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- 3 Questions to Ask Before You Publish Your Next Blog Post
“Warning: this post may cause dizziness.”
This is not a warning you want to put at the top of a blog post. But guess what? Many should.
Why? Because some blog posts leave visitors feeling dizzy and confused.
They come in with the intention of either being entertained or learning something. But they leave saying, “What the heck was that?”
Part of the reason readers feel this way is because the author has “Lost syndrome.” What is it exactly?
Well if you watched the series Lost, you probably felt exactly that at the end of many episodes. Lost. Why? Well I have a few theories. But the top one is this. I think the writers were creating the story as they went along. That may or may not have worked for them, depending on who you ask.
But for bloggers, this is not a good idea.
You want to have a focused message that you can deliver to the focused eyeballs on your site.
Focused eyes on an unfocused message? Not only will your readers feel confused, they’ll possibly be a bit dizzy from trying to piece together your message. That is, if you even have a message.
So before you hit Publish on your next blog post, here are some questions you can ask yourself to increase the chances of getting your message across.
Question 1: Who is the target audience for this post?
Knowing your target audience will help you create a clear message that directly addresses them.
It’s far better for a few targeted readers to read your content and take action than it is for many un-targeted readers to read it and do nothing.
Fix your sights on your desired audience and speak directly to them. Address the emotions they are feeling and the questions they have on the subject you’re writing about.
Build a bond with them. Put yourself in their shoes and then speak to them directly. Address the emotions they have towards your subject. And answer the questions that are burning inside of them.
When you can bond with a person to the point that they say, “This person actually gets me,” you have taken a huge step towards getting that person to trust you and listen to what you have to say.
Question 2: Why am I writing this post?
In order for your readers to clearly understand your content, you should clearly understand why you’re writing it.
It’s great to do a brain dump into your notebook or journal, but that’s probably best kept for your eyes. Remember, just because something you write makes sense to you, it won’t necessarily make sense to your reader.
Understand why you are writing the post. Then, as clearly as possible, present the content to your readers.
If you aren’t sure why you are writing your post and want to do it anyway, it might be a good idea to let your readers know beforehand. That way, they aren’t left scratching their heads when they get to the last word of what you have to say.
Question 3: What action do I want my readers to take?
Your readers shouldn’t need a secret decoder ring to decipher what you want them to do after reading your content. Clearly state the action you want them to take. If you leave it up to them to figure out, they probably won’t.
What do you want them to do? Click a link? Buy something? Leave a comment? Share your post?
Let them know in simple terms. People are much more likely to take action when they know exactly what to do and how to do it.
By asking yourself the three questions above you’ll deliver a clear message that your readers can understand and take action on. This will help separate you from the pack of blogs that leave people scratching their heads and wondering what just happened.
How does your most recent post perform in light of these three questions? Let us know in the comments.
Eric Transue is a part-time blogger and product creator focused on showing you how to succeed online without all the BS. Download his free ebook on How To Create Your First Product Online and visit his blog at EricTransue.com to learn more about him.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
3 Questions to Ask Before You Publish Your Next Blog Post
Переслать - FeedBurner vs. Aweber: Do You Really Need an Autoresponder for Your Blog?
This guest post is by Aman Basanti of Ageofmarketing.com.
When it comes to turning casual visitors into regular readers there are two main options—FeedBurner and Aweber.
FeedBurner uses Feed-based technology (RSS and Atom) to send updates to your blog subscribers. Owned by Google (Google bought it in 2007 for $100 million), FeedBurner is one of the biggest feed syndicators on the Internet.
It works like this: a site visitor subscribes to your feed and every time you add a new post, a message is sent to them alerting them of the addition. The subscriber needs special software (a feed reader) to access the feed.
For more information on feeds, see Darren's post, What is RSS?
Aweber is email-based technology that allows you to send automated email messages to your subscribers. It works similarly to a feed but does not require special feed-reading software, only an email address to subscribe to a blog.
Aweber is the most popular autoresponder software system on the Internet. Other popular brands include Infusionsoft, MailChimp, and GetResponse.
Advantages of FeedBurner
- FeedBurner is free, Aweber costs money: The key advantage of using FeedBurner instead of Aweber (or other auto-responders) on your blog is that FeedBurner does not cost anything. Aweber, on the other hand, can cost $20-$100 a month depending on the number of subscribers you have.
- FeedBurner take less effort: Most popular blogging platforms (WordPress, Blogger, TypePad etc.) publish feeds automatically. There is nothing more to do on top of publishing a post. With auto-responders, however, you have to manually setup the messages and sequence them (but you can now set up a blog broadcast in Aweber, which creates an automatic email newsletter).
- FeedBurner supports both feed readers and email subscribers: The key advantage of auto-responders like Aweber used to be that you did not need special software to subscribe, only an email address. As millions of people still do not have feed readers or prefer email, this meant that you still needed an aut-responder to capture those readers. But FeedBurner changed all that by allowing people to subscribe to a feed using an email address. This means that while an autoresponder only supports email, FeedBurner supports both feed readers and email.
