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- How to Write Posts People Will Remember
I am fortunate enough to meet quite a few of my blog’s readers face-to-face at conferences. It’s always a surreal and enlightening experience.
One of the most interesting parts of the experience is having readers share with you the posts that you’ve written that they remember most. On some occasions they remember things you’ve written years in the past!
Funnily enough, though, these often are not the posts that you want them to remember.
What people don’t remember about your blog
As a blogger who focuses mainly upon how-to and informational posts, I find it fascinating that people rarely tell me that the post they remember most fits into that category. It’s rare that anyone comes up to me at a conference and says:
“I remember that post on dPS from 2009 when you taught us how to use longer shutter speeds to create motion blur! I loved it!”
Or
“I’ll always remember that post on ProBlogger when you listed ten ways to use images on posts. What a great post!”
It’s not the how-to or informational posts that people remember.
What people do remember about your blog
The posts that people come up to me at conferences and remind me about are:
Image copyright Christopher Nuzzaco - Fotolia.com
- stories
- playful posts (humor, or writing in a different voice)
- rants and emotive posts
- inspirational posts
- opinion pieces
- posts about failures, problems, and needs people have
While informational posts are important as they help people on a day-to-day basis, it’s the more heartfelt posts that create memories for people, and make them feel a connection to you as a blogger.
What posts do you remember?
What is your most-remembered post by readers?
What posts do you remember that others wrote long after they were written?
What others said on this topic
I had a discussion on this topic on Google+ (connect with me here) recently. Here’s some of what my smart network there said:
“People appreciate helpful posts, but they bond over what you put some of your guts into. That’s where an emotional connection is formed.” Dixie Vogel
“Thinking back to the memorable posts by bloggers that I follow… They are often the ones that connect me as a person to that blogger.” Brett Morrison
“Posts where my opinion is clear.” Gary Hayes
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
How to Write Posts People Will Remember
Переслать - 4 Ways to Use Video Logging to Grow Your Community
This guest post is by Erin Giles of www.erinmgiles.com.
Have you been telling yourself for months that you should start video logging? It wasn't until I launched my new business that I realized the power that video logging has in growing a business’s community.
Procrastinate no more: today I am here to share with you four ways to use video logging to grow your community, so go ahead and ditch those fears of the camera, pronto!
1. Give your email subscribers some personal attention
I post a video every Monday and the first viewers to catch my face on camera early Monday morning are my email subscribers. In my Time to Shine weekly emails I send out a screenshot of the video with a link to my blog post, along with a short description and some other juicy details that only my subscribers get to feast their eyes on.
Since I switched over to emailing video posts in my weekly emails, my open and click rates have doubled, my subscribers have tripled, and the comments have doubled. Your subscribers want to know they are connected with you, and what a better way this is to speak directly to them every week!
2. Ensure more clicks
With about 65% of the population being visual learners, more people will opt to click on your video post than a regular blog post. With just two months of video logging under my belt, my community of readers interacts with me more on Mondays than any other day of the week.
Think about it. Your readers are inundated daily with blog posts to read that will help make them money or give them tips for their lives. When you provide them with a video you are making it easier for them to learn and grow.
3. Give them a call to action
At the end of my videos, I always give readers a call to action. I ask for their opinion on the topic at hand, or give them a "homework" assignment for the week. This keeps your readers engaged and always coming back for more.
4. Put a face to your story
If your readers have been following your blog for a while, giving them the gift of letting them connect your face and voice with your writing is priceless to them.
Once they hear your voice and see your face, they’ll have made a deeper connection with you that’s likely to make them a reader for life.
I hope these four tips have made room for you to see the power in growing your community through video logging. You may have several insecurities at first and it may take several takes while recording, but before you know it you will feel like a pro—and your readers will be even more faithful because of it.
Erin Giles is the author of Give it Away Now: The Marketing Tactic That Creates Faithful Buyers and a Creative Business Coach that helps female entrepreneurs of all types shine online with encouraging + bright marketing. Connect with her on Twitter @erinmgiles or her site at www.erinmgiles.com.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
4 Ways to Use Video Logging to Grow Your Community
Переслать - 3 Powerful Reasons Why Taking a Break Will Refuel Your Writing
This guest post is by Paul Jun.
Coffee has been consumed (and hopefully breakfast).
Brain is revving, fingers are warm, your neck just cracked in the most awkward way, but it feels great.
And . . . Go!
Image copyright tlorna - Fotolia.com
Go! . . .
G– . . . Sigh.
