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ProBlogger: Why Nobody Reads Your Content and What to do About it

noreply@blogger.com (work smart) — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 11:49:00 +0000

ProBlogger: Why Nobody Reads Your Content and What to do About it

Why Nobody Reads Your Content and What to do About it

Posted: 20 Jul 2022 11:42 PM PDT

The post Why Nobody Reads Your Content and What to do About it appeared first on ProBlogger.

Photo by Brands&People on Unsplash

Question: How do people read online?

Answer: They don’t read, they scan.

In research on how people read websites it’s been found that 79% of users first scanned any new page they came across and only 16% read word-by-word. Knowing this, how should bloggers who want to reach an audience and communicate effectively write?

Why do people scan?

Chances are that not everyone who comes across your blog will already be a devoted reader. These new visitors want to find out quickly whether reading what you’ve written is a worthwhile investment of their time.

Studies have also shown that reading from a screen is more tiring and therefore about 25% slower than reading from paper – hence scanning becomes a technique that most employ.

People read online by scanning the page for individual words or phrases, headings and other visual cues.

Is your Blog Scannable ?

It’s a pretty simple thing to test:

Ask a friend who is not familiar with your site to take a quick look at a few of your recent posts
Give them 15 to 30 seconds on each post
At the end of which you ask them what the post was about

You’ll quickly get a sense of how they’ve interacted with your blog.

Techniques to Make your Blog Scannable

Good bloggers keep this in mind as they write and will employ a variety of techniques to make their posts easier to read.

Some of these techniques include…

8. Make your key point up front

If you have a key point make sure you say it up front. One trap many of us fall into is to bury our main points deep within content where it’s unlikely to be noticed.

(In fact I just moved this point up from number 8 on the list)

If not in the title and opening line, get your message across in the first few sentences. You can expand upon it later.

1. Lists

Anecdotal evidence here at ProBlogger suggests:

My posts with bullet point lists in them get linked to A LOT more
Than similar length posts written in more of an essay style
This post has a list built into it – you’re reading number 1 of 10 points

2. Formatting

Use bold, CAPITALS, italics, underlining, teletext and to emphasize points.

DON’T GO OVERBOARD AS YOU RUN THE RISK OF FRUSTRATING YOUR READER.

Also consider changing font size, color and style to draw your readers eyes to your main points.

3. Headings

and Sub Headings

Large, bold words that act as visual cues of what is happening in the content are effective ways of drawing readers further into articles.

4. Pictures

Research shows that readers eyes are drawn down the page by pictures. Place them cleverly by your key points (especially when they closely relate to the content) and you have more of a chance of getting readers to read full articles.

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

5. Borders/Block quotes

Boxes around quotes and key points can similarly get the attention of readers.

6. Space

Don’t feel you have to fill up every inch of your screen.

Rather, create spaces because they help readers not to feel overwhelmed

and tend to draw readers eyes

to what is inside such space.

7. Get to the Point

Be succinct with your points.

9. Find creative ways to reinforce your main point throughout your post

For example – this post is itself an example of using scannable techniques to reinforce the need to use scannable techniques.

10. Don’t introduce too many new ideas in one post

(I could tell you many more ways to create scannable content, but 10 is probably enough for now)

This helps to avoid overwhelming readers with information all at once.

If you want to cover many ideas that relate to one another consider a series of posts that link to each other.

If your site and its posts are not easily scannable you run the risk of losing your reader to another blog that is.

This article was first published on August 19, 2005 and updated July 21, 2022.

The post Why Nobody Reads Your Content and What to do About it appeared first on ProBlogger.

ProBlogger: 11 Tips to Create a Personal Connection with Your Audience

noreply@blogger.com (work smart) — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 10:29:00 +0000

ProBlogger: 11 Tips to Create a Personal Connection with Your Audience

11 Tips to Create a Personal Connection with Your Audience

Posted: 14 Jul 2022 12:15 AM PDT

The post 11 Tips to Create a Personal Connection with Your Audience appeared first on ProBlogger.

Photo by Duy Pham on Unsplash

Have you ever experienced being very connected to a blogger?

For me, there's been several times over the years where it's felt like a blogger is talking directly to me through their writing and/or podcasting. Some content creators just seem to have that sense of who is on the other side of their content and the ability to draw their reader/listener/viewer into (almost) a conversation in the way that they communicate.

A personal example of this is a podcaster called Rob Bell, who every time I listen to him, it feels like he is directly talking to me. This is probably because he has a similar background to me and he's talking on topics that I'm interested in but it's also in his personal and engaging delivery.

Whether or not you have ever had this experience, I think it's really interesting and important to examine what these content creators do to create this connection to them. Certainly some people have a natural ability for creating this personal connection. But for the rest of us, I think there's some learnings that we can adapt and use ourselves to create a more personal experience for your blog's audience.

What I want to share in this article is 11 tips for creating that personal connection, techniques that I've observed from other content creators and things I've tried myself and have worked with my audience.

1. Tell Personal Stories

Storytelling is a very engaging technique – people love stories and the more you can tell your own stories the more relatable you will become. The stories you tell don't have to be very personal heartfelt stories (although they can be), but any story that shows you've had some experience with the topic you're talking about creates a powerful, relatable connection in your reader.

Here's 14 types of stories you can tell on your blog.

Photo by Kevin Erdvig on Unsplash

2. Write Like You Speak

Everyone's style of writing is going to be a little different, but for me, I find that when I write in a conversational style I am a much better communicator. If you've heard me present at a conference or listened to my podcast, you'll know that I speak in a very conversational tone. And I've found that when I use this style of writing I get a lot more feedback – blog comments and emails from my readers – than when I have adopted a more formal, authoritative "professor"-like tone.

For more about how to write like a human, listen to this interview I did with Beth Dunn.

3. Use Personal Language

This is just a little tweak to the way you write that makes a big difference to how it's received by your reader. Anytime you can use the word "you" in your writing or presentations is a very powerful thing. For example, the title of this blog post is “11 Tips to Create a Personal Connection with Your Audience" rather than (the depersonalised) "…. an audience…". This tweak immediately makes your reader think about their own experience and makes it personal rather than theoretical. As soon as you start addressing your reader personally, they start applying what you're saying to them and their own situation and making it specific and particular.

4. Picture Your Reader

When you start picturing your reader/listener/viewer rather than just typing words on your computer, speaking into your microphone or presenting to camera, you will immediately personalize your message, delivery and style. A very useful technique to bring your reader alive is to create a reader avatar and then have that avatar present in front of you when you create content for them.

Here's How to create a Reader Avatar for Your Blog

5. Address Real Reader Needs

One of the things you will identify as part of creating your reader avatar is what their needs are. Of course you can draw upon your own experiences, issues and problems with your topic, but you should also be asking your readers questions to find out what issues they have. You could set up a survey (if you have a big enough audience), ask questions on your blog, on your email list or via social media to find out what your readers' needs, challenges, dreams, motivations are. The more you understand what your readers need, the more you will know who they are (and they will know that you know) and the more you'll be able to address their specific issues.

6. Write About Your Readers Feelings, Fears and Dreams

When you get feedback from your readers on what their needs are, you will get ideas for topics to address but just as (if not more) importantly, you will also get a feel for what they're feeling. You may need to read between the lines of your audience's responses.

For example I asked my audience in relation to blogging:

What’s your biggest dream?
What's your biggest challenge?

I put all their responses into two word clouds (one for "Dreams", one for "Challenges") to identify what themes were coming out. Yes, there were topics like "Traffic", "Content", "SEO" but there were also feelings like "Fear", "Afraid", "Scared" that were shared in the context of the topic: eg "I'm scared of SEO". By unearthing these feelings I was able to write with more empathy and weave into my content an emotional connection with my audience.

An example of content I produced as a result of this was a podcast episode about Dealing with Imposter Syndrome.

7. Go Off-Topic from Time to Time

On my two main blogs ProBlogger and Digital Photography School, I rarely go off-topic, but if you look at my Instagram or Twitter account, also on my Podcast and my newsletter, you'll see that I go off-topic and include more personal mentions of other things besides blogging and photography. These off-topic mentions can create more resonance and relatability with your audience.

8. Use Multi-Media

Use different types of media to humanize yourself. If you're just writing you can write in a personal tone; but if you add a photo of yourself your audience can see your face; when you use audio they can hear your voice; video animates you as a person and people can see your body language, pick up on your energy, enthusiasm, your sense of humor… and live-video can ramp up the things by adding audience interaction and engagement as well. Granted, all these things aren't for everyone (some of these things are scary for people to do) but anything you can do to personalize your message is going to help.

Here's what happened when my wife, who started blogging anonymously, began to share more of herself with her audience: How Posting a Humble Selfie Grew Traffic, Shares and Comments on a New Blog.

9. Attend Events

One of the most powerful things I did in the early days of my blogging was to attend events that were relevant to the topics of my blog. This may require some time and investment if you're attending in-person events, but there are also many online meet-ups and events these days. Attending relevant events and interacting with people will help you understand your readers' needs and how they might be feeling. Even if you don't meet any of your actual readers, you will be meeting people like them and this will tell you a lot and help you to create more personal content.

10. Work on Interaction

A reader once told me at an event that she had been reading the ProBlogger Blog for many years but never felt any personal connection. It was only when she joined the ProBlogger Community Facebook Group and left her first comment that the blog really came alive to her and felt a more personal connection to me because she did something. A lot of your readers will be very passive – they'll read/listen/watch your content but not say anything.

Anytime you can get people to: like something; leave a comment; join a group; send you an email; subscribe; vote in a poll… it gets them a little bit more engaged and to put themselves out there and as a result it becomes a more personal experience for them and they become more connected to you. So call people to action! And when they do interact with you, it’s really important you acknowledge their interaction and respond to them. Even if you interact with a small group of your audience, other people in your audience will see that and feel included too.

11. Create Content from the Heart

One of the best things you can do in creating content is to allow yourself to feel something about what you're writing or talking about. Writing about topics that interest you is one thing, but writing about subjects that you feel something about takes them to a whole different level. Not every post you produce needs to be an emotional, from-the-heart piece. But do allow yourself from time-to-time to tap into your emotions – whether it's an angry rant, a sad or uplifting story. Allow yourself to feel something and to express this emotion and you will create a deeper connection with your readers.

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader." – Robert Frost

One example of my own content that went there was when I talked about the humiliating wake up call that changed my life and my blog. It came from the heart and I got so much response from that.

If you're not willing to be personal with your readers, they won't be personal with you. They take your lead. It's so important to model what you want from your readers and for you to create the personal experience and connection with your audience that they are looking for from you.

Now, it's your turn… Tell me what you think. Have you seen examples of bloggers creating a personal experience with their audience? Have you tried any of these techniques (or others) yourself? What happened?

Creating more personal connection is one way to build community with your audience. For more ways to go beyond engagement and unlock the power of community ProBlogger's Build Community Course will help you transform your casual group of readers into a mob of raving fans.

The post 11 Tips to Create a Personal Connection with Your Audience appeared first on ProBlogger.

ProBlogger: How to Turn Your Business Blog Readers Into Paying Customers

noreply@blogger.com (work smart) — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 17:11:00 +0000

ProBlogger: How to Turn Your Business Blog Readers Into Paying Customers

How to Turn Your Business Blog Readers Into Paying Customers

Posted: 06 Jul 2022 05:01 PM PDT

The post How to Turn Your Business Blog Readers Into Paying Customers appeared first on ProBlogger.

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

This is a guest contribution from Alicia Rades.

You started a blog for your business because you recognized the importance of content marketing. You know that businesses that blog get more traffic than those that don't.

But more traffic doesn't necessarily mean more customers. You have to be able to leverage your blog content in a way that convinces readers to trust you and buy from you.

So how do you get readers to pay for your product or service?

Start with these five tactics you can use in your blog posts today.

1. Weave Testimonials Into Your Content

People are naturally skeptical when businesses talk about themselves or how great their product is. They're more likely to trust their own peers—people who are just like them. In fact, the statistics show that written testimonials can increase conversions by as much as 25 percent. Leverage this powerful marketing tactic by weaving customer testimonials into your content.

Don't just insert quotes where they're not needed, though. Use them to tell your story.

This approach is particularly effective when writing case studies. You can also use it to back up claims. For example, let's say you offer social media management services. You're writing a post about converting followers on Instagram, and one of your tips discusses optimizing your profile. Maybe you just helped a client with this, and it doubled their followers in two weeks. To add credibility to your advice and show that it actually works, you could include a testimonial from that client.

In this example, the testimonial supports the content without it being a direct sales pitch for your services. It gives the story a fresh voice from someone your readers can relate closely to, which helps customers put more confidence in your claims, your business, and your service.

2. Use Your Blog as a Platform to Host Deals

Hosting deals on your blog does two things:

It encourages readers to shop when they may not have otherwise spent money on your product.
It allows you to gather people's email addresses, who you can market and sell to in the future.

For the best conversion rates, consider teaming up with other companies to offer everyone's product in a bundle and at a super low price. Not only does it make the offer more appealing, but you'll all benefit from reaching each other's user bases.

Here's an example from Time-Warp Wife. In this giveaway, over 100 homemaking bloggers came together to offer nearly $700 worth of eBooks for only $29.97. And to further encourage sales, the deal was only good for six days.

Of course, you don't need to team with over 100 other bloggers to see success. Host a deal with 3-5 other people in your field, and post the info on your blog to entice readers to buy.

3. Include In-Line Product Links

When the opportunity presents itself, point a couple of links back to relevant products or services on your site. This gets readers to visit your product pages to move them down the sales funnel.

The idea here isn't to blatantly promote your products. Your blog posts shouldn't be a sales pitch. However, links to relevant sales pages can actually be useful to readers who are interested in applying the advice in your blog post.

If it will be helpful to your readers, you can also present the product link as a "side note." Here's an example of how freelance writing coach Elna Cain handles this approach. She presents her product as a solution to writers' struggles without focusing the entire post on her course.

Use this tactic sparingly so you don't overwhelm your readers, and make sure you're only linking where it's relevant so readers know what to expect when they click the link.

4. Write Strong Calls to Action

Every blog post should end with some sort of call to action (CTA). You might encourage readers to:

Leave a blog post comment
Sign up for your newsletter
Visit a page on your website
Follow or share on social media

If your goal is to sell to your readers, then your call to action should point them to the next point in the sales funnel. For example, they might be interested but not ready to buy yet. You might ask them to subscribe to your newsletter or sign up for a free webinar so you can turn them into paying customers in the future.

You could also position your product or service as a solution to the topic in your blog post. Point them to your "how it works" page to get them to learn more and sign up.

Be bold with your calls to action. Tell readers exactly what to do next, and use your website design to your advantage. You can use a custom call to action for each post with an in-line link or CTA button, or you can place a universal CTA widget below each post.

Here's an example from Blogging Wizard that illustrates both options. Adam Connell encourages readers to leave a comment, but he also uses a CTA widget to promote newsletter sign-ups.

5. Don't Be Overly Promotional

The key to getting all of this to work is to avoid being overly promotional. Yes, your purpose is to sell. But blog readers aren't looking for a sales pitch. Trying too hard to sell to them through your blog posts only pushes them away.

Instead, focus on providing advice to your readers. Show them what their problem is (they may not even know they're struggling or what they're struggling with). Suggest ways to fix it. Then briefly show that you have the solution. It's only after that that the sales pitch comes into play. If you help them first, you'll gain their trust, and they'll be more likely to buy from you in the future.

You won't use all five of these tips in every blog post you write, but incorporating them where you can will help turn readers into paying customers. Which one of these suggestions will you try out first? Let me know in the comments.

