Few would have been able to predict the growth of social networking sites like Twitter. Ultimately, they helped bloggers by bridging the gap between the site, the writer/publisher behind the site, and the community, or the readers who enjoy the site. When these sites were much smaller and more rarely used, the main method of communicating with the writer of a blog was through email or by leaving a comment. Now, with the social networking factor built in, you need to market to these sites, in addition to promoting your own site.

Like increasing subscribers, you’ll want to use a natural approach to increasing the number of followers you have. For example, you won’t want to simply follow everyone and hope they follow back, as you’ll have a low “engagement rank.” In other words, relatively few people will actually read your tweets and connect to you.

While there have been hundreds of posts written about increasing subscribers, we’ll instead look at how you can use the followers you have today to grow your network into a force the “probloggers” of the web would be quite envious of.

Use Shorter, More Optimized URLs

The first step to increase your exposure on the web is to use shortened URLs that also say something about your brand. For example, Google uses goo.gl, which is a few characters shorter than their main URL, and also says something about the link. Bit.ly, the leading shortener indicates the URL is shortened, but lacks the ability to brand (at this time). It might be ideal if you can pick up a shorter URL of your domain or one that can be associated with your site. It’ll make the next steps in your social networking strategy easier.

Keep Your Message Consistent

Many bloggers have a separate Facebook or Twitter account for their personal use. For the most part, your readers shouldn’t be reading about the party you went to over the weekend. Updates like these should be kept off your “public” profiles. Additionally, your message should be as consistent as possible. If you have a stance on an issue, it shouldn’t be changed to suit the opinion of your readers – you have the opinion, and these readers look for it!

…But Be Personal

Although you can effectively manage a personal and “business” account for Twitter, it isn’t uncommon for bloggers to combine some of their personal thoughts on their business account. Doing this gives your account a more personal feel, and if your readers see this, there is a better chance they’ll feel connected to you. As a result, you’ll see a higher engagement ratio, with more retweets, comments, and responses of other formats.

Respond, Respond, and Respond Again

When your readers see the connection you are trying to achieve with your readers, there is a higher chance they’ll join in the conversation. If you are a member of Twitter or Facebook, and a reader is already interested in your blog (deciding whether they need to follow your tweets/status updates), and they see you are sharing links from other bloggers, there is also a greater chance they’ll follow you.

Another good point to keep in mind is that if there is any problems with your site (server downtime, error messages, etc.), there is a good chance your visitors will catch it faster than you. Having the ability to reach out to your readers via Twitter will ensure your downtimes are quite brief.

Develop a Niche

Many niches have already been carved out, but there are niches that still don’t have a clear leader. Having a good branding strategy will help others associate your brand with the niche. Connect all your social profiles together, and try to get the same name for each. I wouldn’t want to get a Facebook url of facebook.com/blog.tipz, as it breaks the uniformity between accounts. Make it simple for readers to find your profiles on these sites, not more difficult. It can be even more effective if you include a word related to your niche in your website name.

Persuade Your Readers to Share

Sharing is key on the social networking sites. If you are able to garner a hundred retweets of an article, there is a good chance you’ll see more than a thousand clicks through this link directly from Twitter and the other sites aggregating content from the site. With each new retweet (depending on the user), you’ll see more clicks through to your site. Persuade your readers to retweet by making the process simple, and even use a “please retweet” text with posts that you feel should do well on the site. Keep in mind that this should rarely be done, only when you feel you are adding value to your readers.

Follow the Trends

Keeping on top of news stories will help you become better informed, and your readers will realize this. There is a much greater chance that they’ll follow you if you can be one of the first to break developing stories than if you are writing discussing an even that happened last week. The Internet moves at a fast rate – a story that generated a huge response three hours ago may be overshadowed by another one just a short time later. If you’re aiming to generate more of a response on your own site, use a category and append a hashtag to your tweets for breaking stories.

There are the dos and don’ts of web design, then there are the annoying aspects of site designs that make you simply want to cringe. They are all around us, and even I have occasionally forgotten about my visitors, and have resorted to using any of these tactics of increasing conversion rates. No matter what type of site you run, even if it is a blog, you should try to avoid these practices, as they drive traffic away from your site, and will result in lower conversion rates in the long-term.

A Background: Why These Are Used

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with making a little money from the time you spend developing your site. However, what’s wrong is when you plaster large call-to-actions across your site, destroying the focus of your website. Instead of grabbing the attention of your visitors to purchase whatever you may be selling or promoting, these vibrant “graphics” do nothing more than entice visitors away from your site—many will never return.