Nothing. Nothing is happening, fingers are paralyzed, brain feels disconnected from the spinal column, and the constant scratching of your head has turned into an everlasting burn.
Writer’s block.
We all suffer from it time to time, and we don’t really know how to overcome it when our nerves are constantly jumping one way and our brains are in sleep mode.
This is a subtle beeping in your body asking you to walk away from the computer or desk and get your mind off writing for a few hours, maybe even a few minutes if you’re lucky.
The outcome: clear head, clear thoughts, and a clear vision of what your next post will be.
Exercising both brain and body to mitigate stress
If the releasing of endorphins makes a person happy and feel better . . . need I say more?
If you aren’t the type to work out or do any physical activity, then I’m assuming you also can’t find the time to read..?
I noticed when I don’t do any exercise, my brain feels clouded, my mood is spontaneously foul, my attitude can change from positive to lackluster at the flick of a switch, and nothing ever feels okay.
When is the last time you had your heart pounding, or sweat dripping down past your eyebrow, and down your nose? If you’re familiar with the feeling, you know it’s incredible. The shower you take after: bliss.
You clean up, put on fresh clothes, sit in your chair and your mind is just empty. The nerves are calmed down, endorphins are flowing, and now you’re prepared to write . . . or at least begin the process.
I cannot stress enough how important it is for a writer to exercise both their brain and their body. That buildup of stress and constant weeks of working without exercise greatly impacts your train of thought.
You don’t need a gym membership. Go for a nice 20-30 minute run or walk. Punch a punching bag until you think it’s talking to you. Do as many pushups as you can until you fall flat on your face.
Do whatever you can to release that stress, and I promise when you begin writing the process will seem less dreadful.
Maybe today isn’t the day
There is a time and place for everything, and today may not be the day for you to write a thousand-word post.
If your attitude isn’t positive, do you expect your message to be?
Maybe it’ll motivate you to write a post on how to change that feeling. Give it a try.
But if today doesn’t feel like the day, then it isn’t.
In that case, today is a day for reading, gathering notes, doing something other than what you’ve been religiously doing. Watch a favorite movie or TV show. Finish up your reading or catch up with some friends.
Maybe sit in complete silence and meditate.
We are walking batteries, and over time, throughout the day, that battery gets drained by the minute. Being stressed is not a solution to this problem.
Today is just not a good day, so it’s time to redirect that energy to produce some productivity.
Notes on napkins
My PC tower and the thin border around my monitor have become a wall full of post-its.
If you’re like Don Draper, and you write random notes and ideas on napkins, today is the day to bring all that together and review what you’ve written down over the past few weeks or days.
Old ideas are the fuel to the flame. You can potentially create an incredible blog post, just with a few simple words or phrases you’ve jotted down. It’s almost like magic: hard to believe and at times shocking.
Organize your ideas and notes for relevant categories on your blog. Sometimes the notes that I write down are usually headlines or the first sentence of a blog post—the rest naturally flows, or at least kick-starts an idea.
Writer’s block can be mitigated and eventually overcome. These painless steps have proven to work wonders for me, and they don’t really cost you anything (unless I convinced you to sign up to the gym).
As writers, we overwork our brains and we don’t realize it. We are constantly thinking, constantly brainstorming, and constantly flooding our heads with superfluous information from blogs to books.
It’s not up for discussion—it’s time for you to take a break. Go to your room . . . or get out of it!
Paul is a writer/blogger on http://junhax.com. He focuses on sharing insightful stories and advice for writing, blogging, and personal development. You can also follow him at @junhax
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
3 Powerful Reasons Why Taking a Break Will Refuel Your Writing
Переслать - How to Use Big Business Finance Principles to Grow Your Email List
This guest post is by Josh Turner of GatewayCFO.com.
If you’re like me, you focus most of your attention on the growth of your site. You know that generating revenue is priority number one. Thinking about finance and accounting? That’s just a distraction.
While this is true to some extent, there is much more to the world of finance than just counting the beans.
Business finance is about using numbers to improve future business performance. In other words, accounting is about understanding the past and finance is about mapping out the future. No matter the size of your business, the same principles can be applied.
Within big corporations, finance departments provide data, tools and analysis to increase future sales, opportunities, and revenue. And you can do the same things.
One way they achieve this is through the use of dashboards or scorecards. These tools monitor the key metrics that their sales and marketing teams have to stay on top of. Not meeting these goals in the short term will cause them to falter down the road. So what does this mean for you?
Monitoring your metrics—and I’m not talking site traffic
Let’s use Gary as an example. Gary is working hard to grow his email list. He’s currently at 500 subscribers, and has a short-term goal of reaching 8,000. He knows that his growth is supported by two areas:
- organic traffic on his site, converting to email signups
- guest posts driving traffic to his site, which convert to email signups.