Alicia Rades is a professional freelance blog writer who specializes in blogging, writing, and freelancing topics. Visit her site at aliciarades.com, where you can download her free blogging guide, 20 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Hitting Publish.

This article was first Published on September 8, 2016 and updated July 7, 2022.

The post How to Turn Your Business Blog Readers Into Paying Customers appeared first on ProBlogger.

ProBlogger: Discover a New Way to Protect Yourself from Data-Loss Nightmares

noreply@blogger.com (work smart) — Fri, 01 Jul 2022 08:49:00 +0000

ProBlogger: Discover a New Way to Protect Yourself from Data-Loss Nightmares

Discover a New Way to Protect Yourself from Data-Loss Nightmares

Posted: 30 Jun 2022 06:54 AM PDT

The post Discover a New Way to Protect Yourself from Data-Loss Nightmares appeared first on ProBlogger.

Photo by Cookie the Pom on Unsplash

How do you backup your computer/s?

This past month I’ve changed my approach and I wish I’d done it earlier. In this article I’ll tell you why I’ve switched.

For many years I’ve used hard drives onsite at my house and have then backed up those drives to others offsite at a family member’s house. The problems with this are numerous.

Maybe you can relate.

Photo by Lorenzo Herrera on Unsplash

So Much Data

Firstly – the size of our backups keeps growing as we take more photos, videos and create more docs. While some of these can backup to the cloud you can end up with bits of backups everywhere (iCloud, google drive, dropbox…. you get the picture).

I decided a few years ago to let iCloud backup all our phones photos, videos and other data – but prefer to have all computer’s data somewhere else (because iCloud gets expensive) and they have a 2TB limit per account!). To have it all in the one place means I have to keep getting bigger hard drives every few years. And it’s not just one drive – I like to have a backup of the backup!

Back in the day I was able to back everything up onto a drive of 500GB… those days are long gone. This is partly because digital camera sensors keep getting bigger (and so their files take more space) and we’re also creating bigger files because our kids are using more and more multi-media at school and for fun.

Of course we now also have five of us (2 parents, 3 children in our household) creating stuff to take up space! Our house has six active computers (soon to be seven when our youngest starts high school) and our eldest is now making short films as part of his study. All up we’ve got something like 16TB of files on our computers!

Hard Drives Fail

Another issue with hard drives is that every few years I find one of them will fail. As a result I’m not just buying new ones because they’re not big enough – but to replace the corrupted ones. So it’s all become something of a mess. I’m not overly technical so setting up a backup system was taking time and I was juggling hard drives to make sure they were big enough and then trying to manage backing up the backups and taking them over to my family’s house…. arrrrgggh!

For a few years now I’ve been waking up in the night – wondering if all our photos would be ok if we had a fire and stressed that a crucial drive would break.

The anxiety was real!

Photo by Vincent Botta on Unsplash

Cloud Solution

I’ve wondered for a while whether a backup to the cloud might be a solution and started looking at the options. This week I bit the bullet and decided to back up one of the computers to the cloud – to see how long it would take and how hard it was.

I chose Backblaze as the service to test. Every review I read said they were simple to use, had a free trial and best of all were cheap (just $7 a month with unlimited data)! Sounds good to me!

You can check out what they offer here: https://problo.gr/Backblaze

Disclaimer: that is an affiliate link meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my link, at no cost to you – but I’m a paying customer already. The commission is just 70cents if you sign up so I’m not expecting to get rich from this.

Let me tell you how I found the process.

It was SOOOO easy!

Backup Process

You literally install an app to your computer, give the app permission to access your files and before you know it it is already at work backing up your files. You can tell it not to back up certain parts of your computer if you like but as I mentioned above there is no limit to how much you can back up – $7 per computer even if that device has a TONNE of stuff on it.

The backup upload was actually pretty quick. This will vary depending on internet speed but ours isn’t super fast and my 1st computer (1.5TB) uploaded in 24 hours. It self throttles if you’re using your computer for other things and I didn’t really notice anything slowing down. Since then I’ve noticed it updates continuously as needed.

In terms of getting files if you need them – there are a few ways you can do it. Login to Backblaze and you’ll see all your files and folders – just as they appear on your hard drive. If there’s just a single file you need you can download it or if you want more than that you can download small to medium sized folders as a zip file. If you need it all there’s options to get them to send you everything as a hard drive (worst case scenario).

I’m not going to back up all of our computers to Backblaze ($7 per computer is reasonable but it will add up). My thinking is that I’ll back up my two computers to it – they’ve got a lot of data and contain important stuff (all our family photos and my work stuff). I will most likely keep backing up my wife and younger kids’ computers to local hard drives but will most likely backup my eldest’s to Backblaze as he has a lot of data on his computer too.

In time I may bring everything into the cloud as hard drives fail – we’ll see!

Photo by Alexander Sinn on Unsplash

Try it Yourself

If you're losing sleep worrying about your files (or you know you should be backing up but aren't) check out Backblaze.

They have a 15 day free trial to give it a go.

Darren Rowse

PS: for the last few weeks I’ve not had one night where I’ve woken up worried about my files!

The post Discover a New Way to Protect Yourself from Data-Loss Nightmares appeared first on ProBlogger.

ProBlogger: How to Build a Blog that Has Lasting Impact Upon Its Readers

noreply@blogger.com (work smart) — Thu, 30 Jun 2022 09:42:00 +0000

ProBlogger: How to Build a Blog that Has Lasting Impact Upon Its Readers

How to Build a Blog that Has Lasting Impact Upon Its Readers

Posted: 29 Jun 2022 08:08 PM PDT

The post How to Build a Blog that Has Lasting Impact Upon Its Readers appeared first on ProBlogger.

Photo by Kristian Angelo on Unsplash

If you want to have a blog that makes a difference in the lives of those who read it, I would highly recommend getting clarity around these three simple (yet powerful) questions:

Who are your readers?
What do they need?
How will they change as a result of reading your blog?

Previously I wrote very briefly about these questions and suggested that they might be a great way to come up with a purpose statement for a blog.

Since that time I’ve had conversations with four ProBlogger readers who took these questions and applied them to their own blogs – and in doing so saw marked improvements in their blogging.

So today I want to emphasise them again.

Let’s tackle the first two together and then look at the third.

Who Are Your Readers? And What Do They Need?

Understanding who reads your blog (or at least who you want to read your blog) and what their needs are is so important because it will inform:

what kind of content you should create (topics, style of writing etc)
how to attract readers to your blog
how you can engage with your readers and build community on your blog
how you monetise your blog (if this is a goal for you)

Understanding your reader also informs things like design, what social media networks you should be engaging in, what subscription methods you should use, how frequently you should publish, and much more.

I’ve previously published an exercise in building a reader profile or persona to help you get clarity around this. And if you’re a ProBlogger Member (it’s FREE to join) I’ve got a worksheet that steps you through the process of how to create a reader avatar for your blog.

Ultimately – knowing who is reading enables you to take a big step towards producing a useful blog.

Without this clarity you’ll be stumbling around in the dark!

How will your reader change as a result of reading your blog?

Over the years I’d focused very heavily upon understanding readers needs, but it has only been the last year that I’ve taken things to the next step and doing thinking about how to ‘change‘ readers.

Knowing who is reading is one thing, but if you want to build a blog that is epic, your blog needs to leave an impact upon people.

I recently spoke about this idea at a conference and shared the following slide. While I didn’t spend a heap of time unpacking the idea, this was the most tweeted quote of the talk I gave.

Photo by Kate Davies on Unsplash

Blogs that change people are blogs that those people will keep returning to.

Blogs that change people are blogs that build trust and relationship with their readership.

Blogs that change people are blogs that their readers share with their networks.

I’ve always know this – it’s not really rocket science – but for some reason I never actually identified the change I wanted to bring to my readers!

As a result, some of my blog posts hit the mark with readers – but many did not.

Why leave it to chance as to what change we want to bring to our readers? Why not define where they are and where we want to take them?

Name the Change and Then Break It Down

Let’s take a look at my main blog, Digital Photography School, as an example.

My answers to the above three questions are not really that complicated:

My readers are camera-owners
My readers are not using their cameras to their full potential
My readers will gain creative control over their cameras as a result of reading dPS

I know if dPS can give camera owners creative control over their cameras, they will start taking images that help create amazing memories for their families, start capturing magical moments in the trips they take, and that they’ll start creating art and ways to express themselves creatively.

These are tangible benefits and outcomes of reading our site and enhance the lives of our readers.

So once we’ve defined the change we want to bring to readers, then we can begin to make more informed decisions about the content we create by simply breaking that down.

What does having creative control over a camera look like? There are many parts of bringing about that change. Some would include:

Obviously this is just a few of the things a camera owner needs to grasp, but you can see here that we’ve already identified a number of topics to explore that help to bring about the overarching goal of the site.

By doing this exercise, we end up with a content and community strategy that is much more intentional that simply sitting at the keyboard each day and asking what we feel like writing about.

By being intentional, we’re creating content that moves people through a process and takes them to an outcome that changes their life in some tangible way.

So What Change do You Want to Bring?

My challenge today is to answer the three questions above, and then to begin to break down the change that you’re wanting to bring.

Who are your readers?
What do they need?
How will they change as a result of reading your blog?

If you're serious about building an audience for your blog and want to supercharge your traffic ProBlogger's Find Readers Course will give you the roadmap and guide you through 6 clear steps to find readers.

This article was first published on June 20, 2014 and updated June 30, 2022.

The post How to Build a Blog that Has Lasting Impact Upon Its Readers appeared first on ProBlogger.

ProBlogger: How to Be a Purple Cow Blogger

noreply@blogger.com (work smart) — Fri, 24 Jun 2022 22:36:00 +0000

ProBlogger: How to Be a Purple Cow Blogger

How to Be a Purple Cow Blogger

Posted: 23 Jun 2022 03:47 AM PDT

The post How to Be a Purple Cow Blogger appeared first on ProBlogger.

Photo by Daniel Quiceno M on Unsplash

One of the common mistakes that I see in many blogs is that they are quite simply unremarkable.

We’ve all seen seen these blogs – (and most of us if we’re honest will admit to having written them at some point) – they are the blogs you look at for a few seconds without actually seeing anything before you surf on to some other site.

Blog readers only stay on any given post for an average of 96 seconds. Its not long! So you’ve only got just over one and a half minutes to make an impression – to do something remarkable that will rock your reader’s world, arrest their attention and stop them scrolling the web like a zombie.

Two great books that I think all ProBloggers should read are the Purple Cow and the Free Prize Inside (afffiliate links). Both are by the author Seth Godin. There is lots of goodness to chew over in these books that relate to blogging – but one of the major take home lessons is about being remarkable – about being a ‘purple cow’.

We live in a world where we’re bombarded with messages all day long from a variety of media (including the web) – in order to break through the noise with your blog its going to take something remarkable.

How to be a Purple Cow

How does one become a Purple Cow blogger? Its not an answer I can give you – there is no formula to it, if there was everyone would be remarkable in the same way and in the process become just one of the crowd again. However there are some things you might like to consider in your quest for the Purple Cow:

Design

One way to grab attention of readers is with visuals. Seth himself does this pretty well on his books and blog with that bald head of his. I bet that is one of the first things that people look at when they come to his blog every time. It grabs you, it stays in your mind – the blog suddenly becomes ‘that blog with the bald head’. Good branding will stand out – whether that’s an image of you, your logo, strong brand colours or a stylised look and feel for your blog.

Titles

Have you ever been looking through your News Aggregator, or Search Engine results and been totally grabbed by the title that someone’s written for their post? I know I have many times. The title of your blog and blog posts are crucial attention grabbers. Consider using them to do just that. Of course your titles should match up with the content you write – but experiment with your titles a bit. You might also like to read this post: How to Write Great Blog Post Titles.

Pictures

Images definitely capture your readers’ attention and draw them into your blog. You have to be careful about their placement – but a picture has the ability to totally grab your readers – as do logos. I don’t know about you, but blogs that are just slabs of text turn me off faster than a cold shower! Break your page up a bit. At ProBlogger we use Unsplash for images and Canva for creating our graphics.

Content

‘Content is everything’ is the cry that often goes up about blogs. I disagree, it’s not everything, but it IS pretty important. If you’re not writing compelling, intriguing, insightful, witty, humorous or useful content (or some combination of the above) then you might as well give up now. I’d highly recommend that you consider original content too – whilst I do have some more ‘news like’ blogs – it’s the original content that I write that almost always gets the attention. Quotes and links are a dime a dozen. Do something original and you’ll stand out from the crowd. Here’s some tips to add originality to your content.

Give something away

I’m not talking here about offering prizes (although they could work if they are the right ones) but I’m talking about considering giving your readers a gift. Seth’s book Free Prize Inside takes readers back to the days when we were kids and used to get those little plastic toys for free in our cereal boxes and writes about how we should consider what the ‘free prize’ is that we give away with our products or services to surprise and delight your readers. What can you give away with your blog? If you’re anything like me, you remember when someone gives you something for free – it makes an impression. Think outside the box a little with your free prizes, it doesn’t have to be an actual physical gift, perhaps its an award, maybe its some information that others charge for, it could be a newsletter, it could be some personal attention to readers, it could be linking to your readers blogs.

There are many ways to make your blog remarkable. Probably the best thing you can do is to go surfing the sites and blogs in your bookmarks and start asking yourself what others are doing to stand out. Why do you keep going back to your favorite blogs? What hooks you in? How could you be more like them?

Be original, be surprising, be remarkable, be a Purple Cow!

Get more Blog tips from our Blog Tips for Beginners series.

This post was first published on March 19, 2005 and updated June 23, 2022

The post How to Be a Purple Cow Blogger appeared first on ProBlogger.

ProBlogger: 11 Ways to Create More Compelling Content for Your Blog

noreply@blogger.com (work smart) — Sat, 18 Jun 2022 05:28:00 +0000

ProBlogger: 11 Ways to Create More Compelling Content for Your Blog

11 Ways to Create More Compelling Content for Your Blog

Posted: 15 Jun 2022 08:19 PM PDT

The post 11 Ways to Create More Compelling Content for Your Blog appeared first on ProBlogger.

Today I wanted to share some tips on how you can make your content more compelling, whether it’s written, video or audio content. I’m mixing things up and testing out my new camera to create some video content for the blog.

For those of you interested in the production aspects of this video . . . I’m happy with the visual aspects of the video considering it was shot with only the light of a window beside me (and the light changed over the 10 minutes of the video). I need to pick up a microphone as this audio is straight from the camera and will in future consider some extra lighting. The camera is a Sony A7iii and the lens I’m using is a 35mm f/1.4 (camera details at https://kit.com/darrenrowse/sony-gear) The camera is producing some great results. I’ve been posting some of them over on my Instagram account at https://www.instagram.com/darrenrowse/

11 Ways to Create More Compelling Content for Your Blog

1. Make it Useful

Unless your content is useful to people and it’s going to change their life in some way, there’s probably no point in publishing it. You don’t have to change your readers’ lives in a big way with every single post, but you need to be useful in some way: make your readers chuckle if they’re feeling sad; inform them of something they didn’t know before; update them on the latest news; give them a sense of belonging… If something is useful, it’s going to hold their attention for a longer period of time. One way to be useful is to solve reader problems – here’s how to do that.

2. Share Your Opinion

I get very frustrated when I hear content that is just technical specifications or facts. I want to hear your opinion of how something might change my life in some way. For more on this, listen to my podcast episode on How to Write an Opinion Post to Draw People in to Your Blog.