Each visitor to your site matters. Even though many sites only see a 1% return rate on visitors who either leave comments or purchase/click through to multiple areas of your site, your visitors are the most important aspect of your site. Without any visitors, what will your site be? Just text and images on the web. We’ve seen how effective they can be—you need more that that to separate yourself from the millions of other pages on the web.

Subscription, Offer, and Promotional Forms

Those boxes appearing when you visit a website that invite you to take an action -signing up for a service, downloading an eBook, or subscribing to a blog are some of the most annoying types of call-to-actions. They may be effective, but generally only for first-time visitors or those who believe it must be filled out to gain access to the content.

If you happen to value the number of subscribers you have, compared to the opinion of your blog, then this technique will most certainly work for you. Using these forms is the same as telling someone watching television that they must click “next” between each commercial. It becomes even more annoying when multiple sites you enjoy visiting use the technique.

I wouldn’t mind seeing them once when visiting a site, but quite often, I can visit a site, reset the browser, and then see the form again, when I only wanted to read the latest post. The only way these forms work is if the site only displays the box once per IP address or if it can detect if someone subscribed already through the current IP address.

Flash… of Any Kind

Integrating Flash as a prominent part of a site is a sure-fire way for determining whether you want visitors to return to your site. Flash is a prominent part of the web for video and animation, but doesn’t belong on your blog. Blogs should focus on the content—there is no reason for a thirty-second animation with a separate page welcoming me to your site. It’s quite similar to the subscription forms. Once, it might be cool to see, but the second time around, not so much.

Although Flash can be used in innovative ways, much of this innovation has been reserved to the interactive sites offering static content, which results in a degraded experience when integrated into a text-heavy blog.

The main problem with Flash is that it is overused as it is, and may not present the best experience across all platforms. While on the subject of “flash,” having “blinking lights” around your site can detract the value of your content. Visitors will be focusing on the graphics, rather than what you have to offer.

A Hidden Search Form

Having the ability to search one’s site is the key. If you make it inaccessible, then it will be difficult for your users to find previous content. For example, someone may want to read more information about a particular subject, to only find there are no links to archive pages or categories.If this is the way your site is right now, the best solution to this problem is to make the search box more visible.

Until we can pinpoint specific content without browsing through archives, tags, and categories, we’ll still need to integrate a search field and other methods into the designs of our blogs.

Conclusion

While these tips may have been on the basic side, they are essential in your design, as you shouldn’t be including unnecessary elements or leaving out elements that should be included. Testing is also extremely important, as you’ll be able to determine what works for your site and what doesn’t—effectiveness is key.

[Photo Source]

WooRank is a new service which will generate reports for your site. While there are plenty of services that can do this quite well, this one combines all the information into one convenient listing for your site. The service is completely free at this point, although premium services will become available in the future.

What may separate the service from other similar services is that the site will display a number of tips to help you improve your search engine ranking, on-site SEO, as well as the usability of your website.

It combines traffic information from Google Ad Planner, Google Trends, and Alexa, with figures that aren’t accurate (to say the least). Like many of the other tools like this, you might want to revert to the tracking methods already implemented on your site like Google Analytics or similar services.

Check out the tool and let me know what you think of it – how does your site rank?

The Structure Theme, designed by Muku Solutions and Jeff Milone I recently came across, and I instantly became a fan of it before even beginning to use it. I’ve been using it on one of my other sites, and I believe, with some minor CSS changes, it makes a great theme for bloggers who are interested in promoting their content. While it also features a clean and structured design, it may be “too simple” for some bloggers, despite featuring a back-end panel and different theme styles.

In order to use the theme, all you’ll need to do is provide your email address to the designers. Some may hesitate to do this, but you’ll need to provide it in order to get access to the theme – it is sent to you through your email address provided, and any new updates/new themes will be provided through the theme. It’s completely free, so this is a small cost to begin using the theme.

Out of the box, it works great for anyone using WordPress. Simply upload it to your server, and configure the basic settings of the theme. Of course, the theme is free, so it isn’t meant to be completely customizable from the back-end. You’ll need to edit the CSS for any major changes. The designers/developers of the theme are open to suggestions through their forum or contact page if you need any customizations done to the theme. You shouldn’t have much of a problem customizing the theme, as the theme was professionally coded and is optimized, resulting in a fast-loading site.

Four Styles and Formats

Often, the problem with free themes is the fact that there aren’t other variations, so you’re left using the one or two styles included, which might not suit your personal tastes. However, with this theme, four variations are included, but each maintains the simple and clean look throughout.

