
Now, I’m not a designer. The “WJ” badge at the top of my blog is evidence of that fact. But, I do what I can to make my blog easy on the eyes and easy to get around, and I do that by trusting my instincts but also asking for advice.
That’s another way to make your blog more useful:
Make readability and navigation priorities in your blog design.
Do what you can. If you have a crappy “WJ” badge until you are willing to invest in a better banner, then at least make sure people can read your blog.
So, what else?
If I had to add a 4th way to make your blog useful, it would be this:
Foster a true conversation with your readers.
I don’t need to tell you how this works. You already know the drill. Put something in the comments and I’ll write back. Let’s do this one together, shall we?
What do you think? How can you increase your blog’s usefulness?
(Good morning, all! I’m enjoying a sunny weekend here in Michigan with my family. In addition to mowing the lawn and planting some flowers, I’ll be setting up the pool for the summer. The kids are majorly geeked!
I’ll be back on Monday, but in the meantime enjoy a useful, if not necessarily writing-related, article from professional blogger and blog mentor, Yaro Starak.)
There are basically two types of bloggers in the world – reporters and experts – and some people perform both roles (usually the experts, it’s hard for reporters to become experts, but it’s easy for experts to report).
If you have ever taken an Internet marketing course or attended a seminar specifically for beginners, you have probably heard about the two different methodologies. Whenever the business model is based on content, and if you blog for money then the model is based on content, people are taught to either start as reporters, or if possible step up as experts.
I’ll be frank, you want to be the expert.
Reporters leverage the content of the experts and in most cases people start off as reporters because they haven’t established expertise. Experts enjoy the perks of preeminence, higher conversion rates because of perceived value, it’s easier to get publicity, people are more likely to seek you out rather than you having to seek others out, joint ventures come easier, etc… experts in most cases simply make more money and attract more attention.
Most Bloggers Are Reporters
The thing with expertise is that it requires something – experience. No person becomes an expert without doing things and learning. Bloggers usually start out without expertise and as a result begin their blogging journey by talking about everything going on in their niche (reporting) and by interviewing and talking about other experts (reporting again).
There’s nothing wrong with reporting of course and for many people it’s a necessity at first until you build up some expertise. Unfortunately the ratios are pretty skewed when it comes to reporters and experts – there are a lot more reporters than there are experts, hence reporters tend to struggle to gain attention and when they do, they often just enhance the reputation of the expert they are reporting on.
Don’t Replicate Your Teacher
If you have ever spent some time browsing products in the learn Internet marketing niche you will notice a pattern. Many people first study Internet marketing from a “guru” (for lack of a better term). The guru teaches how he or she is able to make money online, and very often the view that the student gleams is that in order to make money online you have to teach others how to make money online.
The end result of this process is a huge army of amateurs attempting to replicate what their teacher does in the same industry – the Internet marketing industry – not realizing that without expert status based on a proven record and all the perks that come with it, it’s next to impossible to succeed.
Even people who enjoy marginal success, say for example growing an email list of 1,000 people, then go out and launch a product about how to grow an email list of 1,000 people. Now I have no problems with that, I think it’s fine to teach beginners and leverage whatever achievements you have, the problem is that people gravitate to the same niche – Internet marketing – and rarely have any key points of differentiation.
How many products out there do you know of that all claim to teach the same things – email marketing, SEO, pay per click, affiliate marketing, and all the sub-niches that fall under the category of Internet marketing. It’s a saturated market, yet when you see your teachers and other gurus making money teaching others how to make money (and let’s face it – making money as a subject is one of the most compelling) – your natural inclination is to follow in their footsteps.
If the key is to become an expert and you haven’t spent the last 5-10 years making money online, I suggest you look for another niche to establish expertise in.
Report on Your Process, Not Others
The secret to progress from reporter to expert is not to focus on other experts and instead report on your own journey. When you are learning how to do something and implementing things day by day, or studying other people’s work, you need to take your process and what you do as a result of what you learn, and use it as content for your blog.
It’s okay to talk about experts when you learn something from them, but always relate it to what you are doing. If you learn a technique from an expert it’s fine to state you learned it from them (and affiliate link to their product too!) but you should then take that technique, apply it to what you are doing and then report back YOUR results, not there’s. Frame things using your opinion – your stories – and don’t regurgitate what the expert said. The key is differentiation and personality, not replication.