3. Cut Out The Fluff

Don’t talk about things that aren’t essential to your message, get to the heart of the matter, to your main points straight away.

4. Visualise Your Reader

If you have someone in mind as you are delivering your content – be that video or the written word – you’re going to deliver in a much more personal way and for a specific type of person. And if that person gets on the other end of your content, they’re going to sense that and feel that you know who they are and that you are writing for them. That’s compelling. There’s nothing like having a reader avatar in mind for helping you visualise your reader – here’s How to Create a Reader Avatar for Your Blog.

5. Make Your Posts Scannable

Don’t overwhelm your readers with a dense block of text that is hard to read. If you’re writing content use headlines, bullet points and different formatting to draw your reader’s eye to different elements of your content and assist their understanding of your article. Most people do a quick scan of an article before they decide whether they are going to read it. Grab their attention, make them curious and let them see that there’s a benefit to reading your content. Here’s 18 Ways to Create Scannable Content for Your Blog.

6. Work (and re-work) Your Headlines

Like scannable articles, people look at your headline and make a snap judgement of whether that content is going to be relevant and interesting to them or not. Compelling content starts with the headline. Ask yourself is the headline intriguing, is it presenting a benefit and reason for reading the article? A good tool for this is Coschedule’s Headline Analyzer which gives your headline and score and suggestions to help make it more compelling. Here’s another article that gives you some specific headline tips.

7. Write With Passion

If there’s no passion in you for the way you write and present your content, your writers will pick up on this and they will not feel any passion for your content either.

8. Give Your Readers Something to do Next

You don’t just want your content to be interesting. You want your content to COMPEL your readers to DO something. Part of that is giving them something to do next – give them some homework, something for them to go away and do or apply to their lives or tell someone else about. This will extend your content beyond the moment in which it is consumed and it will live in on the readers you compel.

9. Include Stories

You can’t do this with every piece of content but in the right context storytelling can really lift your content. People remember stories because they hit the heart and resonate with your readers. If you need some help with storytelling, here’s 14 Types of Stories You Can Tell on Your Blog.

10. Give Your Posts Visual Appeal

This obviously applies to video or text, rather than audio content. But anything you can do to appeal visually to your readers will make your content more eye-catching, intriguing and memorable. Images, charts and formatting for written content. Video content can benefit from interesting backdrops or scenery as well as your own appealing presentation. Here’s some Tools for Creating Great Visual Content for Your Blog.

11. Practice Creating Compelling Content

Compelling content doesn’t just happen, it takes years of learning and practicing the art and craft of creating content. Every time you create content you are adding to your own experience and growing your great content creation muscles.

This post was orginally published on April 11, 2018 and updated June 16, 2022.

What is some compelling content you’ve created lately? Share in the comments below!

The post 11 Ways to Create More Compelling Content for Your Blog appeared first on ProBlogger.

ProBlogger: 5 Mistakes Bloggers are Making with Online Courses

noreply@blogger.com (work smart) — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 13:23:00 +0000

ProBlogger: 5 Mistakes Bloggers are Making with Online Courses

5 Mistakes Bloggers are Making with Online Courses

Posted: 09 Jun 2022 01:04 AM PDT

The post 5 Mistakes Bloggers are Making with Online Courses appeared first on ProBlogger.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

By ProBlogger expert Sam Nordberg.

Online courses are the hottest thing right now. Everyone seems to be launching their own course, and looking for ways to make what they believe is "passive income" – but here are five of the biggest makes people are making with their online courses right now:

1. Not thinking about who they are writing for

When you are creating a course, you need to think really carefully about the end user. Who are they? How much do they know already? What do they want the outcome to be? How do they want to consume the information?

If you really want people to learn from your course, and get results from it, then you need to make sure the information is carefully targeted to meet their needs.

Imagine you were writing a course on nutrition. There is a big difference between writing a course for a professional athlete who really wants to fine tune their diet, and writing a course for someone who has been clinically obese for many years, and needs a lot of support to start from scratch.

Think carefully about who you are creating the course for, before you start creating. Really focus on a single, specific need.

2. Trying to fit everything in

It took you years to learn everything you know.

One of the biggest mistakes people make when creating their own course, is to try and share all of their knowledge. I get it, you want to add value, and make sure that you give them as much as you can.

The problem is, there is no way they can absorb all of that information, and actually start to implement it, all in one go.

It took you years to develop your skills and get to where you are, it will take them a while too.

Focus on delivering smaller chunks of information, with a bigger focus on implementation (that is getting your students to actually try doing things) rather than just giving them lots of information.

3. Just recording videos and making PDFs

A course is more than just great content.

Sure, videos and PDFs are useful way to provide information to a student, but there is more to a course than simply content.

Before you start throwing together your content, consider the following:

– What support will they need?
– How will you get them actively involved?
– How will you get them to implement what they have learnt?
– How will they know if they are getting it right/wrong?
– What might they need before the course or after the course?

A course is a process, you take your students on a journey from beginning to end. Before you start to put content together, it's worth thinking about that journey as a whole.

4. Not providing support

I'm sure you've seen it… you land on their sales page, and you have the two options: buy it for less money and just get the content, or pay more money and get their assistance/support/coaching to help you.

Here's the problem… If they know that you'll need support to help you get better results, then why don't they make it part of the course? Why can you buy a course with no support?

One of the biggest problems with online learning is the lack of support. Students need someone to turn to. They might need help understanding the content, maybe they have technical problems, or maybe they just need to talk it over to really understand what they have learnt.

If you know that your students will need support of some kind (or simply, you know that they will get better results with support) then make sure it's available to them.

You can look into providing a forum, or support group, having live calls, or even providing phone and email support for them.

Note: There are occasions where a course really doesn't need support. Maybe the content is fairly basic and self-paced. If this is the case, feel free to sell the course without support.

5. Thinking courses are great passive income

Don't get me wrong here, courses are a great way to LEVERAGE your income, and they allow you to spend your time one-to-many, rather than one-on-one, but they are certainly not passive. At least, not to start with.

As you've seen so far, there is more to a course than just putting your content online and charging people to access it.

You'll need to promote your courses, help students sign up, answer any questions before, during and after, provide live support, help students to implement… and much more.

Courses are a great way to help your audience.

Courses are a great way to leverage your income.

Courses are a great way to help you monetise your knowledge.

But they are not completely passive. As with anything they require some hard work to set up, and lots of support on the way through.

You can definitely outsource some of that work, but be aware that to begin with, you're going to be putting in some hard yards.

Courses really are a great way to grow your business, and to help you spread your message…. Just keep these simple things in mind as you start.

Really think about who you are creating the content for and what they need to know
Don't try and squeeze it all in. Little bits of information that they actually use, is much more valuable than lots of information they never get around to
Think about the whole process, not just the content
Make sure your students get the support they need

And remember, it might be hard work to start with, but it's definitely worth it in the end.
Sam Nordberg shows people how to take their passion and knowledge and create an online course that sells. You can learn more about her here and connect with her on Facebook and Twitter.

This article was first published July 20, 2016 and updated June 9, 2022.

The post 5 Mistakes Bloggers are Making with Online Courses appeared first on ProBlogger.

ProBlogger: How I Turned One Blog Post Into a 7-Figure Business (And How You Can Capitalize on Going Viral)

noreply@blogger.com (work smart) — Fri, 03 Jun 2022 12:39:00 +0000

ProBlogger: How I Turned One Blog Post Into a 7-Figure Business (And How You Can Capitalize on Going Viral)

How I Turned One Blog Post Into a 7-Figure Business (And How You Can Capitalize on Going Viral)

Posted: 02 Jun 2022 05:00 AM PDT

The post How I Turned One Blog Post Into a 7-Figure Business (And How You Can Capitalize on Going Viral) appeared first on ProBlogger.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

In 2013, I experienced a writer's dream come true. My blog post, 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do, went viral. And not just a little viral, it went mega-viral.

It was read by millions of people in a matter of days. And then Forbes.com picked it up and it reached more than 10 million more readers.

Within a week, national radio shows were about talking my article. Major publications were asking to reprint it. News channels were calling to interview me.

And if that weren't enough, in the midst of the viral superstorm, a literary agent called and suggested I turn my article into a book.

Up until that point, writing was only my part-time job. My main career was as a psychotherapist and college psychology instructor. So I knew this was my opportunity to change that.

But, almost no one knew why I had written that blog post. When people would ask me, I'd say, "I'm a therapist and I've learned what helps people become mentally strong through my practice." But that was only half the story.

The rest of the story was that I'd written that article as a letter to myself during one of the lowest points of my life. When I was 23, my mother had died suddenly from a brain aneurysm. Then, on the three-year anniversary of her death, my 26-year-old husband died of a heart attack.

Dealing with those back-to-back losses was incredibly painful. But I knew that time heals nothing. It was what I did with that time that mattered.

So I worked really hard on allowing myself to grieve. It was a slow and painful process and for quite a while, my life was flipped upside down. But eventually, I found my way by putting one foot in front of the other.

A few years later, my father-in-law was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And I was overwhelmed at the thought of losing yet another loved one.

After a few days of hosting my own pity party, I thought to myself, 'mentally strong people don't feel sorry for themselves.' And I reminded myself that indulging in self-pity wasn't helpful.

So I sat down and I wrote a list of all the things mentally strong people don't do. When I was done, I had 13 things that I'd need to avoid if I wanted to stay mentally strong while I faced yet another loss.

They were things I'd learned through my previous journey with grief. And they were also the things I'd seen first-hand in my therapy office. They were the bad habits that would rob me of mental strength if I let them.

I decided to publish my list online. I thought perhaps if it helped me, maybe someone else would find it helpful too.

I never imagined that my post would go viral. I'd written plenty of other articles and none of them had ever struck such a chord.

But while I was on one hand celebrating my article's success, I was also privately dealing with my grief. Just four days before I appeared on Fox News to talk about mental strength, my father-in-law passed away.

The Book that Told My Story

I spoke to the literary agent who had contacted me and I decided to put together a nonfiction book proposal.

I knew nothing about publishing and had no idea what to expect. But within a week of submitting it to my agent, we received multiple offers from big publishing houses. It was a surreal experience.

I got a deal with HarperCollins and I spent the next few months writing my book. I was still working as a therapist, but I had three days per week I could devote solely to writing my book. To meet my deadline, I had to write one chapter per week. I spent one day researching, the next day writing, and the third day editing.

Then, just 13 months after my article went viral, my book, also called 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do, hit the shelves. Incredibly, it's hit several major bestseller lists, including the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. I've also gotten publishing deals in more than 20 other languages.

The biggest questions I received from readers was, "How do I teach my kids how to be mentally strong?" So in January, my agent and I approached my publisher to pitch a parenting book. And fortunately, they were on board. So my next book, 13 Things Mentally Strong Parents Don't Do, will hit the shelves in the Fall of 2017.

Turning a Viral Article Into a Viable Business

The challenge I faced in going viral was finding a way to turn it into an ongoing business. Clearly, people were interested in the concept of mental strength, but I needed to find a way to provide them with more information in a helpful way.

In addition to the income I received from writing my books, I found several other ways to capitalize on the viral nature of that blog post:

I do speaking engagements. I've spoken at events ranging from TEDx and book clubs, to corporate events and global conferences. Sometimes I appear in-person but at other times, companies hire me to provide webinars on mental strength.

Further Reading: How to Become a Professional Speaker when You Have No Leads or Experience

I created a mental strength eCourse. I receive frequent requests from people looking for individual coaching. But, it was impossible to scale my business by providing one-on-one services. So I created an online course that provides me with passive income while also giving people an affordable alternative to individual coaching.

Further Reading: Tips for Creating Your First eCourse

I write for magazines and other websites. In the past, I've accepted some pretty low paying writing jobs, simply because I needed the money. Now, I can negotiate much higher fees. I write for several major publications and magazine editors often approach me with requests for an article.

Further Reading: 5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Pitches and Get More Freelance Writing Work

I consult with business leaders and executives. I provide consultation to major businesses who are interested in knowing how to create a mentally strong culture or who want to know how to become a stronger leader.

Further Reading: Got a Consulting Gig from Your Blog? Don’t Make this Big Mistake

I continue to grow my platform. Growing my platform has been an ongoing process. Social media has been a big part of that, but I also continue to do interviews with the media as often as possible. And sometimes, that means reaching out to influencers and pitching my ideas.

Further Reading: How to Develop the Right Plan to Grow Your Blog’s Readership

One Piece of Content Could Change Your Life

Quite often, my monthly income is higher than what my annual salary used to be. But, even better than the money, is the freedom that I have to do what I love in a way that I want

I never imagined that one blog post could make such a difference, but one blog post could skyrocket your career. It's important to be ready to capitalize on that opportunity if it happens to you. Here are few tips on how you can be ready:

Make sure your website is ready to go at all times. If you get a viral hit, you'll want to make sure you capitalize on it by getting newsletter sign-ups and social media followers.
Have a professional headshot handy. If you attract attention from the media, they'll want a picture of you.
Update your bio often. Have a short bio and a longer bio available so people know who you are. Media outlets want to know who you are and what you've accomplished.
Go for quality, not quantity. It can be tempting sometimes to send as much information out into the world as possible in hopes something will resonate. But, only high-quality will get shared. Sloppy editing and poor quality images won't attract the right kind of attention.

It's hard to create content that attracts attention in today's fast-paced world. But, it's even more difficult to sustain people's attention and keep them coming back for more. With a clear plan, and a lot of hustle, however, you can capitalize on viral content and turn it into a viable business.

Amy Morin is a psychotherapist, speaker, and the author of 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do, a bestselling book that is being translated into more than 20 languages.

The post How I Turned One Blog Post Into a 7-Figure Business (And How You Can Capitalize on Going Viral) appeared first on ProBlogger.

ProBlogger: Seven Types of Product You Could Sell From Your Blog

noreply@blogger.com (work smart) — Thu, 26 May 2022 21:36:00 +0000

ProBlogger: Seven Types of Product You Could Sell From Your Blog

Seven Types of Product You Could Sell From Your Blog

Posted: 24 May 2022 11:00 PM PDT

The post Seven Types of Product You Could Sell From Your Blog appeared first on ProBlogger.

Photo by Elizabeth Villalta on Unsplash

It took me nearly seven years of blogging to create my first products: two ebooks, one for ProBlogger and one for Digital Photography School. They made me more than $160,000 in 2009 alone and changed my business.

Back in 2014, I wrote about the experience, and how it nearly never happened:

My big issue was a severe lack of time. Between juggling two growing blogs and a growing family (we had just had our first child), I wasn't sure how I'd ever write an eBook. I also had a long long list of other excuses to put it off.

I'd never written, designed, marketed a product of my own before… I didn't have a shopping cart system… I didn't know if my readers would buy…

In short – the dream of creating and selling an eBook of my own stayed in my head for two years until 2009. Ironically by that point I'd become even busier (we'd just had our second son and my blogs had continued to grow) but I knew if I didn't bite the bullet and do it that I never would.

Does any of that sound familiar to you? Perhaps you're blogging alongside a busy day job, or you've got young children at home, and the whole idea of creating a product seems very daunting.

You're definitely not alone. But creating your own product – even a simple one – can bring in money much faster than affiliate sales or advertising. After all, your audience trusts you. And if they like your writing, they'll want more from you.

In this post, I'll take you through seven different types of product you could create. Some of these require more time and initial investment, while others you could plausibly create in a weekend.

But First, What is a "Product"?

What exactly do I mean by a "product"? It could be something virtual (like software or an ebook) or something physical (like a t-shirt or a paperback book).

A product might involve an element of ongoing commitment from you, but it isn't only about the hours you put in. So I won't be covering freelancing, virtual assistant roles, or other services here.

Seven Types of Product You Could Sell from Your Blog … Which One is Right For You?

The seven types of product I'm going to run through in this post are:

Ebooks: these might be positioned as "guides" or even self-study courses. Essentially, they're written downloadables, probably in .pdf, .mobi and/or .epub format.
Printables: these are designed to be printed out. They might be planners, cheat sheets, party invites, worksheets—anything that someone might buy to print and (probably) fill in.
Digital subscriptions: these are normally delivered by email, and are often relatively cheap compared with some other products (making them attractive to first-time buyers).
Online courses: these could be text, audio and/or video, although video is increasingly becoming the "default" expectation.
Membership of a private website or group: this might be a membership site you host yourself, or something as simple as a closed Facebook group.
Software or a phone app: unless you're a developer, this probably isn't the product you'll go for first. But it could be a very lucrative one to try later on.
Physical products: these could be almost anything from books to t-shirts to one-off pieces of art. But unless you've already got a business selling them, they aren't the best products to begin with.

Let's take a look at each one in more detail. I'll be giving examples for each one, so you can see how different bloggers are using these different types of product.

#1: Ebooks: Are They Right for You?

The first two products I created back in 2009 were both ebooks: 31 Days to Build a Better Blog (since updated into a course) and The Essential Guide to Portrait Photography (now superseded by a range of portrait photography books)

That was almost a decade ago, which is a long time in the ebook world. Amazon had only recently launched the Kindle, and the first iPad didn't appear for another year.

These days, there are a lot more ebooks out there. But don't let that put you off. A well-positioned ebook can still be a great starter product. If you're really pushed for time, you might want to compile some of your best blog posts into an ebook (that's what I did with 31 Days to Build a Better Blog), then edit them and add some extra material.

Example: Deacon Hayes' You Can Retire Early!

Many bloggers sell ebooks via their own platforms, charging premium prices for specialized information. But it may be a better fit for your audience if you sell your ebook through a well-established ebook retailer such as Amazon, especially if:

your ebook has a (potentially) large audience
they’re unlikely to pay more than $9.99 for it
they're a bit wary about buying online.

This is what Deacon does with his ebook You Can Retire Early! It's sold through Amazon, but to make it a great deal and to capture his readers' email addresses he offers a free course for readers who email him their receipt.

If you'd like to see more examples of ebooks, we now have 23 ebooks on Digital Photography School.

#2: Printables

Printables are becoming increasingly popular. They differ from ebooks because they're designed to be printed and used/displayed – and they're unlikely to contain a lot of text.

Printables could be almost anything:

Planner pages
Party invites
Pieces of art
Greetings cards
Kids' activities
Calendars
Gift tags
Adult colouring sheets

In fact, it can be whatever you can think of that suits your blog and audience.

Unless you're skilled at design, you may need to hire a professional designer to create high-quality printables for you, depending on what you're creating.

However, the graphic design software Canva does a great job at making DIY graphic design easier to turn out professional-looking printables.

Example: Chelsea Lee Smith' "Printable Pack"

Many of Chelsea's printables are available for free on her blog. But this pack adds five exclusive ones, and brings everything together in one place. Most of her printables are simple and straightforward (which could be a bonus to readers not wanting to spend a fortune on ink). She's priced the whole pack at $4.99, making it an appealing purchase for busy parents.

#3: Digital Subscriptions

A digital subscription is information or a resource you send out to subscribers on a regular basis. Depending on what it is, they might be paying anything from a couple of dollars to a couple of hundred dollars each month.

Delivering the subscription could be as simple as adding paying members to an email list (which you can do by linking PayPal with your email provider). You won't need to create all the content up front, although you'll want to get ahead so you always provide your customers with their resources on time.

Depending on the type of subscription, you could either:

provide all subscribers with all the same content in order (e.g. they start with week 1, then week 2, and so on)
send out a weekly or monthly email to everyone at the same time, so they get the same content whether they've been with you for a day or a year.

Example: $5 Meal Plan, by Erin Chase

Erin's product solve a problem that many parents have: how do you get a tasty meal on the table each night quickly and cheaply without spending hours every week writing a complicated meal plan?

This weekly subscription costs $5/month, with a 14-day free trial. Like Chelsea's printables, it's priced at a point where it's an attractive offer for busy families. We recently had Erin on the ProBlogger podcast, so you can hear more about how she started blogging and went from zero to a six-figure income in two years.

#4: Online Courses

An online course can take quite a bit of time to put together. And for some bloggers the technology can be daunting.

At its simplest, an online course might be essentially the same content as an ebook, only split into "lessons" or “modules” instead of chapters. But many courses include additional features such as:

Video content: courses based around videos normally have transcripts (or at least summaries) to help students who prefer not to watch video or who want a recap to refer to.
Audio interviews: if you don't have the tools to create high-quality video, audio can be a good alternative (and some students prefer it to, as they can listen while commuting or exercising).
Quizzes: depending on what you're teaching, it may be helpful for students to test their knowledge at the end of each lesson or module.
Interaction: you might choose to offer feedback to students, or you might have a closed Facebook group for students to join, where they can talk with one another and with you.
Certification: this is more appropriate for some topics than others, but offering students some sort of certification at the end of the course can be helpful.

Example: ProBlogger's Courses

At ProBlogger we've launch a whole suite of courses. We decided on the self-hosted route and use Learndash as our Learning Management System. You don't necessarily have to host your course on your own site, though. There are plenty of online platforms such as Teachable and Udemy that you can provide your course through instead.

Learndash (partnered with the Buddyboss-friendly Social Learner theme) allows us to offer all of the features I mentioned with our courses. We have a mix of paid and free courses so that we can use some courses to generate leads and build our audience, whereas we charge for others.

For our FREE Ultimate Guide to Starting a Blog course and also for our paid 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Course, we trialled having Facebook groups for students to interact as part of the courses. Indeed Facebook has a “Social Learner” format for setting up a course group where you can even publish your course content in learning modules or units. It’s common for bloggers running courses to also run a group for communication, but be wary of the time and attention this requires.

#5: Membership of a Private Website or Group

For quite a few years now, "membership sites" have been popular. These are essentially closed websites where people have to pay and sign up (almost always for a monthly fee) to view the content.

The content might be text-based, or (more often) include audio or video. Sites might offer monthly "seminars" or "workshops", or regular courses that members can take part in.

On a smaller scale, some bloggers offer Facebook sites with paid membership. This can be a quick and easy way to set up your product, though it's worth remembering that if you’re banned from Facebook you'll no longer have access to your group!

Example: Copyblogger's "Authority"

Copyblogger's membership site Authority focuses on the community elements as well as the teaching materials provided. It's a fairly high-end community site aimed at professional copywriters, small business owners, and so on. It also gives members the opportunity for expert coaching, in addition to peer support.

Like most membership sites, it has a monthly subscription ($55/month). But there's also the option to purchase a year's membership for $550.

#6: Software or a Phone App

Unless you're a developer, this probably won’t be an option for your first product. But creating a piece of software or a phone app can be very lucrative.

There are a lot of options here. Your software/app might be anything from a business tool to something that relates to your readers' hobby. You might have a one-time price (especially if it's a relatively simple tool), or pricing on a monthly basis (the "Software as a Service" or SaaS model, where you host the software for customers to log in to).

Example: Fat Mum Slim's Little Moments App

Long-time blogger Chantelle Ellem created her fun photo editing app on the back of her viral Instagram hashtag challenge #photoaday. When she released Little Moments in 2014, it went to number one in Australia and number seven in the USA. It was picked as the App Store's best app for 2014 and has been Editor's Choice {selected by the App Store worldwide}.

While it's a free app, it has in-app purchases where you can purchase packs of designs to use in the editor – either per pack or an offer to unlock everything and get all the packs.

Chantelle shares some insights here about creating the app, including being prepared for the feedback from customers and creating a community around your app.

#7: Physical Products

Finally, even though blogging life revolves around the online world, nothing stopping you creating a physical product. This could be almost anything you can imagine: bloggers have created board games, comic books, merchandise, artworks, and far more.

Physical products need to be created, stored and shipped (all of which takes time and money), so this probably won't be the first product you'll want to experiment with. You can sell directly from your own blog, or you can use an appropriate online marketplace: Etsy for handmade goods, for instance, or Amazon or eBay for almost any product.

Example: Kirsten and Co's Skin Boss

Personal and lifestyle blogger Kirsten Smith recently developed and launched Skin Boss, a range of facial oils in response to an issue she was experiencing with her skin. You can read the backstory on why and how it was developed. When you create something in response to a real need and have a strong connection with your readers and other bloggers, it's an excellent platform for the success of a new product. Kirsten was able to reach out to her network of blogging friends to get media coverage for her new product.

I know there's a lot to take in here. But all bloggers, no matter fancy and complex their products are now, started somewhere – often with an ebook, printables, or a simple online course.

Even if you're pressed for time, could you set aside 15 minutes a day or maybe block out a weekend to create your first product?

It might just change your life.

If you do want to build a profitable blog and transform your blogging hobby into an income-generating business, check out Problogger's Make Money Course (one of the Four Pillars of Blogging).

This article was originally published on Jan 15, 2018 and updated May 25, 2022.1600

The post Seven Types of Product You Could Sell From Your Blog appeared first on ProBlogger.

ProBlogger: How to Go Beyond Blogging and Harness Multi-Channel Marketing

noreply@blogger.com (work smart) — Thu, 19 May 2022 12:21:00 +0000

ProBlogger: How to Go Beyond Blogging and Harness Multi-Channel Marketing

How to Go Beyond Blogging and Harness Multi-Channel Marketing

Posted: 19 May 2022 12:00 AM PDT

The post How to Go Beyond Blogging and Harness Multi-Channel Marketing appeared first on ProBlogger.

Photo by Timo Volz on Unsplash

Scrupulous readers should have noticed that blogging is not just about writing and getting their opinions, rants and random stuff online. In fact, a blog is just a tool for publishing and conversing online. Every opportunity to enhance communication and reach out through various media should not be taken lightly.

As part of the online marketing mix, blogging plays a significant role because right now much of the marketing effort still revolves around driving people to your web site. When you want your prospects to buy something, you want them to visit your site and proceed to the order / payment page. If you want them to find information or read content, a web site is still the most ideal place for this.

Among those, audio and video content consumptions have shifted from computer to portable devices and TV screens. However, at the end of the process, you still need to take the audience back to the Web to increase ad views or complete the purchase. (Driving people to offline store is out of the scope of this post.)

A blog is no longer used to merely publish blog type content. Modern blog software allows you to format the layout to resemble magazines, corporate web sites or for syndicating videos. Taking advantage of this has become more important than ever in order to grow your business.

Quick advice: combine web publishing and other media to reach your audience. Not only they are cost effective but you are providing richer content experience across multiple platforms and that can bring good things to your business. Even just for online media, you can implement multi-channel marketing.

Email newsletter. If you haven’t developed a way to reach your prospects or customers without having them to visit your site, you are far from getting the most out of your content and traffic. Despite many claims about email digging its own grave, email marketing remains a top marketing priority simply because it is still effective in drive prospects and customers back and to engage them regularly.
Blog RSS feeds. Many people prefer to receive content only when they want to. RSS feeds provide them with fresh content without having them to give away their information. Consumers should have control and RSS feeds fit perfectly into this strategy. The good news is, all blog software automatically provide this feature out of the box.
Podcast feed. Podcast feed is a convenient way to deliver audio, video and other content formats to subscribers.
Social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok… Create a publishing strategy to get people into consuming content and engage with you repeatedly.
Webinars and teleseminars. Telephone and video seminars are capable of providing training in every topic you can possibly imagine.
E-books. Free e-books have higher perceived value than articles. Content in this format tends to establish your expert status faster than anything else. A collection of your best blog posts can be turned into e-book. That’s just one simple example to re-purpose content.

How to Get the Words Out with Content Marketing

When I first used the term content marketing, almost no one was talking about it. Not that people didn’t do it but Larry Chase was one of the first to use the phrase. Other marketers refer to it as educational marketing. Just recently, it becomes the buzz word.

Marketing suddenly becomes fun once you approach it from the content angle. Rather than calling out to random people who are more likely not interested in what you have to offer, content marketing attracts people in. People come (call, contact, or ask) you about your product or service instead of you selling them aggressively. And when the approach you, often they feel as if they’ve known you for a long time.

It all starts with superb content.

Content marketing is effective but at the same time doesn’t burn a hole in your pocket. Sure, there are expensive ways to create and distribute content. More power to those who can afford them. But for most of us, here are some cost effective tips and strategies for content distribution and promotion. (See above for tips on affordable content creation strategies.) Don’t underestimate any one of them, as they can be far more powerful than the costly methods:

Optimize your content for search engines. Learn basic SEO. If you don’t have the budget to spend, you can do this yourself and still get good results. Many web users refer to search engines to find information. I’m not surprised if bloggers claim that 40-60 percent of their traffic come from search engines. So like it or not, a lot of the following strategies will help you get more traffic from search engines.
Break news. This is possible if you have insider access to news, but if you don’t, being one of the first to blog about a story may result in links from A-list blogs and news outlets. I’ve written about content filtering and keeping up with industry news in previous post.
Send out press releases. They have to be news-worthy. If done right, you may get a lot of publicity in additional to links from authority web sites that will strengthen your positions in search engines. Media coverage may bring in a surge of traffic to your blog. Read Darren’s post on how to get media coverage for tips on how to do it.
Hold a contest. Contest is an effective way to generate buzz around the blogosphere, especially if you are able to have other bloggers and influencers blog about it.
Participate in contests. Bloggers often hold contests or group projects to encourage others to blog about certain topics. This may result in both links and referral traffic for your blog.
Participate in blog carnivals. Even though you have great content, it can be hard to get links from other bloggers when you are getting started. By participating in blog carnivals, you are able to kick start your inbound link strategy quite easily.
Linkbait. Certainly it is not the best word to describe what it does. Linkbaiting is simply the act of creating solid piece of information that catches people’s attention. It has nothing to do with baiting people into fads. Being remarkable is the idea behind linkbaiting. With great content and a bit of promotion, others will notice and start linking back to your blog.
Write and promote your free e-books. A free promotion in one forum may bring hundreds or even thousands of downloads, which distribute your message to more audience. A freemium — to steal the term from direct marketing — is effective to get visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter.
Become a guest blogger. Like what I am doing right now. Everyone should like the idea of stealing traffic from other bloggers ethically. Provide great content and help out other bloggers. In return, they will be more than happy to let you communicate with their readers. This in turn will drive traffic back to your blog.
Contribute to article directories. Article directories are still good sources of targeted traffic, mainly because of their authority in a lot of topics. I regularly get 5-10 new subscribers to my e-course every day from this source. Focus on high-traffic sites to save your time.
Visit forums regularly. Discussion boards are places where people with the same interest hang out, discuss and share opinions. By being a forum regular, and by contributing back, you will be able to establish your expertise and drive traffic back to your site. Some forums also accept on-topic articles.
Use social media as micro-blogging platforms. Twitter is by far the most outstanding micro-blogging tool, but you’ve also got Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and now TikTok to drive traffic and use for networking. More about this in the next section.

Connect and Build Relationships with Others (It’s Social!)

Blogging requires you to reach out and connect with your readers and other bloggers. Relationship is an important part of it. “It is who you know.”

Building relationships with other influencers should be on everyone’s agenda. Over time, you will need bloggers to help you spread your content, product or service. By the time you need them, it is usually too late to start networking.

While certainly there’s more things to consider than just “who you know,” influencers are people who have the capability to generate buzz and bring you traffic and business. Average content can become outstanding with the right people endorsing it, but superb content remains unnoticed without proper promotion.

With the word “social” everywhere, “where to network” is no longer the right question to ask. It is more about prioritizing your time to get the most out of social sites and activities.

Here are some useful online networking tips that I hope I’ve learned years ago when I got started:

Leave comments on other blogs Comments with nofollow attribute is still valuable because what you seek for is connecting with the blogger. I know some bloggers who leave comment in 50-100 blogs every day. If that sounds too aggressive a goal because of time limitation and others, aim for 5-10 authority blogs to start with. A tip: If you are able to grab the blogger’s attention, you will increase the chance of getting them to reply to your tweets or emails later.
Help other bloggers. Guest blogging, as mentioned above, is just an example. Do whatever you could to help out bloggers. They will certainly pay attention to you more than to people who blatantly ask for links.
Find the right timing. Don’t spam tens of bloggers with the similar messages. You need to personalize email and get in touch with the right blogger at the right time. A tip I learned from Maki of Dosh Dosh is to create a prospect list using your news reader. It is a neat way to track your network even if you have hundreds of them.
Don’t overlook mailing lists and groups. People are still exchanging hundreds of messages in popular mailing lists and virtual groups such as Yahoo Groups or Google Groups. As with other strategies, the key is always in providing value. Don’t self-promote in your first message unless you want to be kicked out of the circle.
Connect with a purpose in social networking sites. You can certainly befriend your family members or school mates, but if you are to grow your business, look for like-minded people and build relationships with them through those social networking sites.
Use Twitter. Twitter is all the rage nowadays. While people may visit Facebook or MySpace once a week, they regularly use Twitter several times a day. This may be a more effective way to get in touch with influencers, even better than email and perhaps phone (for some people). At least warm up first and avoid cold calling.
Meet bloggers in person. Industry events and seminars are great places to meet people besides getting cutting edge information, of course. When meeting others in person, it often results in closer relationship and joint projects. After all, people who visit those events are also interested in business.

Although social networking sites allow you to syndicate your blog’s RSS feeds and post links to your blog posts, several social sites are created just for the purpose of finding new and interesting content.

Here are some ways that will help you leverage your content and drive traffic through social sites:

Disseminate your content through social sites. Medium and HubPages are just two examples of social sites that allow everyone to publish their own content and knowledge. This will increase your visibility as people start finding your content and blogs through various places.
Provide value and steal more traffic! Reddit, Digg, and Mix (previously Stumble Upon) are just several huge players out there. You can find niche specific social news sites and drive tons of traffic to your blog if you really work on it. Care should be taken that traffic from these sites may not be sticky, but they can still be made effective. When using such sites, remember that networking is also important to get your content noticed and endorsed.
Help others find answers. Quora and Answers.com are just two examples where you can help others with your knowledge. Others will notice what you have to say, which in turn may drive business to you.

Closing Words

If you look at the list above, you should agree that it can be overwhelming even for most productive bloggers. If you only get one advice from this article, it should be that you should not attempt to do them all at once by yourself.

Instead, prioritize. Successful bloggers focus on what they know best and exploit a handful of different marketing channels to the maximum, systemize them, and whenever they are able to offload some of the stuff, pick another channel to explore. You will be surprised that even if you do one thing well, you will see significant improve in traffic and revenue to your site.

Final recommendation: spend a weekend to plan out your blogging business. It will be time worth spending.

Next post, which is the last post in the series, talks about the metrics you should be tracking so you know which strategy brings you result and which needs a fix. Not knowing your numbers is like shooting in the dark and hoping you will hit the bull’s eye. It isn’t going to happen. Driving traffic and growing a blogging business need a strategy, and based on the feedback you adjust things and take even more actions.

So… stay tuned.

Hendry Lee helps bloggers overcome strategic and technological challenges in starting and growing their blogs.

This post is the 5th in a series of posts by Hendry Lee. Check out part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4.

This article was first published on January 29, 2009 and updated May 19, 2021.

The post How to Go Beyond Blogging and Harness Multi-Channel Marketing appeared first on ProBlogger.

ProBlogger: 15 Social Media Mistakes that are Strangling Your Success

noreply@blogger.com (work smart) — Sat, 14 May 2022 18:14:00 +0000

ProBlogger: 15 Social Media Mistakes that are Strangling Your Success

15 Social Media Mistakes that are Strangling Your Success

Posted: 12 May 2022 12:14 AM PDT

The post 15 Social Media Mistakes that are Strangling Your Success appeared first on ProBlogger.

Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash

While it’s not new, I’m often surprised by the way bloggers use—and mis-use—social media.

Each of us has our own blogging journey, and we use different tools in our own unique ways. Yet there are still quite a few very common errors that I continue to see bloggers making as they work with social media.

These mistakes have the potential to make your social media experience a struggle—if not put you off it completely. But if you persist with them over time, they have the potential to do significant harm to your brand and your blog.

Think about it: social media is a very public space, perhaps even more public than your blog. Although we might not be conscious of it, every time we make a status update on a social network, we have the potential to reach a huge audience of people we don’t know through others sharing our messages.

That can happen whether the messages are good or bad, for better or for worse.

Take a look at these 15 mistakes, which definitely send the wrong message. Then, let me know in the comments if you’re making any of these errors.

1. Using social media as broadcast media

We all know that social media is an engagement tool, but how many of us treat it that way?

What’s your ratio of “broadcast” updates to direct, personal updates that address other users individually? And who are those direct updates to—friends and family and people you feel “safe” with, or are you reaching out to new contacts, readers, and others in your niche?

Make sure you know How to Socialize Your Posts for Maximum Effect AND The 10 Rules of Social Media Engagement.

2. Not responding to contacts

While you may not want to connect with everyone on every social network, the blogger looking to build an online presence should focus on responding to contacts from others on social media.

Avoiding one-word responses is ideal—look for ways to connect naturally and easily with every person who approaches you, and you’ll see real benefits from social media.

3. Not joining your readers on the networks they use

Where are your users congregating online? Which networks do they use? Are you on those networks, or are you holding off because you think you don’t have enough time or energy to tackle a new network?

Not long ago, I started developing the dPS presence on Pinterest, and I’ve never looked back. While there’s no perfect time for anything, leaving yourself out of a social network where your audience is active could mean you’re leaving money on the table—or readers out of the loop!

Here’s how I use social media in my blogging as ‘outposts’.

4. Not offering follow and share buttons on your content

On your post pages, do you offer readers the option to share the post on social networks and the opportunity to follow you on those networks?

Offering one or the other is better than nothing, but it’s important to offer both. Of course, your follow buttons might appear in a location that’s globally available throughout your blog—like in the header or sidebar. But do make sure users have both options.

Here’s The Step-by-Step Method to Making Your Content Shareable on Social Media.

5. Not following or friending your readers

If a reader contacts you on social media, do you follow them?

While following massive numbers of people can be overwhelming, if you’re just starting out on a new network, connecting with those who contact you is a great way to make the most of the medium and get a feel for what your readers are doing on that network.

6. Not following or friending industry contacts

Connecting with people from your broader niche is an excellent way to stay abreast of news and get on the radars of others you haven’t met, but whose work you admire.

Who knows? They might follow you back—and share your updates with their followers. But even if they don’t, you have the potential to get a sound perspective of the players in your niche, and their work, on social media.

Here’s some more benefits of networking and collaboration.

7. Not presenting your brand consistently on a network

Every blogger and blog brand has a range of facets, but these need to be carefully managed—even curated—if you want to give your followers a clear idea of who you are and what you’re about.

Chop and change in the way you approach a given network or your followers, or present your brand, and you might do more harm than good.

If you’re not sure about your brand, you need to know How to Define Your Blog's Brand.

8. Not presenting your brand consistently across different networks

Following on from the previous point, you will have readers who follow you on multiple networks, so it’s important to present yourself and behave consistently in all your dealings, whatever the network.

Your blog’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest accounts should share brand characteristics, even if you target the information you share with each network individually.

9. Only doing the basics on each network

Social networks have come a long way since they were first launched. Even the more recent arrivals to this industry are evolving new features all the time. Yet many of us ignore these developments, and just keep posting the same stuff, day in, day out.

Are you aware of the features of each of the networks you’re using? Are you up-to-date with what each network offers your blog? If you’re not, you could be missing valuable opportunities to promote your blog, to meet potential readers, and eventually, to make sales.

10. Not tracking social media traffic

At the most basic level, it’s worth knowing what portion of your blog’s traffic comes from social media, and from which networks.

This knowledge can help you focus your efforts, prioritize your work, and manage your time to best effect. It can also help you to respond to one-off traffic events arising from particular networks.

11. Not tracking how much your content is shared

On the other side of the coin, it’s also important to keep an eye on how much your content is shared. I’ve found this particularly useful when I’ve joined a new network, as it helps me to understand what works in that space and what doesn’t.

Looking at what’s shared—in terms of blog content and my own social media updates—is an essential step in making the most of a social network.

12. Not listening to discussions about your brand and niche

Similarly, it’s important to track not just what people on a given social network are saying about your blog and brand, but also about your niche itself. Social listening is the answer.

This can give you post ideas, opportunities to connect with readers on topical issues that they care about—even ideas for updating your blog’s layout or post categorisation. Social media listening is a great way to get to know what your audience is thinking and feeling.

13. Not listening to your main competitors

The listening doesn’t stop there, though. you can also set up searches for social media discussions of your main competitors, or key players in your niche, and find out what the audience has to say about them.

This can help you find gaps in your market for information and commentary, give you prodict ideas, and a lot more.

14. Not posting at high-sharing, high-visibility times of day

This is a big one. Even if your social media followers are in your timezone, there are going to be better and worse times to share on social media.

If you’re listening to find out the way your niche works on social media, you should have an idea of when its players—organizations and audience members—are most active. By tying that information to the traffic and sharing tracking mentioned above, you should be able to piece together a picture of the best times to get traction from social media among your target readership.

15. Not realising that promotion doesn’t stop with social media

Social media has its place, but it’s only one way to reach the people you want to read your blog. It’s one piece in a big promotional puzzle, and it’s one that’s actually independent of a digital presence that you own.

That presence is on your blog itself. But if you only ever use social media to try to get people to your site, you’ll soon kill off any goodwill you’d established. This is why social media really should be used as part of a broader promotional toolkit that lets you attract some of the other kinds of readers we mention in this article.

Are you making any of these 15 mistakes? They could be slowly strangling your blog’s authority, brand, and ability to attract new readers! Share your thoughts—and tips for social media success—with us in the comments.

This article was first published on December 16, 2012 and updated May 12, 2022

The post 15 Social Media Mistakes that are Strangling Your Success appeared first on ProBlogger.

ProBlogger: Giving Underperforming Posts a Second Chance with Updates

noreply@blogger.com (work smart) — Sun, 08 May 2022 12:17:00 +0000

ProBlogger: Giving Underperforming Posts a Second Chance with Updates

Giving Underperforming Posts a Second Chance with Updates

Posted: 05 May 2022 01:37 PM PDT

The post Giving Underperforming Posts a Second Chance with Updates appeared first on ProBlogger.

Photo by Jeffrey F Lin on Unsplash

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again….

Have you ever written a post that you thought would hit the spot with your readers, generate lots of interest and/or stimulate a great conversation and then find it fell flat on it’s face?

I have – in fact it happens all the time for a variety of reasons:

Sometimes your posts fall over because other stories break in the blogosphere and hog all the attention
Perhaps you just had some bad luck and the right influential blogger didn’t happen to see your post (and spread the word)
At other times its because you posted on the wrong day of the week
Or perhaps you wrote the post in the early days of your blog before you really had any readers to read it
Alternatively it can be simply that your post wasn’t good enough

Many of these unsuccessful posts slide off the front page of a blog never to be seen or thought about again (by your readers or by you) – however, perhaps in time, they deserve a second chance. After all, you’ve put work into researching and writing them and with a second chance in the spotlight they could actually reach their potential and become more fruitful and rewarding to you as a blogger.

Over the last few weeks I’ve experimented on a number of occasions with giving old posts that I felt hadn’t lived up to their potential a second chance. I’ve done this in a few different ways with varying degrees of success but wanted to share the method that was most successful for me (as well as a few others at the end of this post).

Reposted Update

The most successful of my experiments with giving old posts a second chance have been reposting them on the front page of a blog with updates.

I did this a few days back with a post on DPS on Slow Sync Flash. The previous version of the post had been posted back in January when my readership was considerably smaller than it currently is (ie most of my current readers wouldn’t have seen it before) and while it had been moderately successful in terms of generating comments I was never completely satisfied with the post (in terms of what I’d written and/or the traffic it got).

So I updated the post with a few tweaks that made it more useful, attractive and relevant and reposted it at the top of my blog (simply by changing the posting date in WordPress). I also included a note that it was an updated post at the end of the post.

IMPORTANT NOTE – I am able to do this at DPS because I have a permalink structure that does not include dates (ie it is just the BlogName/PostName not BlogName/Date/PostName as it is here at ProBlogger. if you have dates in your permalink structure you shouldn’t use this method as you’ll end up with a new URL for the post which can mean you lose any SEO ranking your previous version of the post had.

The results of this updated repost were significant with a front page appearance on Digg, large StumbleUpon traffic, being featured on the front page of Delicious and link ups from many blogs including a few authoritative ones.

The advantage of this method is that the post not only gets a second chance in the spotlight – but because it’s an established post with some Search Engine Ranking – the combination of the content being updated and new comments being added (Search Engines like fresh content), the appearance on your front page and the extra links that the post might generate means that the post will build it’s SEO authority.

The danger of this approach is that if you do it too often with posts that most of your readers will have seen before you run the risk of them becoming disillusioned with you. I don’t have a problem with updating old posts to make them more relevant and useful – but some of your readers might get a bit sick of reading the same old stuff if you do it too often.

This approach works best on evergreen or timeless posts – particularly ‘how to’ or ‘tips’ posts.

ProBlogger: 6 Reasons Your Blog Traffic Might Be Declining [And What to Do About It]

noreply@blogger.com (work smart) — Sat, 30 Apr 2022 17:57:00 +0000

ProBlogger: 6 Reasons Your Blog Traffic Might Be Declining [And What to Do About It]

6 Reasons Your Blog Traffic Might Be Declining [And What to Do About It]

Posted: 27 Apr 2022 10:03 PM PDT

The post 6 Reasons Your Blog Traffic Might Be Declining [And What to Do About It] appeared first on ProBlogger.

Photo by Luismi Sánchez on Unsplash

I’ve read a few comments here on Problogger from bloggers who are feeling low because they’ve noticed a plateau or even a decrease in the traffic coming to their blog.

While we all want to see our traffic rise the reality is that every blog has days, weeks and even months where traffic levels out or even decreases. This can be quite distressing for bloggers who have big hopes and dreams for their blogs.

Today I’d like to look at some of the reasons a blog’s traffic might decrease and suggest some ways forward for each of them.

1. Seasonal Traffic

If you’re still in the first year of your blog you are yet to see what a full calendar year looks like in terms of traffic for your niche. Most niches have natural rises and falls in traffic.

For example (see below for a chart of visitor numbers) on my photography tips blog we see spikes in traffic in December and January. December’s traffic boost is generally to do with people researching new cameras to buy and January is generally associated with people working out how to use cameras that they got for Christmas. On the flip side we often see dips in traffic over August to October.

What to Do: The first time you see a seasonal rise or fall in traffic it can be quite confusing – however the key with it is to not panic when you see a dip but to identify opportunities to maximize the rises and to minimize the falls.

For example it might be that you need to tailor your content for certain times of year and what people are doing in relation to your niche.

For me on my photography blog this meant writing content in November-December on how to buy a digital camera (to capitalize on the Christmas buying trend), writing beginner photography tips in January (to capitalize on the trend of people looking for tips on how to use their new cameras) and during low seasons (like July when it’s summer in the US) writing topical tips like Beach Photography Tips or How to use a camera in the Bright Sun.

Another Tip – one great free tool for looking at seasonal traffic is to use Google Trends to analyze what people are searching the web for. For example if I type in ‘digital cameras’ I get this chart:

There’s lots of interesting stuff in this (the downward trend for starters) but it clearly shows what I’ve observed above – more people are searching the web for that term from November-December each year. This information could confirm a suspicion you have or help you identify a trend to capitalize on in your niche.

Further Reading: Seasonal Traffic and How to Capture it for your Blog.

2. Topical Interest

Chris Rock and Will Smith | CREDIT: ROBYN BECK/GETTY

At other times of year traffic events can be triggered by other current events. For example I know one entertainment blogger who has had a lot of traffic this past few weeks simply because they’d previously had a lot of content that ranked well in Google on Will Smith. Of course in coming months as the news of Will Smith’s bad behaviour at the Oscars subsides it’s likely that they’ll see some declines in traffic.

What to Do: The key with topical rises and falls in traffic is to try to capture as much of the rush of traffic as you can so that when the decline comes you’ve got new subscribers/readers to your blog (see further reading below on ‘sticky blogs).

It’s also important to be aware of upcoming events in your niche and writing content in anticipation of that. This can be hard in predicting the death of a mega pop star like Jackson but in different niches it’s possible to predict events.

For example – before the Athens Olympics I was involved in running a blog where we wrote a post in advance of the Olympics for every single event in the games. The posts included athletes names and any information we could get on the events. We updated the posts with results once they events had been run. As a result we were consistently ranking very highly for ‘Event name Results’ when people were searching for winners of events in Search Engines.

Further Reading: How to Create a Sticky Blog

3. Posting Frequency

Photo by Egor Vikhrev on Unsplash

One common reason for lulls in traffic is that a blog has had a lull in new content being published. I saw one blogger writing a post recently about how their blog was failing to gain traction and in the comments of the post a reader pointed out that the blogger had hardly been posting. The reality was that the blogger had produced very little to be read and so people were not visiting.

What to Do: Posting more doesn’t guarantee extra traffic but it can be a factor to consider. Chart your last few months of posts and see if there’s any correlation to rises and falls in your traffic – you might identify a trend!

Worth noting is that some bloggers report that when they post LESS that they actually get more traction with readers. I know of one blogger who was posting 10-20 times a day and when he dropped things back to 2-3 posts a day he noticed not only increases in comment numbers per post but that his posts were being shared more on social media sites. At 10-20 posts a day posts were coming off the front page of his blog so much that readers hardly had a chance to read and share them.

Further Reading: What is the Ideal Post Frequency for a Blog?

4. Shifts in Search Rankings

Many blogs see the way that they are ranked by Google (and other search engines) rise and fall over the years.

A Personal Example – Back in 2004 (just before Christmas) I woke up one day to find that my main blog at that time had all but disappeared from Google. I’d not done anything to the blog that wasn’t allowed by Google and hadn’t made any major changes to the site – I just disappeared. My heart sank (actually I felt quite sick) because that blog was the main source of income from my blogging and 75% of my traffic had vanished.

The lull in traffic lasted about 6 weeks before it magically reappeared. In that time I got myself another job and diversified my blogging and learned a lot.

What to Do: Sometimes search engines change their algorithms and occasionally they seem to lose sites from their rankings for no apparent reason. The key with this type of loss of traffic is to not panic, make sure you’re abiding by Google’s guidelines (not selling text links or doing anything else considered to be black hat) and then apply for re-inclusion using Google’s webmaster tools.This has happened to me a couple of times over the years and each time the traffic came back – it wasn’t quite as good as when it disappeared but things seemed to right themselves.

Further Reading: Search Engine Optimization for Bloggers

5. Poor Quality Posts

Photo by Thom Milkovic on Unsplash

Of course another factor to consider when looking at the traffic to your blog is whether you’re actually building a valuable site for readers and producing high quality, engaging and useful content.

This one can be a little confronting to think through and might take you getting an outsiders critique or feedback (sometimes it’s hard to be objective about something you’ve put so much work into). As I look back on my own blogging I know there have been definite times where traffic has suffered when I’ve struggled for inspiration as a blogger and where this has impacted the quality of what I was able to write.

On the flip side there have been times where I’ve been inspired to write series of posts that have connected with readers and helped them in practical ways which has driven a lot of traffic to my sites.

What to Do: Ask yourself (and others around you):

Are You Being Relevant and Useful to Readers?
Is your blog helping your readers by providing them with value, solving their problems, entertaining them or giving them a sense of community?

If the answer is no then it is likely to impact the number of people reading it.

Further Reading: How to Write Great Blog Content

6. Promotional Activities

As I look at some of the rises and falls in traffic to my blogs I know that some of them can be directly tied to my own marketing and promotion of my blogs (or the lack of promotion that I’ve done).

Writing great content doesn’t guarantee a blog’s success. You can’t just build it and expect that ‘they will come’. Sometimes you need to get out there and promote yourself.

Perhaps the lull in traffic on your own blog is partly to do with taking your foot off the accelerator in your own marketing.

What to Do: This means different things for different blogs but could include investing into social media sites like Twitter, promoting your posts to other bloggers, networking with other bloggers, running a competition on your blog, leaving comments on other blogs and forums, guest posting on other sites, doing promotions in main stream media, doing some giveaways….. etc

Further Reading: How to Find Readers for Your Blog.

Keep Moving Forward – Don’t Give Up

There are many other potential factors that could be at play (I invite you to share others below) but the key is to not be paralyzed by the declines and plateaus in traffic that you experience but to spend a little time trying to identify the reasons and then keep on motoring on with your blog.

You can see from the first chart above that my photography blog has had quite a few months where traffic has plateaued and dipped – but I’ve kept to the vision that I have for the site and continued to keep working. A decrease in traffic from one month to the next is not pleasant but it’s not the end of your blog. If I’d allowed the dips to determine whether I’d keep blogging or not I’d probably have lasted 2-3 months on that blog and failed to see it grow to the point that it has.

This article was first published on July 15, 2009 and updated April 28, 2022.

The post 6 Reasons Your Blog Traffic Might Be Declining [And What to Do About It] appeared first on ProBlogger.

ProBlogger: Seasonal Traffic and How to Capture It for Your Blog

noreply@blogger.com (work smart) — Thu, 21 Apr 2022 08:44:00 +0000

ProBlogger: Seasonal Traffic and How to Capture It for Your Blog

Seasonal Traffic and How to Capture It for Your Blog

Posted: 20 Apr 2022 11:00 PM PDT

The post Seasonal Traffic and How to Capture It for Your Blog appeared first on ProBlogger.

Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash

Don’t Miss Seasonal Opportunities on Your Blog for Spectacular Traffic. Read to the bottom of this post for an example of how I used the same content three times in 18 months to generate 50,000 page views on one post.

One of the skills that I encourage bloggers to develop is to think ahead about what events might be coming up that will impact the niche that you’re writing about.

The web is a fairly rhythmic place and every year there are waves of activity across search engines and other websites that are quite predictable.

For example:

In November and December every year millions of people go online searching for gifts in the lead up to Christmas.
At Superbowl time people go online looking for the ads that were featured during the game.
Every Thanksgiving the numbers of searches for Turkey recipes go through the roof
During the Olympic games (every 2 years for Winter and Summer games) people go online searching for results and medal tallies.
At the end of American Idol’s season (and other localized versions) people head online searching for results, inside gossip and related information
Everytime a blockbuster movie is released people hit the seach engines looking for reviews

The list could go on… and on.

In fact, if you’re reading this article in April, here’s a great article on April content calendar ideas. The beauty of many of these seasonal events is that they are perennial – relevant year after year.

One tool for looking at what people are searching for at any given point in time is Google’s Hot Trends page which shows the latest popular searches.

However as bloggers wanting to capitalize on these mini frenzies of online activity around different topics a tool like Google Trends is limited in how useful it is. The problem with it is that it gives information on what people are searching for today and not what they’ll be searching for in a few weeks or months time.

The seasonal example I want to talk about today is “4th of July”. One of the keywords people are searching for online that day is ‘fireworks’. It comes up 17 times in the top 100 list as I’m writing this (update – a few hours later fireworks appear in 38 of the top 100 terms). The term spikes on July 4 and at the end of the year (just before New Years) every year. Here’s Google’s Trends graph on the term ‘fireworks’ (click to enlarge in a new window).

You can see that this year’s spike is about to happen (or has just started).

The problem is – that if you write a post related to fireworks today you’re too late to capitalize on the majority of traffic that is out there for the term. You’ve not allowed long enough for the search engines to find you or for other blogs and sites to link up to you.

At the very least you will have wanted to write your post a couple of weeks (if not months) ago.

This same principle applies not only to fireworks but any seasonal event that happens in your niche. This is why last year I started writing my How to Optimize Your blog for Christmas Series in November. It’s why the best blogs on the iPhone (did I say I wouldn’t mention it?) started way back when it was announced (or even before) and why I know bloggers starting blogs on events that won’t even happen for over 12 months.

Before I give you a couple of tips on how to capture some of this seasonal traffic to your blog lets look at five of the more obvious seasonal trends/holidays/events to illustrate just how rhythmic a lot of it can be. The following is Google’s Trend graphs for Christmas, Easter, Mothers Day, Valentines and 4th July. As you can see, it’s very predictable stuff.

Of course it is never really too late to blog on a topic. With tools like Google’s Blog Search, Digg and Technorati a story can still hit it big very quickly – but to be found particularly by search engines you need to be planning well ahead.

Take Home Tip – Start a Blog Diary

Get a Wall-planner or diary (or use an online calendar) and start brainstorming events that happen in your niche. These might be annual events, one off event or even semi-regular ones. Add these events to your diary but also make a note of them two months and one month before they arrive – telling yourself to start writing on those topics to get ready.

You’ll find that with keeping a record of the events in your niche for a full year that you’ll start to notice annual trends that will help you plan for following years.

One last tip – Reposting Seasonal Content to Build Momentum

Here’s another quick tip if you have seasonal events in your niche – you don’t have to write new content every time the event happens.

I’ve previously written about giving Underperforming Posts a Second Chance with Updates. The theory was that sometimes putting an old post back in the spotlight with some good updates can give an old unsuccessful post a second wind.

What I’ve found is that this technique is not only good for under performing posts – but also previously successful seasonal ones.

The most topical example that I can give you where I experimented with this technique, is my post How to Photograph Fireworks Displays. This post is 15 years old – yet it has appeared on the front page of my blog several times (usually leading up to 4th July and just before New Years Eve) because it is an ‘evergreen’ post that is relevant every time fireworks are on display and people want to photograph them.

On each occasion I’ve updated the post with new images and information to freshen it up so that regular readers are not just seeing the same old information.

The reason for updating to post is to give it another chance to be read. The information is relevant and useful and as a result the post continues to grow momentum.

Every time I repost it, it gets a small SEO boost having been featured on the front page of the blog, it gets fresh incoming links from other blogs and sites, it gets bookmarked by readers on social bookmarking sites and it enjoys larger and larger traffic. This year it’s even reached the number one position for its keywords on Google as a result of the strategy.

Readers seem to love it also. I’ve had so many emails today from readers saying that they’ve read the post previously but appreciate me reposting it because they were going to have to go searching for it from last time. New readers have not seen it before and appreciate finding it for the first time.

In terms of traffic – this post has grown in it’s readership every time I’ve posted it. The original article, posted leading up to the 4th of July, generated around 5,000 page views. The second time it was re-published, just before New Years, attracted closer to 15,000 page views. And the third time around, again before the 4th of July the following year, views were upwards of 30,000.

The alternative to this updating strategy would have been to write multiple posts on essentially the same thing for each time that I republished it (or to link to it from the front page). While this might have driven a few readers back to the post it wouldn’t have had the impact that updating the original post has had.

What type of seasons and rhythms happen in your blog’s niche? Do you plan for them? How do you attempt to capture the waves of traffic as they come rolling in?

This article was first Published on July 4, 2007 and updated April 21, 2022

The post Seasonal Traffic and How to Capture It for Your Blog appeared first on ProBlogger.

ProBlogger: Blog Metrics: Why You Need to Stop Focusing on ‘Vanity’ Stats

noreply@blogger.com (work smart) — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 07:37:00 +0000

ProBlogger: Blog Metrics: Why You Need to Stop Focusing on ‘Vanity’ Stats

Blog Metrics: Why You Need to Stop Focusing on ‘Vanity’ Stats

Posted: 13 Apr 2022 11:28 PM PDT

The post Blog Metrics: Why You Need to Stop Focusing on ‘Vanity’ Stats appeared first on ProBlogger.

Photo by olieman.eth on Unsplash

While having lots of page views, sessions, fans, followers and even email subscribers may feel good, they don't actually tell you anything about the health of your blog.

At a previous ProBlogger Mastermind, I shared a slide that seemed to hit a nerve with the group.

I included this in my Mastermind session after having several conversations with bloggers that all started something like this: “Traffic is growing, and so is my social following and email list. But I’m not making any money".

For many, the monetization emptiness came from focusing on certain results and metrics (such as those I just mentioned) that sounded great, but had very little bearing on actual monetary return.

Vanity over actionable metrics isn’t a new thing.

The idea of measuring the metrics that matter has been around for a while. People like Neil Patel have made their names and built successful companies through challenging us to think more deeply about the 'Why?' behind our numbers. Today, action-driven data is available to everyone doing business online – including bloggers – so there’s no excuse for not using it.

But rather than leaping into the depth of data, I recommend you begin with small steps.

Define your North Star Metric, and what might influence it

Time is the enemy of most bloggers just starting out, and so focus is critical. A North Star Metric gives you one thing to care about above everything else.

"To uncover your North Star Metric you must understand the value your most loyal customers get from using your product. Then you should try to quantify this value in a single metric." – Sean Ellis

Your North Star Metric should be a metric that will directly improve the health and prosperity of your blog.

Start asking better questions

It's time to start ignoring what Google Analytics thinks you want to know. Instead, think about the real value you're trying to give a reader (your North Star), and what observable actions they might take that will show how good a job you're doing getting them there.

For example, if your blog teaches others how to run a successful blog, what short- and long-term behaviors would you expect to see from someone you're actually teaching?

They could be basic things such as, how does someone…

Find you (first time visit)
Come back again (repeat visit)
Engage (comment on a post, or follow you on a social platform)
Give you their email address (subscribe)
Buy or subscribe to a product (purchase)
Buy or subscribe to a second product (purchase again)

Thanks to free services such as Google Analytics, we take comfort in very basic but often misleading blog metrics. After all, who has the time (or the energy) to dive into the numbers? But if think about the questions you need to answer before you start worrying about how to measure them, you'll quickly change your mindset.

And once you've got this down, you'll be ready to get your numerical nerd on.

Understanding cohorts and segmentation

Statistics and mathematics are probably the last things you want me to talk about. But segmentation and cohorts are important terms that you need to understand.

So what are they?

Segmentation and cohorts are techniques used to collate data into meaningful groups. They let you compare different groups in various ways, as well as over different time periods, and ask questions like, "Are my current first-time visitors behaving differently from the first-time visitors I had a year ago?"

While Google Analytics lets you do some basic cohorts, you’ll quickly find the level of detail Google gives you for free quite limiting.

But when you look at your data through cohorts and segmentation, you can identify specific strengths and opportunities to improve.

What is a cohort?

In statistics, marketing and demography, a cohort is a group of subjects who share a defining characteristic.

For example, you might notice over time that people who find your blog through search are less inclined to arrive at your North Star than someone coming from a different source. By using research, data, and experimentation you can get a better understanding of the situation, and create a plan to improve the experience of these first-time SEO arrivals.

For example, you may need to:

create a stronger CTA in your post to help casual SEO arrivals learn more about you
find better ways to get readers to check out a second post, or give you their email address
spend time building more traffic from those lower volume but higher value-per-visitor channels.

Whatever the answer is, you'll find it in your experiments and metrics.

And from there you can look at your most recent cohorts to see what impact your new approach is having.

Congratulations. You're now taking meaningful steps to grow the prosperity of your blog.

The theories are nice, but what about in practice?

At 99designs, we began reflecting on our blog's performance by asking deeper questions about the impact we were having on our readers.

Some of the results were hard to read.

Do people read our content?

We knew how many people started reading our content. But we had no idea if they were consuming all those wonderful words we’d put so much effort in creating. We could make some guesstimates based on ‘time on site,’ but that was too general. So we produced two reports – time engaged with the page, and how far people were scrolling down the page.

The results were hard to read at first. "What do you mean, 'Only 5% get to the end'?" But with visibility, we’ve managed to improve this percentage significantly in the past year.

What do people do after they finish reading (or abandon) a post?

We’d tried cobbling together an answer using sign-up rates and other things such as page views per user. But those were meaningless aggregate results.

So we created a report on what people do after reading (or not reading) a post.

What's driving growth – our old (evergreen) content or our new content?

We assumed our new content was fuelling growth. But it was actually a combination of the two.

But wait, there’s more

These graphs are interesting. But when you start to segment things become more insightful. We can look at this graph by channel, post category, author and more to find patterns in what's being read and what's providing value to our readers. These insights are now intrinsic to our growth plans for our blog.

Upping the ante for key transitional pages

Our blog is what we call a top-of-funnel page type – one that's consumed early in a relationship we hope to build with our readers.

As people progress through our funnel, we've identified key transitional pages that signal a significant potential shift in the relationship from reader to customer.

One example is our logo design page.

On this page, a reader or visitor is deciding whether to pursue getting a logo with us — an obvious turning point. While we have great tracking measures on our blog, we track ten times as many events on our logo design page to learn even more about our transitional pages. And we use this extensive data to continually improve the page with changes both large and small.

The dangers of misinterpretation

I’ve been fortunate to work closely with some brilliant people who see numbers in a way I sometimes struggle to comprehend. And there have been some less than inspiring moments where I’ve been shown how quite clearly how 'wrong' I'm interpreting the data — publicly and privately.

As you get access to more data and learn how to use it, you'll undoubtedly face the same challenge. While you may be tempted to scurry back to a comforting world of vanity metrics and intuition, try looking your data critics in the eye and asking them to help you do better. Chances are your first blog post wasn't very good. Why would your first analytical endeavor be any different?

That said, here's how to avoid some of the mistakes I've made:

1. Become a student of data interpretation

There are a lot of resources, books and courses that can be really helpful. I’m currently doing a Data Science course on the very subject to help me lift my analytical game.

General Assembly, Skillshare, Udemy, Lynda and Udacity all have data- and analytics-related courses you can subscribe to.

2. Don’t go it alone

Collaborating with someone on your analysis — even if it’s just talking through your data and what you’ve learned — helps you find not only mistakes in your logic, but also any subconscious biases that may have crept into your analysis.

3. Find your devil’s advocate

This one is hard, but super important. Find and work with someone who will tell you you're wrong more often than right. The secret to making the most of this critical view on your decisions is learning when to listen to them and when to ignore them.

Now, how do you set all this up?

The point of this post is to challenge you to step outside ] your data comfort zone. While tools such as Google Analytics can take you some of the way, you might need to look for data in other places.

At 99designs we have a pretty complicated data configuration. You won’t need anything near this level, — but here are some basic tools that can help take your analytics beyond Google.

Segment

We use Segment as the central point for collecting events and distributing them to the various tools that use them.

Indicative

We then use Indicative as our reporting tool for all that wonderful event data. But it's not cheap, and alternatives such as Mixpanel offer better entry-level plans.

Setting up your new analytics might feel impossible at first. But try not to get too bogged down. A specialist can help set it all up for you.

Instead, focus on figuring out the questions that are important to your business. Start with your North Star Metric and work downward. Once you can describe the questions you are trying to answer with confidence, it’s easy and affordable to get help setting up the analytics you need.

Love over metrics? Nope, love and metrics.

During the Mastermind event, I was fortunate to spend some time chatting with one of the most authentic community builders online, Jadah Sellner. Her session was titled "Love Over Metrics," which proposed a slightly different direction than the one I was heading at the event.

But as Jadah and I chatted I realised that although we started at different places, we had common middle ground. We both believe that while meaningfulness is in the value you give to your audience, it's also important to align how you measure yourself to these goals. Results driven from loving your readers can live right next to a love of data.

This post doesn't have all the answers. But I hope it helps you understand that there's a life beyond those headline stats we’ve clung to for so long.

Mastering these measures may not give you schoolyard bragging rights with big headline numbers. But it will give you a better chance of building that profitable blog you always dreamed you could.

This article was first published on 15 September 2017 and updated 14 April 2022.

The post Blog Metrics: Why You Need to Stop Focusing on ‘Vanity’ Stats appeared first on ProBlogger.

ProBlogger: 5 Ways to Make Your Blogging Life Easier

noreply@blogger.com (work smart) — Thu, 07 Apr 2022 19:38:00 +0000

ProBlogger: 5 Ways to Make Your Blogging Life Easier

5 Ways to Make Your Blogging Life Easier

Posted: 07 Apr 2022 04:18 AM PDT

The post 5 Ways to Make Your Blogging Life Easier appeared first on ProBlogger.

Photo by Chris Thompson on Unsplash

Blogging. It goes a little something like this:

Think of idea
Write a post
Take/source/edit a photo for the post
Format the post
Schedule or publish the post
Push the post to social media
Respond to comments

But that is just the beginning, right? That doesn’t include planning, goal-setting, editorial calendars, blog design, design tweaks, multimedia, multiple updates on social media, a social media workflow plan, guest blogging, networking, sponsorships, affiliate sales, creating products, launching products, email marketing, creating newsletters, being part of the blogging community, going to events, keeping up with trends…

There’s so much to do.

In the five years I’ve been blogging I feel like I’ve made all the mistakes. One of my biggest ones was wasting time. When you’re blogging on top of work and life and other responsibilities, that time you have to spare is is finite. After crashing and burning with my poor habits, I learned very quickly what would work to cut down wasted time, and I then created strategies to be more efficient.

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

5 Ways to Make your Blogging Life Easier

Batching

Batching is when you complete the same or similar tasks in one period of time. Instead of writing a post with a headline, image, post body, etc, you might like to write all posts for the week in one go, edit and upload all images in one go, etc. It means you’re in the right headspace for each task, rather than switching between what you need to do, then the next task, then back again.

Batching is also super-useful for returning emails, scheduling social media, general writing, researching, image sourcing, and the menial task you hate but must be done (accounts, anyone?!).

I’ve even gone so far as to choose which days I batch process. Mondays was content creation, Tuesdays was email and images… I’ve had to make some adjustments this year, but picking days when I was most useful was actually the most successful strategy I tried.

Scheduling

This applies to both time and content. I schedule my time when I have it, and I schedule content.

For example, if I have a few hours spare, I’ll spend a couple of minutes before I get started prioritising my tasks and adding them to blocks of time. I usually try and “eat the frog first”, i.e. doing the thing that’s the hardest to do, so the rest is easier (and also can be added to tomorrow’s to-do list if I get interrupted, as they’re not as time-sensitive as the frog).

My frog is usually content creation. I need to do that when I’m motivated and have space to think. Image processing I can do later, and with less brain bandwidth. So I schedule creation first, then other tasks.

Darren’s low-tech editorial schedule

Scheduling content is super useful for when you don’t have time to blog every day, or you’re taking a break. Scheduling content on your blog and scheduling your social media means less hands-on work, and more time to work on other things. Like binge-watching Netflix and eating popcorn.

If you’re scheduling your social media, do make sure you pop onto the platforms at certain times to respond to people. It’s best if you can post and respond in real time, but if that’s not always possible (I know for me it certainly isn’t), then schedule the updates, and respond when you have time. Or when you’ve scheduled time in your day to respond!

Figure out when you’re most efficient

I’ll never forget one morning I woke up before the birds and wondered if I should just study for my upcoming test seeing as though I wasn’t going back to sleep anytime soon. I was soon surprised to realise how clear my thinking was and how well I understood what I was reading. My attention was focused and things made perfect sense. I felt like I had mastered some pretty difficult concepts (it was a third-year psychology exam, after all) and was well on my way to acing a test – all before breakfast! I knew right away I was a morning person.

While working in the early hours hasn’t been achievable for me in the last few years (two kids who don’t sleep, heaven help me), I do know I’m more efficient for brain tasks in the morning, and can satisfactorily respond to emails and requests, upload recipes, and do admin later in the afternoon. I’m pretty fried by night and can barely string a sentence together, so I don’t even bother.

A friend of mine is the opposite – she doesn’t really get her writing groove on until late afternoon, and will write up until bedtime. It’s all about knowing when you’re the most efficient so you aren’t trying to write a 2000 word post on Facebook algorithm changes when you’re dog tired and fuzzy. When you’re efficient, you don’t waste time – and as a bonus, you complete tasks faster.

Automate

Bless you, internet automation tools, where would we be without you? They are fiercely discussed, loyalties are strong – it’s hard not to love something that makes your life so much easier.

There’s been plenty of discussion here on ProBlogger about what kinds of tools everyone loves to use for automation – everything from social media scheduling apps to creating reports in Google Analytics so they’re sent to you regularly and it saves you going looking for them.

You can automate plenty of things for your blog: If This Then That (IFTTT) is huge for automated behaviours. It can do anything from posting your Instagram pictures to your twitter account (thereby bypassing that pesky issue of Instagram images not showing up in newsfeeds), you can be emailed when someone mentions you online, you can “like” a track on Soundcloud and have it directly downloaded to your Dropbox – plenty of things you can set up to automatically happen after a trigger of your choosing.

I had to giggle when I saw this automation for parents:

Email canned responses are a wonderful thing if you find yourself answering people with the same information over and over. Gmail in particular is useful for this – it will send a pre-written response as a reply to inquiring emails. You can automate the responses to be sent based on the criteria you choose – often sender, subject, keyword, etc. Very handy for freeing up your time.

Automation doesn’t get much better than apps that manage your social media. No longer do you have to wait for posts to go live before you manually update them to your Facebook! Or set reminders for when you wanted to tweet out your link based on when your audience is online. There are plenty of places to go where you schedule a bunch of posts to go out at a time of your choosing. Darren uses Sprout Social (see his social media scheduling workflow here), I use a combination of CoSchedule and Buffer, and there are plenty that will help you out when it comes to Instagram and Pinterest, too – namely Sked Social, Hootsuite, Agorapulse and Tailwind.

Photo by Gaining Visuals on Unsplash

Planning

I cannot recommend this enough! I haven’t always done it, but it made a huge difference to how I spent my time, and how efficient I was when I finally had the time.

After I nailed the planning of time, I moved onto the planning of content. It was important for me to take a step back and see the bigger picture of what I needed to do and what I wanted to achieve when it came to blogging. It was no longer enough to just show up every day and do what needed to be done, I had to plan first so I could be in control, rather than always running to catch up. I hate running.

The first thing I did was figure out when I was most efficient now that I couldn’t do the early mornings any more. Then I figured out which parts of the day would be used for which tasks. Then I made the holiest of holies: the editorial calendar. Even if I didn’t know exactly what day I’d be blogging that pot pie recipe, knowing I had a post to write about pot pies (or creating achievable blogging goals) meant I wasn’t faffing around wondering what to do or what to write. When I finish one post, I look at my list and move onto the next. I move the calendar around when I write spontaneous posts, but having an overarching framework with which to reference has been the breakthrough for me.

You can listen to the webinar Darren and I did with Darlene of Digital Photography School where we discuss how we approach editorial calendars on each site, and how to plan one for yourself.

I use good old pen and paper plus CoSchedule for Veggie Mama, and I use a Google Doc and Google Calendar for content here on ProBlogger.

Bonus tip: Outsource

Sometimes it’s just necessary. Here’s 44 Things Chris Ducker Thinks Bloggers Should Delegate to Virtual Staff.

And there you have it! Five (well, six) ways you can streamline your workflow to get more done.

So what about you? Have you found some shortcuts that help you blog effectively? I’d love to hear them!

Stacey was the Managing Editor of ProBlogger.com: a writer, blogger, and full-time word nerd balancing it all with being a stay-at-home mum. She writes about all this and more at Veggie Mama. Chat with her on Twitter @veggie_mama or be entertained on Facebook.

This article was originally Published 16th February 2015 and updated 7th April 2022.

The post 5 Ways to Make Your Blogging Life Easier appeared first on ProBlogger.

ProBlogger: What Links to Use in Your Affiliate Marketing Emails

noreply@blogger.com (work smart) — Fri, 01 Apr 2022 15:11:00 +0000

ProBlogger: What Links to Use in Your Affiliate Marketing Emails

What Links to Use in Your Affiliate Marketing Emails

Posted: 30 Mar 2022 11:23 PM PDT

The post What Links to Use in Your Affiliate Marketing Emails appeared first on ProBlogger.

Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash

This article is based on ProBlogger Podcast 107.

This question comes in from Scott who asks, "I want to try my hand at some affiliate promotions and have selected an ebook to promote. I've heard you say that your affiliate promotions work best when you email your list, but I'm wondering if I should email that affiliate link or should I send them to my own blog where I review the ebook? I'd love your guidance – how do you promote an affiliate product?

This is a great question from Scott and I want to tackle it today, giving you a few insights into when you should do each of the options that Scott mentions.

What is an affiliate promotion?

If you're wondering "What is an affiliate promotion?" then check out my article on 12 Tips for Affiliate Marketing which gives you a good introduction. Affiliate marketing is the most common way that our readers on ProBlogger tell us that they're making money; it's one of my primary income sources and it's a revenue stream I recommend you consider as one of your first if you're thinking about monetizing your blog.

Perhaps the simplest way to explain affiliate marketing is that you as a publisher are rewarded for promoting another business's product or service, by paying you a commission when someone follows a link on your blog to their site where they then buy something.

What Links to Use in Your Emails?

Today, I want to talk about where the links should point to when you send an email to your list promoting an affiliate product.

If you're sending an email out to your list, promoting an affiliate product, do you:

a) Send out the affiliate link linking directly to the product creator's sales page or

b) Write a post about that product, put it on your blog, and use that link in your email?

There are some good reasons for taking either approach.