The black variation, shown above, as nearly a direct inversion of the white style, offering a dark look ideal for showcasing photographs and other types of content. I’m not as big of a fan of the dark look for blogs, as many readers will find it harder to read long lengths of text.

A two-column area has been setup for the main template, which functions more as a magazine template the way the featured content is displayed at the top than anything else. However, this blog template can be installed as a separate installation, and this is how I am using it on the other site. It makes a great solution, putting the content at the forefront of the site.

As shown above, both the main look (with a large featured image and link to the latest post) and the two-column blog template are available in both white and black color schemes.

Elements of the Theme

Even if a theme has a good structure, it also needs to have good typography. Because this theme was created for the designer and developer in mind, the typography is already great right out of the box.

Below, a screenshot of the typography shows the typography style of the theme. All bullets, headings, and quotes are styled, so you won’t have to customize the CSS in any way. However, my one minor complaint about the typography is that there’s no differentiation between the heading styles/sizes (H3, H4, etc.). It might only take a minute or two to customize them, but is necessary nonetheless, in promoting readable and structured content.

Next, we move onto the footer of the theme, where there is a unique four-column widget-ready area. If you don’t have any content in this area, the footer simply won’t expand, which is ideal, as you can produce an even simpler theme without any customization. The “complete” theme, with the left and right sidebars may be more ideal for users who want to use the theme much like a magazine, as it includes more widget-ready areas for advertisements and links.

The styling of comments is also a big part of all blogs, so the area for leaving comments and replying to comments must be well-designed. In the case of this theme, the perfect amount of spacing is provided, along with separation, between the content and the comments. Gravatars and threaded/reply functionality has also been integrated.

Conclusion

You’ve likely noticed that I like to change the theme of Blog Tipz quite frequently, although in this case, I’ll hold off on it. My current theme is doing the job well at this point (there are some things I don’t necessarily like about after testing and using the Structure Theme, but won’t be changing it for some time.

The main features I find appealing in the Structure Theme is the layout of content and the ability to change the styles, as well as the integrated full-width, blog pages, and archives/sitemap pages. These make it easy to get your site up and running quickly without making a huge amount of code edits.

Personally, this theme compares well to other premium themes aiming to be simple, but well-designed. Take the theme for a demo or let me know what you think of the theme. I am passing it on as I don’t think it’s received the exposure it deserves.

I have talked a lot in the past about how you should begin marketing your blog – leaving comments on other blogs and developing real relationships with other bloggers. These are both critical steps in securing the future of your blog.

However, there is one aspect of this process I left out and feel should be written about further. When one goes to market yourself, it isn’t a “let’s tell everyone about our product today” and be done with it, but a continual process—once you start a blog, you can’t stop marketing.

Why Many Bloggers Fail at “Marketing”

Marketing to some is the same as it was ten or fifteen years ago. At the core it is the same – the more work you put into the promotion of your blog, the more return you will see. The aspect many fail to see is that simply having your name spread around won’t cut it any more.

As many bloggers promote their website, services, or products, they often resort to tactics such as giveaways and other odd promotions, which result in a quick boost in traffic, but in the long-term, the results won’t be as solid as if they had taken a more strategic approach to building out their blog.

Another main reason bloggers fail is due to their fear. When bloggers start to promote their website, they often (but not always) realize that there is a lot more to promoting their blog than they first realize. In other words, it isn’t just about getting links pointing to your site, but about creating an impact around those links.

Once bloggers realize that their “quick” tactics aren’t working, they give up and resort to other methods of driving traffic or bringing in revenue. These often leave a lasting impact on the readers, leaving them wondering whether the blogger behind the blog is actually just looking to leech off any real visitors he or she has left.

There is, however, a fairly definitive way all bloggers can effectively market their blog, and that is the long-term approach, which I explain below.

A Long-Term Approach that Works

Taking blogging seriously should be your main goal. By creating a strategic, long-term approach to blogging, you ensure that both you and your site will remain open to new ideas and your readers will also see this evolution.

There is one concept behind how you market your blog: never stop, whether you see success or failure. As long as you are marketing your blog, you will see some kind of return on your time investment.

Leaving comments and interacting is still the biggest way that you can draw in new traffic, thus marketing yourself by growing your reach. You need to provide value to other blogs, and you’ll see a positive return. Included in leaving comments is building your social presence – Facebook and Twitter are currently the hottest places where you can begin.

