This guest post is by Goddess Leonie of GoddessGuidebook.com.

In blogging years, I’m approaching my mid-life. Instead of having a crisis though, there’s life (and new tricks) in this ole goddess dog yet! In the last three months I’ve increased my subscribers by a whopping 50%. All with three simple changes. Because simple is fun and good, and really, it’s the best way to do things.

Are you ready to hear them? Hurrah!

1. Getting people in

I’ve SEO’ed the heck out of my website. I’ve commented like a fiend on all my favorite blogs. I’m aTwittering and FriendFace-ing with the best of them (a li’l “IT Crowd” joke in there for those playing at home). Want to know the thing that’s lovingly ushered people through the doors into my blog?

Guest blogging.

I had it on my to-do list for a bazillion years. “Yus yus yus, sooo important. OMG must be all ova dat! But mmm, can’t be bovered.” Every week, I put it off. Until I kicked my own butt (somewhat lovingly) into guest blog town.

• I asked all my affiliates if I could guest blog for them.
• I popped an “Interview me!” button on my blog.
• I contacted all the places I knew that accepted guest blog submissions.
• And I asked all my favorite blog peoples if I could write for them.

Whenever I wrote the guest blogs, I made sure I infused as much of my trademark ridunkulous silly and soppy language in them. Just to shoot up a little beacon of a freak flag so my right people knew I was a ginormous raving hippy, and that I was one of their kind.

And people spilled through the doors, and it was grand.

Mission Getting People In a success! Hurrah!

2. Making them welcome

But the next mission is just as important, and it’s one that we totally ignore.

We all know that the bounce rate on our websites is super-high. When you jump on a blog for the first time, it’s hard to know where to begin, or if you belong. We need a better doormat, people. And a lounge room to welcome them into. We need to help them recognize instantly that our blog is a home for them.

Some ways we can do that:

• Add a New Here page to your blog introducing yourself, explaining what your blog’s about, and sharing some of your best posts to get them started.
• Add a YouTube video to your sidebar welcoming new readers, and introducing yourself and your blog.
• Do some brainstorming. If your blog was a magazine, what themes would it cover? Then make those themes prominent on your blog—whether that’s written in your banner, or as an image.

Here’s the one I popped together:

Mission Make Them Comfy complete! *confetti*

3. Helping them stay

How do we get our guests to become regular drop-in-aholics?

The best way I know is the What Would Seth Godin Do plugin. It appears the first five times a new friend visits your blog, and asks them if they’d like to subscribe by RSS or email.

Since using it, I’ve noticed a 20% increase in subscribers alone. Happy days!

Mission: Stay foreva, my one true reader-love = done.

3 simple changes = 50% more delight

It’s been dang glorious. And I’m pretty sure it’s been way more fun than having an existential blogging mid-life crisis!

Let us know your secrets for upping subscribers in the comments.

Goddess Leonie is the creator of GoddessGuidebook.com, a popular creativity and spirituality blog for women. She’s also the creator of the upcoming Become a Business Goddess ecourse.

This guest post is by Jeff Domansky of The PR Coach.

Your blog is a very important part of your personal image or company brand. While you’ve invested time in its development, have you ever thought about how you could use your blog to manage a crisis?

A blog offers several advantages compared to news releases, websites, or other social media channels.

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This guest post is by Ray Maker of DCRainmaker.com.

Product review posts are in many ways the core of what blogging is about—the ability for all of us regular folks to express an opinion about a product, be it good or bad.  Every day, tens of thousands of product reviews are written on blogs across the world, and often, on just one product alone, hundreds of new opinion/review posts are written each week.

The goal of most folks when they write a review post is to share their opinion with the world about the product.  But how do you differentiate writing a review post that only sees a handful of eyeballs, from ones that see thousands of readers every day—and in some cases ranks even higher than the manufacturer’s own product page?

Know the product like nobody else

The single biggest difference between writing a product review that’s just so-so, and writing one that kicks butt is demonstrating an in-depth knowledge of the product.  A product review that is written by someone who understands the product inside-out will organically attract more attention than one written by someone who’s just stumbling around.

If you understand the product inside and out, show off that knowledge.  If you don’t, then learn it quick!  When people search the Internet for a review of a specific product, they’re looking for detail and coverage of the product.  What they aren’t looking for is a short blurb with a few “Four out of Five Stars!” icons tossed in.  If they were looking for that, they’d just check the ratings on their favorite online retailer’s site instead.

No, when they look for a product review, they’re looking for unbiased feedback from knowledgeable experts in that field.  The most popular product review sites for any niche are written by folks that understand the product and every little detail about it.  While short “I just opened up the box”-type reviews have their place, one has to realistically understand that place won’t be at the top of search engine results.

Speak from the perspective of someone new to the product…

If you review products often, you can easily get into the rut of thinking “my readers already know what I’m talking about.”  And while this may actually be true, you have to step back and look at what your end-state target audience is.

In many cases, it’s not only your regular readers, but also everyday people searching the wild blue yonder trying to find information about that specific product.  And in many cases, they know nothing about that product or its genre.  If I were to go out and buy a new camcorder today, I’d likely be starting from scratch to find out what’s a normal feature, and what’s a totally cool unique feature.

In thinking about it from that angle, you should always introduce functionality within a product as if the person never knew it existed. The benefit to doing this is that you not only explain that piece of functionality, but also teach your reader something new.  This is critical.  Users who find blogs educational will almost always stay around for more.  If they don’t learn anything new, they’ll simply wander elsewhere and not come back.