Given that FeedBurner is free, easy to set up, effortless to use, and supports both feed readers and email, why would you want to pay for an auto responder?
The fatal flaw in feeds
The key thing that you cannot do with a feed is sequence messages: you cannot create a series of messages to be sent to your subscribers. This means that your subscribers only get alerts for posts that are added after they subscribe.
For example, say you post four articles over four weeks, and a visitor subscribes to your blog after week three. This means they will only get alerted about the fourth post, and will not receive posts one to three, as shown in the image below.
In FeedBurner, you cannot send alerts for older posts
Now, if you post time-sensitive information (news or latest developments) on your blog, this doesn’t matter. But if you publish evergreen content, or you want to take your blog readers through a specific set of messages, the ability to sequence is crucial.
Autoresponders allow you to do just that. You can create a sequence of messages, set how long the wait is between each message, and the autoresponder will execute that for you for each subscriber, regardless of when they join, as shown below.
Aweber allows you to create a sequence of messages
Then there are the other benefits of auto-responders like Aweber—customization of look and feel of emails, personalization (“Hi John”), controlling the wait period between messages, solid delivery rates, split-test multiple lead capture forms, and so on.
The audience factor
A third factor in deciding which system to use is your audience. If you have tech-phobic audience, then an email-based system like Aweber is likely better for you.
For tech-savvy audiences, on the other hand, FeedBurner may be better. Technically inclined people are more likely to use and prefer to get their blog updates through feeds. Feeds also have the added benefit of allowing another blogger to include your feed on their blog, creating free exposure and traffic for your blog.
The best way to find out what your audience wants is to have both options on your site for a month and see what your readers prefer. You may even find that it is useful to have both.
The bottom line
If you have a small budget, publish time-sensitive information, and/or cater to a tech-savvy audience, FeedBurner will be sufficient for your blog.
If, on the other hand, you want to take your subscribers through a sequence of messages and control the wait periods between the messages, then Aweber is better suited to your blog.
What are you using: Aweber, FeedBurner … or something else? Tell us how you do it in the comments.
Aman Basanti writes about the psychology of buying and teaches you how you can use the principles of consumer psychology to boost your sales. Visit www.Ageofmarketing.com/free-ebook to get his new ebook—Marketing to the Pre-Historic Mind: How the Hot New Science of Behavioural Economics Can Help You Boost Your Sales—for FREE.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
FeedBurner vs. Aweber: Do You Really Need an Autoresponder for Your Blog?
Переслать - How Offline Promotion Landed 300 New Blog Visitors
This guest post is by Kyle Taylor of The Penny Hoarder.
I've been blogging for six short months and I'm bored.
I still love writing new content, but like many of you, I have spent so many countless hours commenting, tweeting, and begging for backlinks that I'm simply too bored to keep it up.
What makes the situation worse is that I have spent months establishing myself as a unique brand in my niche, yet I've been employing all of the same marketing strategies as my competitors. My marketing is the first impression I give potential readers and, by reusing old strategies, I have been leaving readers with the impression that I was just another personal finance blog. Sure, the traffic has grown, slow and steady, but I decided that I needed to do something different this summer; not only to grow the site faster, but to make marketing more enjoyable for myself.
My experiment
My first move was to step offline. Offline is a scary place, but there happens to be millions of people out there that have never heard of my blog. And these are the kind of people who aren't trolling comment threads and message boards like the rest of us. I wanted to reach them and I was confident that once they found me, I could hook 'em.
My bumper sticker
I once read in a ProBlogger article that when advertising online, you shouldn't necessarily send people to your homepage. Rather, you should sent them to a page deep within your blog. I decided to run with that advice and apply it to my offline endeavor. Instead of promoting my entire blog, I picked a popular article on my site titled, "I Get Paid to Buy Beer," bought the domain iGetFreeBeer.com, and permanently redirected the domain to the article hosted on my blog.
Maybe it wasn't quite what Darren had in mind when he shared that advice, but what the heck?
It had all the makings of a page ready to go viral offline:
- A rather juvenile web address. Check.
- An article that represented my blog well. Check.
- And, well … free beer. Check.
My hope was that some of the new visitors would like what they saw in the article and start exploring the rest of the blog. The downside of promoting a separate web address was that we wouldn't be promoting our actual brand or website. However, I was hoping the novelty of "free beer" would successfully launch our regular website to stardom, or at the very least, bring about world peace.
Naturally, this type of article and domain address was perfect to market to the under-30 demographic. To promote the new domain, we had simple bumper stickers made and hired willing college students from Craigslist.com and Fiverr.com to put the stickers up around their college campuses, apartments, and hangouts.
Results
All told, we spent about $120 dollars. The printing cost us $45 for 250 bumper stickers. And five college students were paid $15 each to put up 50 stickers in their towns.
The campaign is only in its second week, and we have already had more than 300 new visitors come from our bumper stickers. At $0.40 per visit, our costs are certainly cheaper than an AdWords campaign, and there is no telling how many more visitors we will get in the coming weeks.
It's also easy to track our campaign using Google Analytics, because the visitors show up as a "referring site." Plus, using the Advanced options, we can look at our visitors' cities to see if word-of-mouth has found us readers in locations other than the ones we targeted with our stickers.
Get creative
Start brainstorming ways you can promote your website that you haven't seen done before. Get crazy. Have fun with it.
Maybe you could make a video of yourself planking and post it on Youtube? Maybe you could give out free lemonade at the beach and put your blog’s logo on the cup? What about passing out flyers at the farmer's market?
The strategy you choose will largely depend on your site's niche, but if you want to be different then everybody else, you are going to have to start thinking differently about your marketing.
Have you ever completed offline marketing—or done something completely outside the box? Let us know how you went in the comments.
Kyle Taylor is a personal finance blogger that blogs about weird ways to make money at The Penny Hoarder. Connect on Facebook or join the newsletter and get our "5 Wackiest Ways to Make Extra Money."
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
How Offline Promotion Landed 300 New Blog Visitors
Переслать - How to Recruit Evangelists for Your Blog
This guest post is by M.Farouk Radwan of http://www.2knowmyself.com.
Today, every successful blogger knows that diversifying traffic sources is a practice we can’t afford to ignore. Search engines update their search algorithms all the time, social media sites keep rising and falling, and new traffic sources keep appearing and disappearing.
In order to ensure your long-term continuity on the Web, and in order to be able to live through these changes, you need a team of evangelists who can help you market your content whenever a new traffic source appears.
For example, if you had a blog before the time of Twitter, and then Twitter came into existence, you need loyal evangelists who can help you develop strong presence on the social network, who tweet your posts, retweet your tweets, and follow you.
In this post I will tell you about powerful and effective methods that can help you recruit evangelists for your blog.
Recognize potential evangelists
How many times you ignored a mail, a comment, or a request of help from a reader? Each of these people can become potential evangelists when you provide them with the help they need.
When I get a mail from someone asking for help I do my best to answer him on time. If he replies to say something like "thanks," or if he doesn't reply at all, I don't consider him an evangelist. But if he replies saying that he is very thankful, I then ask him to become an evangelist for my blog.
Of course I don't ask him to do this in a direct way; instead I tell him something like, "You are most welcome. If you want to help me as well, then you can do that by sharing my content."
People who send you thank you emails are evangelists. When they use powerful words, you know they are already existing evangelists who are eager to do what you ask. Never be ashamed to ask someone for a favor if you really helped that person through your blog.
Never block all communication channels
I often come across blogs that have no content forms, no method to comment on a post, and no communication method that can help you reach the owner of the blog.
Of course you might want to disable one or two features for technical reasons, but this doesn't mean that you can’t keep at least one communication channel opened between you and the people who might become evangelists. After all, if those people can't reach you, you will never be able to recruit them.
Spend more time communicating with people
Before understanding this fact, I used to spend no more than 30 minutes answering emails, and sometimes I allowed many messages to accumulate in my Facebook inbox. After understanding my mistake, I started spending more than one hour per day answering emails and searching for potential evangelists.
Post an announcement
Even if you keep all communication channels opened between you and your readers, there will still be many potential evangelists who won't offer help unless you ask them to do so.
Post an announcement that states that you need help from loyal readers in your forums, on your blog, or on your Facebook page.
Assign tasks to your evangelists
- Once you have a team of evangelists, you can ask them to share your content and to promote it on the newest potential traffic sources.
- Keep an excel file with the names and emails of your evangelists, so that you can reach them whenever you want.
- Keep looking for potential evangelists and keep increasing their numbers all the time.
Remember: successful blogging is all about connecting with your loyal readers on a deep level so that they can help your blog come into the light.
Avoid overburdening your evangelists with tasks
People who believe in you should be treated as if they are precious treasure. You don't want to overburden those people with tasks and have them turn away from you.
If you asked one evangelist for help, make sure you don't ask her again for a reasonable period of time. In the Excel sheet where you keep the names and contact details of your evangelists, make notes so that you can check which ones have been contacted before, and which have not.
Also, repay the favor your evangelists gave you, even if you have initially helped them. For example, if you sell products or have membership areas, give those people free access to some of your products.
This will help to increase their loyalty even more, and they will never turn away from your blog. The key point to keep in mind is to not ask for more than those people can tolerate, or else you will risk losing them.
And the next time you need help, ask those loyal evangelists indirectly, for example, by announcing on your fan page that you need help with a task. Only those who really want to help another time will get back to you, so you can be assured you’re not overburdening anyone.
Does your blog have evangelists? How did you build up a core group of loyal followers? Share your tips in the comments.
Written by M.Farouk Radwan, the founder of http://www.2knowmyself.com, which gets more than 600,000 page views per month.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
How to Recruit Evangelists for Your Blog
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