The second most effective way to market yourself over the long-term is simply to create new content, then promote it. By doing this, you’ll ensure that others see what your potential is, and there’s a good chance they’ll link back to it or share it through their social platforms (which may very well be Twitter).

Conclusion

No matter whether you write on your own blog or as apart of a blog network (or for a larger website), you can use these approaches to help you better market yourself and your work.

I can’t emphasize enough how you can’t give up when it comes to blog promotion – you never want to quickly dump a lot of links into a social networking site and hope to instantly see thousands of new visitors. It is the gradual approach that will pay off in the end.

Quix is a new bookmarklet and service that makes it painlessly simple to access common services, and even easier to interact with your WordPress blog or social networking services like Twitter. While the service isn’t completely new, it surely does replace some of the bookmarklets that I had kept in the bookmarks bar. For bloggers, it can help improve the time it takes to perform common functions, such as shortening links or sharing pages through Twitter.

Before I look at the features, it might also be worth looking at where the service stems from. There are many services only that provide these bookmarklets – links you drag to your bookmarks bar to shorten links, share links, or get information about websites. When each has a specific function, it can dramatically clutter an area that you want to keep as clean as possible, defeating their purpose. Shortwave is a similar service, but doesn’t contain nearly the same level of functionality out-of-the-box.

As you can see in the screenshot above, even the website where you can find the bookmarklet is extremely simple to navigate and use. While the service is meant for everyone, it is intended for serious Internet users who need to quickly access a large number of “command line” functions. It won’t slow down your browser like other plugins/extensions, and has been made to be easy to use. For more experienced users, it can even be expanded to include more functions/shortcuts.

Below I’ve listed some of the common commands that can be used (many great for bloggers).

• codex – Search the WordPress codex.
• plugin – WordPress plugin search.
• wp – WordPress function search.
• archive – Check archive.org for the current page.
• gdb – Search Google Blogsearch for links to the current domain.
• bitly – Shorten current page with Bit.ly.
• evernote – Clip current page with Evernote.
• db – Bookmark the current page in Delicious.
• tn – Tweet the current page.
• s – Twitter search.
• t – Twitter user.
• tumblr – Share on Tumblr.
• post – Share on Posterous.

Check out the service, and let me know how it has come in handy (or what you may be using it for). Again, you can find the bookmarklet at quixapp.com.

After more than ten years, Blogger still doesn’t have a way for its users to create static pages. That is until now — pages have been announced and will soon become available to anyone who uses Blogger “in Draft.” At this point, the feature has been turned off due to some issues, but the feature will eventually become available again.

To create a page, simply go to the Edit Pages tab, which will be displayed next to the Edit Posts tab. The process couldn’t be easier. You can only create up to ten pages (there really isn’t a reason why you need more than this for a simple blog). In addition, a new Pages widget will become available, making it easy for you to list your pages.

The widget will be customizable, allowing you to change the name of certain pages (particularly your home page). Once the feature is rolled out to all users, it is likely that new templates will integrate the feature into them, making it easier to create “About,” “Contact,” and similar pages for your blog.

Please let me know whether you were looking forward to this feature – it certainly would have been useful when I was using Blogger more frequently!

For more information, about this feature, you can view the official release page.

Aa you know, a lot of visitors traditionally don’t navigate too far beyond the initial portion of your site unless there is a reason for them to continue. For example, you can place posts or links to your featured categories at the top of your site.

Even though visitors may not be interested in this content, there is a much greater chance that they will click on them, as there is more emphasis placed on these areas.

On one of my other sites, I created an image that pertains to a specific category. I was normally receiving about 50 visitors clicking through the specific categories per day, but once I implemented the new category-specific images, traffic jumped nearly 250%, and may continue increasing as time goes on.

This technique is quite simple, as it makes your visitors really want to explore your content. However, it may also work better on “static” pages, where you don’t need to place as much emphasis on your latest posts.

Let me know what you think of this technique and whether you’ve had any recent success stories like this.

While there may be millions of blogs out there, around this time each year, many of them mysteriously “die out.” In other words, the holidays consumed the blog owners, or they have simply moved onto “bigger and better” things for the new year. Quickly moving to some stats, you’ll notice that each year (at least for the term blogs) there is a noticeable swing up at the end of the year, which peaks around mid-year, only falling towards the last month of each year.

The trend has repeated for a noticeable portion of the last six years, and it can also be seen in the news reference area (bottom graph). What this means for you, as a blogger (if you are still interested in blogging) is that many bloggers simply call it quits towards the end of the year.

How to Avoid the Great Dilemma of Returning to Your Blog

I covered how to de-stress while blogging, but there are certainly other ways that you can get back to blogging after an extended period. Even some of the largest blogs take a break over the December to January transition, so it isn’t something you need to be extremely concerned about.

1. Have several posts ready before you go on “break” and have them scheduled to be posted when you would normally post – for example, every other day. It’ll give your readers the appearance that you have still been active. However, it’ll also give you some more time to think of new topics or to get back in the swing of things.
2. Being active elsewhere will greatly improve your ability to return to blogging. Assuming you already have profiles set up in forums and are able to comment on other blogs, it may be a good time to promote your blog, too.
3. Become inspired by other blogs. There are still plenty of blogs that published content during the holidays, so this content can help provide some inspiration for your own blog.
4. Set new targets or create a new strategy. Doing this will ensure that 2010 is your best year yet for blogging. Nothing will prevent you from achieving this except you. If you misunderstand where you need your blog to go, then you will also forget what made your blog successful (to any degree) in the past.
5. Just think about how everyone else may have trouble getting into the swing of things again. You are in the same situation as them, and they have been able to return, so why can’t you?

Conclusion

The reason for this post is due to the fact that I have seen a large number of popular bloggers become absent from blogging since the transition to the new year (some of them after more than three weeks). Just because a new year has arrived, it doesn’t mean it is time to call it quits blogging, but a time to get a fresh start.

There is a good chance that you are using Twitter. If not, you are missing out on a lot of opportunities to grow your blog and connect with millions of others. A great tool to measure your success using the service, called Twitalyzer, was updated just a few days ago with lots of new features and a sleek new interface. I’ll be looking at the main ways you can use the service and take advantage of the tool.

Twitalyzer was designed to be a business application, and their main goal is to create the best possible metrics and reporting for individuals and organizations that have long-term goals in mind. Therefore, if you are a casual user of Twitter and only have a few followers and don’t want to grow your brand, then this is not the service for you.

An Overview of New Features

At this point, the entire service is completely free. It can be used by anyone looking for advanced analytics/metrics about your account – great for bloggers, in other words.

Before I take a closer look at the interface and minor features, we’ll take a look at everything that has been included within “version 2.0.”

1. Easy to Read Summary Metrics – This feature lets you visualize where you are headed using the service, as viewing your data shouldn’t be difficult.
2. Powerful Interactive Charts and Graphs – Users of the service spend a lot of time evaluating their success in social media, so these powerful charting and graphing features have been designed to accelerate time to insight.
3. Rich Data Visualizations – Quickly visualize a large amount of information without having to browse through otherwise useless metrics.
4. Integration with Google Analytics – Twitalyzer integrates with Google Analytics to present stats on how many clicks each of your tweets receive.

A Look Inside the Metrics

I’ve included a sample profile below, which you can use to gauge as what the service looks like (if you haven’t tried it out yet).

The interface is clean and well-organized. In my opinion, it is one of the first (and best at that) services to measure how able you are to penetrate through what is referred to as “noise” on Twitter.

Some of the definitions of what is measured on the service have been outlined below:

1. Clout – The relative likelihood that an individual’s Twitter username will appear when searched for in Twitter.
2. Engagement – Provides a measure of the type of interaction the user has in Twitter by examining the ratio of people referenced by the user to the number of people referencing them.
3. Followers – The number of followers reported by Twitter.
4. Following – The number of people the user is following as reported by Twitter for the user.
5. Hashtags Cited – The number of updates that included at least one hashtag published in the seven days prior to the last analysis.
6. Impact – A factoring of several items to present the overall impact of the user.
7. Influence – The likelihood that a Twitter user will either retweet the user has written or reference the user.
8. Lists – The number of Twitter lists the user was a member of.
9. Referenced – Reports the number of times the user has been referenced or cited by other users.
10. Referencing Others – The number of times the user wrote or responded directly to other people.
11. The List Goes On…

For more in-depth analysis of any single metric, we can click on “Velocity,” for example. This will display a convenient chart, which can be broken down into single days to analyze your velocity (the indication of the relative frequency at which a user publishes updates in Twitter). Additionally, the graph can be broken down into certain periods – 1 week, 2 weeks, one month, two months, three months, or all time. These stats can also be shared or tweeted.

I hope that sharing this tool can help you grow on Twitter, helping you set and meet new goals. Check out the 50-page user’s guide to using the application here [PDF]. More information can be found on their blog or through their Twitter account.