…And from the perspective of a longtime user

In addition to approaching a product from the newbies’ standpoint, it’s also important to delve into subjects that long-time users of the product or product series will find useful or educational.  You can do this in a number of ways, but I find the easiest way is to simply talk about the evolution of a given feature from product to product.  By doing so you illustrate not only your understanding of the product, but also your understanding of past products within the same line/genre/niche.
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This guest post was written by Mark Pollard of MarkPollard.net.

Let’s face it, how you make money from blogging is in serious flux right now. The thing is, flux brings opportunity. If you’re thinking differently enough to everybody else, chances are you can stand out. That’s what this article is about. How to get you standing out in front of brands and agencies, and find new ways to make money from your blogging pedigree along the way.

Old models are struggling

It’s not just “heritage media” that’s trying to work it all out right now. Bloggers everywhere need to rethink their approaches:

• display advertising needs reinvention: who’s it working for?
• Google just downgraded content farms
• guest posting is the new content marketing
• selling ebooks is a hit-and-miss affair for most
• affiliate marketing: how do you pick a product and make it worthwhile?

Establishing an audience and then releasing a book as your monetization tactic is challenging when such a small percentage of books are actually profitable. So, do you make an app? Do you go Kindle? Do you put on a conference? Should your revenue come from the very content that you pour your soul into or from something else, like a better salary, fees for speaking at events or a new business venture?

Just where will the money come from?

As a blogger, you need to make some serious strategic calls on where to put your focus because content-making is heavy going.

Why listen to me?

I work in advertising. It took me a long time to be able to say that. It’s not something I identify with—”advertising,” that is. I’m in it to disrupt it for the better. I’ve been publishing content online since around 1997, since the days of Angelfire, Tripod, and Geocities; since the client request of “Can we have an animated .gif on our homepage?” To which one would reply: “I’m not sure the modems will be able to handle it.”

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This guest post is by Lea Woodward of www.DotNetConnector.com.

Did you know that the second place many new readers go after hitting the home page of your blog is your About page? Go and check your stats and you’ll probably see that if it’s not up there at #2, it’s probably still pretty high up on the list of “most viewed” links. Chris Brogan noticed this, so it must be true!

This isn’t really a surprise—most people are curious to find out more about who writes the blog they’ve just landed on. While they’re looking for this information, they’re probably thinking three things:

• Who is this guy or girl telling me all about how to make money blogging?
• Should I stick around and read more?
• Is it worth me bookmarking or subscribing to this site and coming back again?

If you don’t lose readers at the home page (which you can avoid by compelling headlines and killer content to browse around), the second most common place to lose them is at your About page.

Here’s how to avoid that—and how to ensure your About page makes your blog, rather than breaks it.

Introduce yourself

Tell us what your name is, and include a photo. This sounds simple but I can’t tell you how many About pages I’ve read where the blogger frequently mentions “I” and “me”, or “we” and “us”, where the username is “admin” and there’s no mention of a name (or names) anywhere on the site—not even the About page.

The exception of course is if you’re blogging anonymously, but even so, it’s nice to give yourself (or your alter ego) a pen name. People like names and they like to put a face to a name, even if it’s cartoon one.

Remember the mantra: WIIFM?

Somewhere up near the top of your About page, it’s a good idea to tell readers what’s in it for them if they stick around on your site and even subscribe. They’ll be scanning your page thinking, “What’s in it for me? Should I stick around?” If you can answer that succinctly early on, you’ll save them time and attract the kind of audience you’re actually looking for.

About them

If your blog covers a wide range of topics and it’s not super-targeted, it can be useful to actually state who your blog is for. You can even be as obvious as to include a “Who this blog is for” section listing a few items describing your ideal readers. It’s a fast, simple way to help readers figure out whether they want to stick around or not.

Be personal, but not too personal

It depends upon the topic of your blog, but it’s usually a good idea to share your credentials or expertise in the topic you’re blogging about. If you don’t have any, and you’re writing more of a “share your journey” blog, then say this. It helps people figure out where you are on the path in relation to them, and whether they’ll get something from sticking around.

The depth and level of personal information you share will depend upon the type of blog you’re writing—whether it’s a topic-focused blog or more of a personality-based blog.

Determine the goal of your About page

As you’ve probably gathered by now, your About page isn’t just a place to tell people more about you: it can be so much more. You need to determine the goal(s) of your About page, and then make sure that your page achieves those goals. For example, your About page can:

• be an ideal place to highlight your best content, allowing you to share links to deeper content within your site
• encourage people to sign up to your newsletter—which works especially well for “behind the scenes” newsletters and those which are used to share more personal information from the blogger
• give readers other ways to connect with you, by sharing links to your social media profiles and encouraging readers to connect with you there, too
• provide readers with social proof and testimonials, helping to establish your credibility and authority from the start.

Always end with a call to action

Your About page is a great place to encourage those who’ve stuck with you until the end of the page, to keep going … but you do need to give them some direction. This goes hand in hand with the point above: once you’ve determined what you’d like your About page to do for your site and your readers, make sure you end strongly by giving readers pointers about the next steps to take, should they be interested.

The above advice can be summarized in the following three points. Your About page should, at the very least, achieve the following:

• Introduce the person and personality behind the blog.
• Help new readers easily identify whether your blog is for them.
• Direct them to do something specific once they’ve read it (whatever it is you’d ideally like them to do next).

Take advantage of this golden opportunity to make another great impression on new readers and create an About page that helps your blog stand out from the others.

What does your About page say about you?

Lea Woodward helps bloggers and online entrepreneurs craft About pages that make stronger, deeper, longer-lasting connections with readers at www.DotNetConnector.com. You can connect with her on Twitter @leawoodward or on her personal blog, www.LeaWoodward.com.

Post from: ProBlogger Blog Tips