With his current posting schedule of two new articles per week, Gary expects to receive ten new email signups per week. He also knows that, on average, he receives 100 new email signups every time he writes a guest post.
Using your data to project growth
Based on this data, Gary can figure out exactly what it will take to reach his goals. Initially, he decides that it’s feasible to write a total of four articles per week: two for his site and two guest posts. Based on this level of activity, he can forecast approximately 210 new email signups per week. At this rate, it will take Gary 35.71 weeks to grow his list of 500 all the way to 8,000.
Gary has never looked at his email list growth this way. Not bad, he thinks, but he really had hoped to grow his list to 8,000 within 16 weeks. Based on the same metrics and assumptions, Gary can calculate that he needs to add 468.75 new subscribers every week to reach this goal.
Breaking it down from there, he knows that he will need to write 4.59 guest posts per week. That’s about 238 guest posts on an annual basis. Gary decides to step up his game, put in the hard work, and make it happen.
Looking at list growth in this manner provides clarity and clear goals. But you have to take it a step further to enforce accountability.
Create your own dashboard to improve performance
Big businesses use dashboards to keep owners and managers apprised of performance, and to keep their teams on track and accountable. Typically a graphical display, it shows them the key numbers that they have identified as critical to their business performance.
Doing the same thing for your site and email list will provide you with the same type of accountability. Build a simple Excel spreadsheet that tracks the numbers that you have identified as critical for the growth of your email list. It might contain the following data:
- weekly guest posts
- weekly posts on site
- weekly new email subscribers
- weekly sales/revenue
Set up the spreadsheet to include data for the prior week, prior month, and year-to-date. This will give you insight into your numbers and tell you if you are on track. Gary’s dashboard might look like this:
An example spreadhseet
Use conditional formatting in Excel to highlight good results in green and bad results in red, and set up a second sheet that includes the actual data for each week. With this, you can then create functions within the dashboard that automatically generate the dashboard results. Once this is completed, all you have to do is update the data sheet at the end of each week with the four numbers.
Why would you want to do this?
Spend 30 minutes setting up the Excel file. Following this initial setup, you will only need to spend one minute updating the data each week. Doing so will provide you with tangible benefits.
- You will stay on top of your metrics and not stray from your plan.
- You will be consistently reinforcing your goals.
- When things go astray, you will know where course correction is needed.
- You’ll be executing your business like a pro.
- You will be far more likely to meet your email list goals.
Yes, it’s an extra step in your blogging process. But with just a little time up front, you’ll be running your site and business much more like, well, a business.
Josh Turner is the founder of GatewayCFO.com, where he helps small business owners realize their profit potential. He is currently giving away his how-to ebook “Cash Flow Clarity: Be Proactive, Make Life Easier, Make More Money.” Get your copy here.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
How to Use Big Business Finance Principles to Grow Your Email List
Переслать - What Bloggers Can Learn From Musicians
This guest post is by Jamie Northrup of jamienorthrup.com.
A lot of the keys to being a successful musician are the same as being a successful blogger.
Some of the similarities between these two professionals are that both write a lot, both present their work to an audience, and both can choose to do it for the art or for the money—or even both, like I do!
The path to the top
There are currently three ways to become a successful money-making musician:
1. Join a music label or record company
This is the oldest and most common way to becoming a successful artist. You can either push your demo or get discovered. Either way, you may not have as much control over your destiny, but you usually have some help getting to the top—or as close as possible.
Image copyright IKO - Fotolia.com
2. Do it yourself
This isn't the easiest way, but it is probably the most rewarding. You have to work hard, but you get the control over what you do as an artist.
One artist that comes to mind is Master P, who basically sold CDs out of the trunk of his car. He made millions like that, and later founded his own record company. He was worth over $400 million, and was on Forbes richest people under 40 list in the late 1990s.
3. Win a contest
This isn't new—it's been around since television has been around with shows like Star Search—but it seems to have exploded in recent years with shows like American Idol, X-Factor, and others.
It's a great way to become a star and showcase your talent, but it can be hard to even get into the early stages of the competition.
When you look at these options, you can see that attaining blogging success isn’t much different. You can join a "tribe," do it yourself, or enter blogging contests—but chances are, like me, you fall in the second group of people trying to do it on their own.
Some of the techniques I use to be a successful blogger are similar to the ways DIY musicians gain success.
Think of a song as a blog post, and an album as a blog.
What successful bloggers and musicians share
There are several techniques that work for both musicians and bloggers.
The first is guest posting. The same thing happens in music: guest posting is pretty much the same as one artist featuring another one in one of their songs. It's a great way for either the musician or the blogger to establish themselves with a new audience, and get their name out there.
The second technique, which is quite similar to the first, is remixing a song. Lil Wayne is famous for doing this on his mixtapes (unreleased or non-mainstream albums). This artist would take popular songs and remake them with his own words. Bloggers do this quite often as well—I actually try and do it once a month. My latest attempt was "remixing" a popular post from Think Traffic.
The final link I like to draw between successful bloggers and successful musicians is that both write about what is hot—the trends. There's no surprise that when you blog or sing about what’s in the news, you’ll get recognition. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not, but apparently there is no such thing as bad publicity.
Choosing to blog on your own isn't the easiest way to earn blogging success, but if you don't quit, you will succeed—just like self-made musicians.
Do you see any other ways that bloggers are like musicians?
This post was written by Jamie Northrup, a web consultant based in Montreal, Canada. Jamie runs several different blogs, and tweets using his web handle DeuceGroup.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
What Bloggers Can Learn From Musicians
Переслать - Want to Make Money Online? Then Stop Reading and Get Moving!
This guest post is by Danny Iny of Firepole Marketing.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post here at problogger.net about how Firepole Marketing makes money.
I explained that even though we're less than a year old, we've already made over $20,000, and that over half of that came from offline sources.
We wanted to know how other bloggers make their money. Is it all online, or do they make their money offline as well?
In other words, we wanted to know if they were Semi-Local.
In October 2011, we surveyed 153 people; 107 who were already Semi-Local, and 46 who aspired to be. We asked a number of questions to find out what was really involved in becoming and being Semi-Local. Here are the highlights of what we learned.
How many hours per week do you work?
The first major finding was about how many hours per week people who were already Semi-Local (current SLs) spent working, versus how many hours per week people who aspired to be Semi-Local (aspiring SLs) spent working:
Notice the discrepancies on either end of the spectrum: 31% of aspiring SLs work less than 20 hours per week, versus only 12% of current SLs. On the other hand, only 15% of aspiring SLs work 50+ hours per week, versus 28% of current SLs.
Do you think people are idealizing the Semi-Local life, and expecting it to be a lot easier than it really is?
What is your take-home income?
Another interesting finding was about take-home income:
There's definitely more money in being Semi-Local: 39% of current SLs make over $60K/year, versus only 22% of aspiring SLs. The majority (60%) of aspiring SLs make between $20K and $60K/year, whereas the majority (60%) of current SLs make between $40K and $200K/year—a big difference!
There's some interesting data at the edges of the spectrum, though. 25% of current SLs make under $20K/year, versus only 18% of aspiring SLs, and only 2% of current SLs make over $200K/year, versus 4% of aspiring SLs.
How does one become Semi-Local?
One of the most interesting findings (to me, at least) was about how people actually go about becoming Semi-Local:
The majority (71%) of aspiring SLs expect to achieve Semi-Local status by creating an offer that is substantially different from their current offer. In contrast, the majority (60%) of current SLs did it by selling exactly the same offer to a new market.
The lesson here is pretty clear—put away all of the shiny objects, and look for new customers to buy what you've already got!
How long does it take to launch?
This is one of the top questions for anyone who's thinking about becoming Semi-Local: how long does it take to launch?
There are really two "categories" of results here: the first category is "under 100 hours," and the second category is "100+ hours." Seeing the results in these two categories, we can draw a couple of interesting conclusions:
- Current SLs have a stronger preference for smaller projects as a means of getting going (76% of current SLs, versus 70% of aspiring SLs).
- Current SLs took a lot less time to launch than aspiring SLs expect it will take (46% launched in under 40 hours, versus 34% who believe they can do it in such a short time).
Do you need professional help?
That's the question that we should all be asking before opening up our wallets for the latest training program on blogging and online business:
This is the most striking finding: 63% of current SLs said "no," versus only 43% of aspiring SLs. The message here is very clear: you don't need training, you just need to get off your butt and start working!
Do you want to see more of the numbers? Review more of the answers that the respondents gave us? Then download the full report—it's free!
Danny Iny (@DannyIny) is an author, strategist, serial entrepreneur, expert marketer, and the Freddy Krueger of Blogging. Together with Guy Kawasaki, Brian Clark, Mitch Joel, he wrote the book on how to build an engaged audience from scratch.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Want to Make Money Online? Then Stop Reading and Get Moving!
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