Expertise comes from doing things most people don’t do and then talking about it. If you do this often enough you wake up one day as an expert, possibly without even realizing how it happened, simply because you were so good at reporting what you did.
You Are Already An Expert
Most people fail to become experts (or perceived as experts) because they don’t leverage what they already know. Every person who lives a life learns things as they go, takes action every day and knows something about something. The reason why they never become an expert is because they choose not to (which is fine for some, not everyone wants to be an expert), but if your goal is to blog your way to expertise and leave the world of reporting behind you have to start teaching and doing so by leveraging real experience.
Experience can come from what you do today and what you have done previously, you just need to take enough steps to demonstrate what you already know and what you are presently learning along your journey. I know so many people in my life who are experts simply by virtue of the life they have lived, yet they are so insecure about what they know, they never commit their knowledge to words for fear of…well fear.
Blogs, and the Web in general, are amazing resources when you leverage them as a communication tool to spread your expertise because of the sheer scope of people they can reach. If all you ever do is talk to people in person and share your experience using limited communication mediums, you haven’t much hope of becoming an expert. Take what you know and show other people through blogging, and you might be surprised how people change their perception of you in time.
Reporting Is A Stepping Stone
If your previous experience and expertise is from an area you want to leave behind or you are starting from “scratch”, then reporting is the path you must walk, at least for the short term.
Reporting is a lot of fun. Interviewing experts, talking about what other people are doing and just being part of a community is not a bad way to blog. In many cases people make a career of reporting (journalism is about just that), but if you truly want success and exponential results, at some point you will have to stand up and proclaim yourself as someone unusually good at something and then proceed to demonstrate it over and over again.
Have patience and focus on what you do to learn and then translate that experience into lessons for others, and remember, it’s okay to be a big fish in a small pond, that’s all most experts really are.
This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.
To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:
I’m so excited to tell you about something that I just couldn’t wait until tomorrow.
Yaro Starak of Entrepreneur’s Journey has been one of the biggest influences on the blogging side of my freelance career. In fact, the name “Writing Journey” was inspired by Yaro. Yaro’s web site has over 25,000 RSS subscribers, and he talks about how he made more than $6,000 in one month by blogging. After reading about his success with blogging, I knew I had to give it a shot. Every bit of advice I’ve read from Yaro has been pure gold.
An integral part of Yaro’s program is the Blog Profits Blueprint. Yaro offers the Blueprint free of charge, and it contains enough advice to get you started on the path to blogging success. Here’s the link to the newest version of the Blueprint, hot off the (digital) presses:
The Blueprint doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about successful blogging. In fact, if you’ve already got 1,000 or more subscribers, there probably isn’t much for you there. I’m not saying you shouldn’t download it and give it a look, I’m saying that you’ve probably already mastered the strategies and tactics he covers in the Blueprint.
Yaro is also in the process of launching the next go-around of his Blog Mastermind mentoring program. I haven’t participated in the program, but I know of at least two other bloggers (both more successful than I am, so far) who have been through the program and they can’t say enough good things about it. I’m going to check with them and see if we can’t get a guest post or two talking about their experiences with Blog Mastermind. I’m comfortable recommending the mentoring program to you based on the quality of the Blueprint, the quality of Yaro’s blogging advice at Entrepreneur’s Journey, and the results I’ve personally seen from them.
I especially like the fact that Yaro, unlike some high-profile bloggers, really seems to care about writing quality content. He is constantly banging the gong about “adding value” to your blogging, and making your blogging useful to others. Yaro probably spends more time on marketing and monetization than I would, but I’m not a blogging writer – I’m a writing writer.
Anyways, as part of the launch, Yaro’s offered some useful articles to prospective members. The article that follows is his. Please note that any links to Yaro’s sites are affiliate links.
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10 Blog Traffic Tips
In every bloggers life comes a special day – the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else”s blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader – you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best friend about your new blog but that”s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.
Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.
It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called “traction”, which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.
Top 10 Tips
10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.
9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.
You don”t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.
8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that”s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).
7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.
Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.
6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger”s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry – it”s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.
This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important – it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.
5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.
4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.
To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.
3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it”s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it”s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!
2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it”s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have – your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.
How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.
1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.
I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it”s certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.
This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.
To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:
