 |  ProBlogger Blog TipsMake Money Blogging http://www.problogger.net рекомендовать друзьям >> |
- 11 Blog Proofreading Tips You Can't Afford to Ignore
This guest post is by Luke Palder of ProofreadingServices.Us.
It should come as no surprise that writing for a blog is different from writing for other types of media. Blogs are free to read and there are tons of them, so people tend to decide very quickly if they’d like to move on to the next one. Only great content will cause a new visitor to read beyond the first paragraph of one of your posts, but there are many ways to scare a new reader away. Publishing content with glaring errors is one of them.
Git my pointe? (Don’t run away just yet. Instead, find out how easy blog proofreading can be.)
The aim of blog proofreading is to build credibility with new readers as quickly as possible so that they stick around, share your content and maybe even throw you a link or two. Below are 11 actionable proofreading tips for bloggers that are going to help you polish your posts quickly and effectively.
1. Walk away
Bloggers usually write a post and then immediately publish it. Don’t. Wait instead. When you’ve stared for too long at the same draft, any proofreading you undertake will be ineffective. Step away from your keyboard for half an hour or an entire day (gasp!) if you can and then check your work. This way, you’ll spot more errors.
2. Ask a friend for help
No matter how sharp you are at spotting errors, your eyes naturally skip over errors in your own work. Enlisting a friend’s help to read a draft post and point out your mistakes can help you correct them.
3. Use a spell-checker
You might be a flawless speller, but everyone includes a typo here and there, especially when hurriedly typing, which is the modus operandi of many of my blogging brethren. Always run your blog posts through a spell-checker or use a browser that detects spelling errors. This is one of the quickest proofreading tips you can implement, and there’s no reason not to use a tool that’s so widely available.
4. Use a grammar-checker
Like spell-checkers, grammar-checkers are immeasurably useful, but only if you actually use them (for many word processing programs, this means you’ll actually have to click “start”). A grammar-checker will scan your post for issues such as parallel structure errors, comma splices and run-on sentences, all of which are easy to miss when rushing to publish. Grammar-checkers aren’t perfect, but they’ll point out sentences that may need more work.
5. Read your post backward
Scan your blog post in reverse to spot spelling errors that your spell-checker didn’t catch. Going backward lets you concentrate on individual words, so you can focus your attention on finding elusive spelling errors without getting distracted by other writing issues.
6. Proofread multiple times
Reading your post through to catch major errors is a good first step, but once is not enough. It’s best to go through your draft several times and to look for a specific type of error each time. For example, you might look for run-on sentences in one scan, and check for proper spelling after that.
7. Ensure you’ve been inclusive
If you write for geneticists, then using terms like “genotype” and “phenotype” without defining them is okay; however, if you’re writing a post for the general public, cut down on jargon and find inclusive ways to communicate. Write out abbreviations and acronyms unless they’re common like “IRS” or “CBS.” While you don’t have to strip your writing of personality, use specialized terminology sparingly. Your blog about anime and manga might describe a new character as “kawaii,” but avoid writing half of your blog in romaji Japanese so your less experienced readers can follow along easily.
8. Print it out
What your eyes miss on the screen, they’ll see on a printed page. Print your draft out and read it on paper to find elusive errors.
9. Choose a different font
Just as printing your post will force you to examine it differently, so will changing fonts during the proofreading process. Select a new font that’s easy to read, and see how your post looks in Times New Roman or Courier instead of your usual Arial.
10. Triple-check proper nouns
If you want your blog to have a chance of becoming lucrative linkbait, you must spell the names of people, products and companies correctly. Correct spellings attract search engines’ notice and will make you trustworthy in your readers’ eyes. Spell-checkers do a great job in general, but they’re terrible with proper nouns, so pay extra attention to how names are spelled.
Pro tip: Enclose proper nouns you’re unsure about within quotation marks and Google them. Google sometimes suggests an alternative spelling based on what is searched most often. Sometimes you might even know that the spelling you have is correct, but that it’s not the most popular version (e.g. how many ways are there to spell Muammar Gaddafi?). When you’re trying to spell a proper noun that doesn’t have a universally agreed upon correct spelling in your language, this quotation mark technique is a great way to compare the number of Google results that different correct spellings of a proper noun yield. It’s that easy.
11. Read it out loud
Saving one of the most effective blog proofreading tips for last, read your post out loud, especially if you’re in a rush. Blog posts typically take on a conversational tone, and how better to proofread the quality of that tone than to read your draft out loud? Reading out loud also helps you find subject-verb agreement errors and other awkward phrases with great ease.
These 11 proofreading tips will help you build instant credibility with your readers. What didn’t I include? I think we can make a much longer list.
Luke Palder is the founder of ProofreadingServices.Us, a San Francisco-based proofreading service. ProofreadingServices.Us provides online proofreading, manuscript proofreading and other proofreading services.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
11 Blog Proofreading Tips You Can't Afford to Ignore
Переслать - Boost Your Blog #1: Create a Product
Yesterday I gave an example of something I’d been putting off doing to improve my blog—even though I knew it would have long-term benefits.
Today I want to continue on that theme and being to suggest a number of areas that bloggers could be investing time into today—and enjoying payoffs from in the future. Some of them will lead to financial benefits while others are just going to improve the effectiveness of a blog.
1. Create a Product
Every time I talk about monetizing blogs by selling a product of your own, I get comments from bloggers telling me that they’re thinking of, planning to, or wondering if they should launch a product of their own.
Yes there’s significant work in creating your own product, but there are also many many tangible benefits of doing it.
Have you created a product of your own?
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Boost Your Blog #1: Create a Product
Переслать - Take Vacation Time From Your Blogging Business
This guest post is by Stephanie Foster of Home With the Kids.
I did something recently I haven’t done in a long time. I took a vacation from my blogging business just about entirely. For once on vacation, I didn’t spend the evenings making up for lost time. I didn’t write blog posts. No tweeting, no blog commenting, none of that stuff, for an entire week.
Sure, I still used my computer for fun. I brought it along and I even had internet access most days. I just didn’t use it for work, and did relatively little leisure stuff on it. I was too busy at the beach, the zoo, places like that to bother with my computer.
Taking a vacation from my blogging business is something I do too little of. My laptop always travels with me, and most times I spend my evenings working. The only problem with that is that I don’t give my mind enough of a break from business, so eventually I get tired and even head toward being burnt out on the whole deal.
Copyright pressmaster - Fotolia.com
Many home business owners do the same. It’s all to easy to work long hours and rarely take a break to refresh your body and mind, even for a few minutes during the day, never mind a whole week away. Yet it’s necessary.
Getting ready for a vacation
Taking a vacation from your blogging business isn’t something you can just do on a whim. Well, you could, I suppose, but most times it’s not that great an idea. You need to figure out how things are going to go without you.
What about email? Cleaning out spam blog or forum comments if you have those on your site? What if your site goes down or gets hacked?
You need to figure out how much stuff you can drop from your business for a week or so, how much you can handle in a few minutes each day while you’re on vacation, and what should be handed over to a virtual assistant or trusted friend or family member while you’re gone.
The great thing about many home businesses, especially if they’re online, is that you often can drop quite a bit of what you’re doing to take a vacation. Many things will wait. Others won’t.
You can schedule blog posts to run in your absence. I always like to do this, even though it means extra work while preparing for a vacation. It keeps things running just a little bit and then I don’t have to feel rushed to prepare blog posts when I get back because I’ve been gone a week and there aren’t any posts ready for the next week either. I can take a little time and ease back into my work with only a small gap in my posting, or even none at all if I get so far ahead that I can schedule some for just after I get back.
Use self-control while on vacation
It’s not always easy to leave your home business alone once you’re on vacation, especially if you love what you do. There’s always that temptation to do just a little work during your downtime.
Don’t do it. Find some other way to enjoy your downtime. Read a book for pleasure. Play with your kids if you have some. Go out with your spouse, significant other, some friends or just on your own. Keep your mind off your business. It will still be there when you get back.
If you must check on your business, try to keep it to just a few minutes a day, maybe first thing in the morning so the rest of your day is clear. If you’re having to get too involved in things, maybe you didn’t plan well enough for your break and need to rethink how you can get away for a time.
The benefits of taking a vacation
I feel great now that I’m back from my vacation. It was wonderful not thinking about that next blog post for a time. When you don’t take real breaks, all the stuff you know you should be doing is more like clutter in your head. It’s there and you really can’t deal with it effectively. A vacation gives you time to sort it out, even if you aren’t actively thinking about it at the time.
A vacation can also freshen up your ideas. Work too long on a project, and you get stuck with certain sorts of ideas. A vacation gives you time away from all that, and you might find new ideas come more easily after, even if it’s only a new perspective on the same things you were working on before.
You should also be more relaxed after a vacation. It’s a time when you shouldn’t be focusing on whatever stresses are in your life. Most of the things that cause stress in your life can wait that week too.
Taking a vacation from your blogging business isn’t always the simplest thing to do, but it can be a great idea. You don’t have to bring your business along every time you go on vacation. Sometimes it’s best to leave it all behind.
Stephanie Foster runs Home With the Kids, a resource for work at home moms and dads. She writes about running her home business, work at home scams and being an at home mom on her blog.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Take Vacation Time From Your Blogging Business
Переслать - My Best Product, My Best Launch, My Best Month – Ninjafied
Last week the mysterious Web Marketing Ninja released a free PDF mind map here on ProBlogger (with accompanying video) that walked readers through his in depth strategies for turning a Blog into a Business.
The feedback from that MindMap and video were great and I had a steady flow of thank you emails over the weekend from readers working through it.
Among the feedback from readers was some people feeling a little overwhelmed – so the Ninja has put together a second shorter video with some practical case study examples of how we’ve implemented some of the strategies in the Mind Map on my own blogs – yep, the Ninja is picking on me today!
The 3 case studies are:
- A/B testing – how we significantly increased the revenue from a product launch through split testing emails (and how we could have done even better had we done more testing).
- Product Development Made Easy – the back story behind my biggest selling ProBlogger eBook
- The Art of the Campaign – the story behind my biggest earning month ever
Our hope is that these practical examples will not only bring the Mind Map to life but that they might also give some practical ideas on how you can transition your blog into a business.
See the video here (along with the previous video and the Mind Map).
Also be watching out for a brand new ProBlogger Resource created by the Ninja in the coming days.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
My Best Product, My Best Launch, My Best Month – Ninjafied
Переслать - Spice Up Your Blog with a Virtual Blogging Team
This guest post is by Luis Cruz of Pepper Virtual Assistant.
Blogging is simple. You produce quality content, react to commenters, watch your stats grow, rinse, repeat.
Blogging is also labor-intensive, time-consuming, and tiring. Producing quality content regularly can be draining, managing comments can get exhausting, and don’t even get me started on dealing with spam.
Fortunately, blogging doesn’t have to be a solo affair. In fact, quite the opposite is true, and many of the biggest blogs are written and managed by teams of bloggers, not individuals.
One problem, of course, is how to build and manage of team when you don’t exactly have a ton of resources to throw at your blog. One solution: get a virtual assistant (or a bunch of them) to help you blog.
ProBlogger visited this idea a few years back when a reader asked Darren how he felt about VAs, and we’ve mentioned VAs every so often on the blog. The general consensus seems to be that VAs are great at administrative tasks for your blog, but have you ever considered having a VA write for you?
It might seem like a strange thing to do, but trust me, it’s not that uncommon. In fact, it’s something I’ve been doing, or rather, something I’ve been hired to do, for quite a while now. You see, I work as a virtual assistant, and one of my jobs, on top of administrative duties, is to produce content for some of our clients’ blogs.
Of course, you can’t just hire somebody to blog for you, leave them to their own devices, and expect great results. You need to do a few things to help us serve you better. Here a few things that, from my experience, you need to do in order to build an effective virtual blogging team.
Set your expectations
Are you looking for a team of bloggers that will churn out a half-dozen posts a day? Perhaps you’re searching for somebody to contribute one or two posts a week. Maybe you’d like to keep your blog a mostly solo affair, and you just need somebody to help moderate comments, do research on new topics, and handle a few other tasks. Whatever it is you want, you need to communicate it to your team.
Explain who you are
If your blog were a person, how would he or she sound? Is he a snarky, sarcastic, snob, or is she a bright and cheerful optimist? Does he jump from one idea or topic to another, or does she ramble on and on on specific topics? How does he like emphasizing certain points? Does she like lists?
Hundreds of different questions can pop up, but the main idea is to set the tone, or voice, of the blog. Each individual writer should still have a different personality, but it should be consistent with the voice of the blog in general.
Go for a test-drive
When you’re shopping around for a car, you don’t buy a car without going for a test-drive, do you? The same idea applies to your blogging team. You don’t hire a team until you have an idea of what they can (and can’t) do.
One way to test prospective members of your team is by inviting them to guest on your blog. Their guest posts tell you a few things: how well they write, how readers react to their voice or style, and how well they interact with your readers. I wager some people can learn a few more things about potential writers for your team, but I think most will learn about these three things.
Be an editor
If you find talented writers among your guest bloggers, you can promote them from guest bloggers to regular contributors. With a team of writers working for you, you now have a new role: editor. As editor, you need to make notes on your team’s writing, and advise them on what they’re doing well, as well as what they need to change.
Don’t forget the little things
Even if you’re not very comfortable with hiring other people to write on your blog, you can still benefit from having a virtual blogging team. Some of the simpler tasks my team has handled include doing research for new posts and monitoring trending topics. Even if your virtual team doesn’t produce new posts for your blog, they can still help you create fresh content.
Do it your way
This isn’t another tip, but rather, an invitation. How do you get your virtual assistant or team to help you create fresh content for your blog? Share some of your tips in the comments.
Luis Cruz is a writer for Pepper Virtual Assistant, a virtual assistant firm based in the cities of Manila and Davao in the Philippines.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Spice Up Your Blog with a Virtual Blogging Team
Переслать - What Are You Putting Off Doing Today that Could Significantly Improve Your Blog Tomorrow (And Beyond)?
Do you put off doing things on your blog that you know you really should invest time into?
I do.
Yesterday I was out walking and found myself thinking about my “I’ll do it one day” list. It struck me that there were a lot of things on that list, and that while some of them were just fanciful ideas, there are also items on the list that I know are potential profits that I’m just not earning.
One point on the list was updating the autoresponder sequence on my photography blog.
I’ve talked in the past about how I’ve structured my email strategy on my photography blog. It looks something like this:
For a full description of what all the elements are, have a look at this post. In short, people get weekly manually edited emails containing updates from the blog, along with a mix of bonus content (themed updates) and “promotions.”
The promotions are a mix of promotions of our own ebooks (discounted) as well as promotions of other people’s photography resources (affiliate promotions).
The weekly updates are all done manually but the “themed updates” and “promotions” are all done via an autoresponder. The autoresponder simply sends out these emails at predetermined intervals (around every 30 days). This means you’re doing mini-promotions every day, which creates long-term sustained income.
In many ways, when you add a promotional email into the sequence, you’re setting up a small passive income stream for as long as people keep subscribing to your newsletter.
The problem is that while I do have a number of these promotional emails in my sequence, I could have more. In fact, after you’ve been subscribed to my list for around 10 months the autoresponder sequence stops and you just get the weekly updates. Right now, more than 300,000 people have gone past that ten-month subscription duration—that’s a lot of people who I could be promoting quality products to.
So last night I decided to bite the bullet and create more emails for the autoresponder.
I added the first one last night—an affiliate promotion—and it’s already started to go out. All up the email probably took me a maximum of two hours to write and set up in Aweber.
The email will go out tonight to most of the people on the list on my list who’ve been long-term subscribers. It’ll then slow, to mail to just a few hundred people per day. As a result, we’ll see a nice big spike in sales tonight, and then it should slow down to a few sales per day.
Update (24 hours later)
The bulk of the list has now received the email, and we’ve had a good sales spike totalling around $14,000. Based upon open rates and sales generated, I estimate that, since long-term subscribers now have the email, this autoresponder should now generate around $50-$70 per day in income.
That’s not a massive amount when you think about it on a daily basis, but over a year it ads up to more than $18,000. Over the next five years, it’ll go past the six-figure mark—not bad for a single email, and a couple of hours’ work.
Key points
So the main points of this post are:
- Firstly, I wanted to highlight a strategy that lets those who have email lists generate a longer term income stream from those lists. Keep in mind, we have hundreds of thousands of people on our list, so the amounts we’re talking about here might mot be achievable on smaller lists. However, the strategy will be the same. A simple email you write today that goes out on a daily basis to a segment of your list can generate daily or weekly sales for you over the long haul. And that’s income that you don’t need to do much work for after setting up the initial email.
- The second reason for this post is to motivate those of you who, like me, like to put things in the “one day” basket. I could have created yesterday’s email 12 months ago. In that time I could have created 12 more of them that could already have been mailing to my list. Instead of an extra $50-$70 per day of income, those emails could have been generating 12 times that much for me by now.
So what are you putting off doing today that could be leading to a significant, long-term improvement to your blog and business?
Over the next two weeks, I’ll suggest something new each day that you could invest some time into, to generate this kind of long-term payoff (not all of them are financial payoffs). In the meantime, I’d love to hear what you’ve been putting off that you’re determined to get done now.
Articles in this series:
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Переслать - How to Email Your Blog Updates Like a ProBlogger
This guest pst is by Martyn Chamberlin of Two Hour Blogger.
“When you work with words … words are your work.”—Don Knotts
I assume you know a lot about blogging.
You know how to set up a blog, you know how to write. You know how to tweet and share.
Most importantly, you know how to build your email list.
Maybe you’re not as fanatical as I am. Maybe you haven’t hidden your RSS feed. Maybe you offer alternatives to email. But you understand the best results come from your emails. You baby your list.
The email list is important … but what are you doing with it? You’re sending your blog broadcasts to it? How are you doing it?
Copyright Tommi - Fotolia.com
I’ve got a sneaking suspicion you aren’t doing it right. Don’t take it personally—some of my most brilliant clients weren’t either. It’s not your fault. No one’s ever told you how, that’s all.
Are you handling your email subscriptions in Feedburner?
When people subscribe to your blog via email, where’s that email address going? I hope it’s not going into Feedburner.
See, Feedburner is pretty lousy when it comes to email marketing.
- You can’t easily customize the subject line
- You can’t customize the design
- You can’t utilize auto-responders
- You can’t know who’s subscribing in real time
- You can’t know the open rates
- You can’t completely control when the broadcast goes out
Maybe you’re thinking, “I don’t care that much. Feedburner’s free. This is deep and scary, and I’m not going to worry about it. I’ll just blog.”
Let me remind you that your blog’s success hinges on how effectively you master email marketing.
This is important. Quit using Feedburner.
What are the other options?
I’ve worked with a lot of email marketing tools, but the best are MailChimp and AWeber. There are other options out there, but I recommend one of these two.
Which one should you chose? Mailchimp’s free for the first 500 subscribers while AWeber costs from from the start. They’re both excellent tools, but if you can possibly afford it, go with AWeber. It’s slightly better, and after all, ProBlogger uses AWeber.
Once you migrate your list to one of these services, you’re ready to send emails. Whenever you publish a blog post, you want to send it to your list.
You can always do it manually, of course. Whenever you publish content, you can copy and paste the article from your WordPress dashboard and blast it away. While it’s fun doing it this way for about two months, it starts getting old after a while. Really old. Trust me.
Here’s a better way
Unfortunately, this is where most bloggers run into trouble. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ll frustrate yourself.
Luckily, I’ve done the heavy lifting for you. After successfully implementing this for myself and clients, I’ve put this article together for you. You’ll be rocking with the big boys in no time flat. I’ll even help you in comments if you get stuck. Deal?
Step 1: Prepare thyself
If you haven’t done so already, you’ll want to burn a feed for your blog at Feedburner.com.
Okay, I told you to quit using Feedburner. You’re probably confused.
While Feedburner is lousy at email marketing, it’s a great tool for creating a feed URL. You’ll use this feed’s URL in your email campaign, so this step is important. Since Google owns Feedburner, you only need a free Google account to use this service.
You may have already created a Feedburner feed and don’t know what the feed URL is. Log into Feedburner and click the grey RSS icon to the left of the feed title. The link it sends you to is your feed URL.
Make sure your feed URL shows the full content version of your posts. If you only see excerpts on this page, it means your email subscribers will only get excerpts in their inbox (usually a bad idea).
To change your blog’s feed to full content, log into WordPress and head over to Settings > Reading Settings. Make sure you’ve selected Full text instead of Summary. It can take Feedburner up to fifteen minutes to recognize these changes, so be patient if you don’t see immediate results. (Yes, I’ve learned this the hard way!)
If you’re using MailChimp …
- Log in.
- Click the large, orange button in the left column titled Create campaign. A drop-down menu will appear. Select RSS-driven campaign.
- This will take you to a page where you enter your RSS Feed URL. Paste your Feedburner URL and hit next.
- Select the list you want to send your campaign to. Hit next.
- In the Message Subject field, paste this:
*|RSSITEM:TITLE|*That pulls the title of your latest blog post into the email subject line. Fill out the other details and hit Next.
- Select your template and edit the body copy. The default prose says “Heading 1 Heading 2″ etc. After deleting all this, select the Source tab and paste the following:
<a href="*|RSSITEM:URL|*">*|RSSITEM:TITLE|*</a><br /><br />
*|RSSITEM:CONTENT_FULL|*<br />
<a href="*|RSSITEM:URL|*">Click here to leave a comment</a>This funny-looking code dynamically pulls the the content from your latest blog post into the email. To see the magic in action, just hit the preview button to view how it will look in your inbox. Nifty, isn’t it?
Hit Next.
- Finalize your plain-text version. Hit next.
- You’re now looking at your entire setup with all the glamorous details. Scroll to the bottom of the page and hit the orange “start RSS campaign” button. You’re all set!
If you’re using AWeber…
- Log into AWeber
- Hover over the Messages tab and click Blog Broadcast.
- This sends you to a page with a green button that says Create a New Blog Broadcast. Click it.
- Chose the list you want to use and prepare your email template. I recommend keeping the design as simple as possible, but you’re welcome to customize it to your heart’s content.
- In the RSS feed URL, paste your feed URL you got from Feedburner.
- In the subject line, paste this:
{!rss_itemblock}{!rss_item_title}{!rss_itemblockend} - In the HTML message, paste this:
{!rss_itemblock}
<p style="font-weight: bold; font-size: 30px; margin-bottom: 0px"><a href="{!rss_item_link}">{!rss_item_title}</a></p><span>{!rss_item_content}</span><br />
<h2><a href="{!rss_item_link}">Click here to leave a comment</a>.</h2>
{!rss_itemblockend}Be sure you’re on the Source tab when pasting this content. It won’t work in the design tab.
- Hit the save button and you’re off!
Let’s wrap it up
In case you’ve wondered how the pro bloggers do it, now you know. It’s not that difficult, but no one tells you how to do it. Funny, isn’t it?
Let’s face it—getting your email campaign off the ground can be tricky. I remember when I first started doing this stuff, I had so many questions and I couldn’t talk to anyone (for free).
But today, it’s different. If you have any questions, I’ll answer them in comments. Let’s get started!
Martyn Chamberlin is a full-time web guy who blogs about the importance of web design and builds web sites that enhance great blogging. Learn what it takes to succeed online and join the growing number of passionate writers becoming better bloggers.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
How to Email Your Blog Updates Like a ProBlogger
Переслать
 | Блог о жизни и браке в Европе Все о русских женщинах и европейских мужчинах. Россия и Европа. Мужчина и женщина. Он и она. Психология отношений. Записки владелицы Брачного Агентства . Присоединиться → |
| rss2email.ru |
| rss2email.ru | отписаться: http://www.rss2email.ru/unsubscribe.asp?c=12354&u=1052515&r=672244627 управление подпиской: http://www.rss2email.ru/manage.asp партнерская программа: http://partner.rss2email.ru/?pid=1 |
Комментариев нет:
Отправить комментарий