Affiliate Link direct to Sales Page

The reason that you would consider using the affiliate link, linking directly to the sales page of the product that you're promoting is:

It gets your reader closer to them hitting the add to cart button faster. It removes a click if you like. If you're sending people directly from your email to the product sales page, you're sending them straight there without having a middle page in the way. That always increases the chances of them putting that product in a cart and checking out. Job done.
When the sales page is good – well-designed and well optimized, and has good calls to action – it's more likely to convert, so your job is to get your reader/potential buyer to the sales page.
If we don't have to do a whole heap of pre-selling in the email that we're sending out. If we're sending out an email and we just think the sales page sells itself, sells the product itself, then probably we'll just do a relatively short email and say, "Look, you can get all the details here," and then give them the link.
An example of this would be last year. We do a 'Twelve Days of Christmas' campaign on Digital Photography School every year. As one of the promotions we were doing during that 12 days, we were promoting a course which we had promoted in the past, we knew it converted with our audience, and the sales page was just fantastic. The sales page had a great video on it, it had a well-written copy, it really sold the product well. We knew it was a good match for our readers, we knew that all we had to do is to get our readers to see that page, and there was a pretty good percentage of them who are going to buy that product.I had no hesitation, whatsoever, in linking directly to that sales page. There was no need to put a link to a blog post that then explained what the product was and everything because the sales page itself did such a good job. This is my ideal. This is what I want to do every time I promote a product, I want to get people to the landing page.
Or, if we do the pre-selling in the email itself and there's not much more to convert and we can direct the customers straight to the sales page

Link to Your Own Blog

There are times when you should consider not sending people directly to that landing page and sending them to some other destination, ideally your own blog:

If you're promoting a product that has a sales page that you don't really think does a great job of selling the product.
ExampleI'm not going to name the product, but I can think back to a product a few years ago that I promoted on Digital Photography School. It was an ebook. The ebook was great, it was a really good fit for our audience, the product itself was perfect for our audience, but the person who'd written the ebook was a better ebook writer than they were a marketer.As I looked at their landing page, I was like, "No, I'm not sure that this page is going to really sell this product very well. I might need to pre-sell the product a little bit more." Instead of sending my readers to the landing page, I wrote a review of the product on my blog. That review acted as a landing page in and of itself. In the review, I talked about whom the product would be great for, what it was about, I ran through some of the sections of the ebook. I think I even used a screenshot or two from the ebook with the permission of the author. I showed the table of contents and I really talked about the pros and cons of the book (naturally, there were more pros than there were cons).This review post acted as a landing page and was a testimonial of sorts as well. By the time people clicked the affiliate link to go to the sales page, they were ready to buy. The landing page itself didn't need to convince them a whole heap. If anything, it probably would unconvince them because it wasn't the best design, but hopefully, my review warmed them up enough to buy that product that they didn't really pay a whole heap of attention to the landing page itself.
If you think a review itself might help to sell the product.
Sometimes, the sales page is good, but you still think your readers will respond better if they hear you really talk in-depth about that product. This is something that I've done a little bit on ProBlogger over the years, where I might do a walk-through of how I use a tool that I'm using on ProBlogger that I'm also an affiliate for.Now, the reason I would do that instead of sending them directly to the affiliate link is I think that illustrating the product and how I use it is actually going to enhance the chances that they will buy it as well. This can be a really good way to promote an affiliate product. This shows that you genuinely use the product and gives your readers some tips on how to use it themselves, which will be helpful to them.
If you're going to promote that product over a period of time with a number of different emailsIf I’m promoting a course, a software, or even an ebook that I think is really good, I might do a multi-pronged campaign promotion.
This is where instead of just sending them an email and saying, "Buy this product. This is a really great product," I might send them two or three emails over two or three weeks. Each email will have a different approach to it.
1. First Email: Announces the product and the deal for my audience.
  I always do try and get some exclusive deals for my readers. That email might be, "Here's this ebook. I've arranged 50% off for you and this bonus." That might be all I really do in that ebook. I might talk about what it is, of course, and some features of it but that's about it.
2. Second Email (a week later): "Here's a review of this product."
  They've already heard about this product and a lot of people will probably have already bought it – our fast-acting readers, the people who buy everything that we recommend because they trust us. But then there'll be another segment of readers who want to know a bit more. They want to hear some pros and cons, they want to weigh it up, and they want to see it in action perhaps.
  1. Alternatively, we interview the creator of that product and publish that as a blog post
  2. Or we get the author of that ebook or the creator of that product to write a guest post and put that on the blogThe second email might just link directly to that review, interview, or guest post or it might do both. It might say, "Hey, just a reminder, here's this product we're recommending. It's a deal for you. You might also want to read our review of it." That email might have both links for those people who just trust your recommendation and for those who want to know a little bit more.
3. Third Email (week three): last chance reminder
  Eg. "Forty-eight hours to go before this deal ends." That, again, would link directly to the landing page.

You can see there that a multi-pronged campaign is going to communicate different things over time and there's a time and a place for linking to different destinations within that campaign.

In Summary

For me, it's really about looking at the product, looking at the landing page that you're given as an affiliate, and work out whether that landing page is going to sell that product well to your audience or whether you, getting involved in the middle and adding that extra click into the process—which is risky in some ways—whether that is worth it. If that extra click is going to increase the chances of people buying that product, then I definitely think adding that extra clicking can be worthwhile.

Ideally, you want as few clicks as possible between when you send your email and when they hit "Purchase", but sometimes, that extra click will really help to put your readers in a more likely position to make that purchase.

NOTE: Link cloaking

Another important thing I should mention about affiliate links is that you can use your own link cloaking service to:

Shorten the URL (some affiliate links are very long and ugly)
Rebrand the affiliate link so it looks more trustworthy
Track affiliate clicks yourself

Link cloaking services:

Bitly

Genius link

Examples:

problo.gr/Ultimate_Bundles is this link cloaked using Bitly https://affiliates.ultimatebundles.com/affiliates/signup.php?a_aid=a6268

https://geni.us/JobyProdPS is this link cloaked using Genius Link https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B07C5HZ425?tag=dps0e-22&keywords=JOBY%20GripTight%20PRO%20TelePod&geniuslink=true

The post What Links to Use in Your Affiliate Marketing Emails appeared first on ProBlogger.

ProBlogger: 7 Strategies for Growing Community on Your Blog

noreply@blogger.com (work smart) — Thu, 24 Mar 2022 14:08:00 +0000

ProBlogger: 7 Strategies for Growing Community on Your Blog

7 Strategies for Growing Community on Your Blog

Posted: 24 Mar 2022 03:30 AM PDT

The post 7 Strategies for Growing Community on Your Blog appeared first on ProBlogger.

Photo by Adam Whitlock on Unsplash

Recently on ProBlogger we’ve been looking at the topic of building community on a blog. We started by identifying 9 benefits and 3 costs of community on a blog and then looked at 5 stages of building community on a blog.

Today I want to dig deeper into some specific things to DO to build community on your blog.

1. Write in a Conversational Voice

This tip fits into the ‘it’s not rocket science’ category of blogging tips (as do many blog tips) – however as simple as it sounds I regularly see bloggers falling into the trap of talking ‘AT’ readers rather than blogging in a conversational voice.

The art of good conversation is as much as being ‘interested’ as it is about being ‘interesting’. Good conversationalists ask questions, pause to allow others to speak and listen to others when they are speaking.

Good bloggers similarly often write in a more conversational way and in doing so invite readers to respond.

Every bloggers needs to find their own style and voice but I’ve found a number of things have been helpful in writing more ‘conversationally’:

I write like I speak

My best blog posts often start out as me writing an email to a reader answering a question. Alternatively I will often imagine I’m talking to someone as I’m writing – which leads to a post written in a more personal way.

I tell stories

I don’t do this in every post but I find that when I weave some kind of personal angle into a post that it seems to draw readers into recounting their own stories. The story need not be long or highly personal story – it could simply be sharing how you did something in your business (you’ll see me do this below when I talk about how on dPS we added a Flickr Group to dPS as an intermediate step on the way to starting a forum, now a Facebook Group).

I use personal language

When you talk to another person it is common to use words like ‘I’, ‘you’ and ‘we’. Conversely when you write in a theoretical language these words often disappear. Check out the top 20 posts on ProBlogger in 2012 and notice that over 50% of the most read posts that year had personal words in their titles.

Share Opinions

One of the most powerful ways to get some kind of a reaction from readers is to share you opinion. Doing so will automatically trigger your readers to think about their own opinions and whether they agree with you – and more often than not you’ll find at least a few of them will let you know if they do! Tread a little carefully here – opinion pieces can cause debate and depending on the tone of your writing and the topic can lead to heated conversation!

2. Invite Interaction

Part of writing in a conversational tone is to invite others to participate in the conversation. While some of your readers will comment without any kind of interaction you’ll be surprised how many more will interact with you with a simple call to do so!

Inviting your readers to interact with you can include numerous things such as:

asking readers to comment (and not just at the end of posts… you can signal right at the beginning that you’re interested in other people’s thoughts on a topic (as I did several paragraphs above).
asking specific questions – I find the more specific your questions are the better better responses you get (i.e. instead of ending a post with a general ‘what do you think?’ guide your readers with a more specific question about your topic or give them some alternatives or examples to help them make that first comment.
write posts that are purely questions – one of the best ways to get responses is simply to write a post that is little more than the question itself. These ‘discussion’ posts can be gold (for example recently to wrap up a week of content on the topic of Pinterest we finished the series with a discussion post on the topic.
Setting a Challenge – on dPS we do a weekly themed challenge for readers to go away and take a photo on a theme and then to come back and share what they did (here’s an example of one we did on the theme of ‘Nature’). This not only gets a good number of comments – it gets readers DOING something quite involved which is a sign of real reader engagement. Another recent example would be our recent Group Writing Project here on ProBlogger.
Polls – perhaps the simplest method of getting a first time reader out of passivity and doing a little something is to run a poll on your blog. Having them simply choose from a couple of multiple choice options and clicking ‘vote’ may not seem like much but it signals to your readers that you’re interested in their opinion or experience and takes them a tiny step down the road to engagement and community. The other thing you can do with polls is once they’ve voted ask them to tell you why they voted as they did. For example on dPS we asked readers if they’d ever taken a photography class and then at the end of the post invited them to tell us what class it was and how they found it. 161 people added a comment. While this was a small % of those who’ve voted in the poll it was a higher number of comments than an average post on the site.
Tell Readers about the Community – while we’re talking about polls, the other thing I’ve found useful is to not only run a poll but to post the final results of a poll too. For example in this post we shared how many of our dPS readers are looking to buy a new camera. In doing this readers see where they fit in to the diverse membership of your community and you remind them that they participated. The other good thing about showing results is that you signal to your whole readership that others are engaging with you. In that example above we mentioned that 28,000 people responded to the poll – great social proof!
Invite Interactions OFF your blog – community does not just need to happen ON your blog for it to be worthwhile. In fact some of the best community discussions I’ve seen among my readers have happened on our dPS Facebook page or on my personal Google+ page. People are trained by these social networks to interact – so it can be a great place to begin conversations and relationships that may lead to ongoing community.

Regular invitations to your readership to interact will gradually draw more and more of your readers out of passivity and into an interaction with you. Even a small first step towards community could lead to a passive reader becoming super engaged which as we’ve seen previously can have many positive benefits.

Further Reading:

3. Consider a Dedicated Community Area

Blogs have community built into them to some degree by allowing comments to be made on any post. Many blogging tools now not only allow comments but allow threaded comments which enhance the experience and allow mini-conversations to happen in an easy to follow way.

However if there may come a time on your blog where you want to give readers the ability to not only respond to what you or your writers have to say – but also to start threads of new conversation.

To do this you’ll want to consider some kind of dedicated community area.

There are a number of ways to do this. On dPS I first did this by starting a ‘Flickr Group‘ where I invited readers to share photos and start conversations. dPS being a photography site and Flickr being full of photographers this not only gave our readers a place to interact but also helped us to find new readers.

For dPS the Flickr group also gave our readers a taste of community and whet their appetite for it to the point that they began to ask if I would consider starting an actual forum area – something I did (and then went on to create the dPS Facebook Group) after I saw that there was enough demand to kick it off with enough active members.

A forum comes with its own advantages and challenges.

In short forums benefits are:

Increasing Reader Engagement
Builds User Generated Content
Increases Page Views per Visit
Appeals to different types of readers

However the challenges of forums include:

The challenge of moderation (they can take a lot of work and are often targets of spammers)
The challenge of having enough critical mass to make the forum active enough to be attractive
The technical challenges – as with most self hosted blogging platforms forum platforms need maintenance and upgrades and can be a challenge to manage.

Further Reading on Forums: check out 10 Mistakes that Will KILL a Forum (or blog) and 6 Tips on Adding a Forum to your Blog.

Other options for community areas on a blog include setting up off site community areas such as:

Of course with all of these options you’re really at the mercy of other companies who have control over the hosting and upkeep of your community. You also lose some control over features etc.

Add to the conversation: If you’ve had experience with other types of community areas on your blog (or other people’s) I’d love to hear about them in comments below.

4. Use Interactive and Accessible Mediums

While we’re talking about using different types of social media let’s touch on a range of other tools that you can use to help build community on and around your blog.

A number of years ago I experimented over with using Ustream to connect with my readers. I set up a ProBlogger channel and on a fairly regular but impulsive basis used to jump onto it to do Q&A sessions with readers.

This is an idea I carried over onto Facebook, doing many Facebook Live Q&A sessions and even hosting coworking sessions. Every time I do a Live I get a lot of positive feedback from readers as it allows them to not only interact with me by asking questions but allowed them to see and hear my responses live and they can also interact in the comments with the other people watching the live.

The other option on this front is to experiment with running webinars – something I’ve also done a lot of.

I use GoToWebinar (to which I am an affiliate) to run ProBlogger webinars and while mine have only been me talking to slides or me interviewing guests (audio only) I’ve had more positive feedback about our webinars than I have about most other things I’ve done in the past couple of years here on ProBlogger.

GotoWebinar have also just introduced Video conferencing also for 100-attendee webinars (soon to be adding it for larger plans too) so that those attending can see you live. Another very popular option for meetings and webinars these days is Zoom. And you can also conduct webinars via Facebook Live, although you may want to use some third party software to improve the experience – here’s my live streaming setup.

5. Run Projects and Challenges

I’m often asked what the ‘tipping point’ for ProBlogger was – the moment that the blog really took off. There were a number of these but one was the first time I ran the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog (31DBBB) challenge.

31 Days to Build a Better Blog is today our best selling Course but it didn’t start out that way. It actually began as a series of blog posts that I put together over a month in 2005 which I then formatted into an ebook, which in turn morphed into the current course.

The idea started as a joke with a fried but was one that wouldn’t go away and so on the spur of the moment in the early hours of a night when I couldn’t sleep I posted that we were going to run this challenge where I’d give readers a little teaching/theory on an aspect of blogging every day for 31 days and would also give them a challenge to complete that related to the challenge.

I didn’t really expect it to take off too much but the next morning I awoke to a lot of comments on that post and people emailing to say that they were excited. The following 31 days not only saw increased traffic on the blog but readers engaging in a deeper way than they had before.

I ran 31DBBB over the next two years again and each time we saw readers becoming more and more engaged with the site.

What I realised through these projects is that giving people a common task to work on over a period of time gives them a shared experience that draws them closer together.

Since 2005 there have been many such projects run around the blogosphere. In fact inspired by 31DBBB Nester from Nesting place runs an annual ’31 Days of Change’ project on her blog in which bloggers are invited to run a ’31 Days’ series on their blogs.

In 2012 Nester saw over 1200 bloggers run 31 Days Challenges over the month of October (just a few pictured below)! That project is growing every year and I suspect it is because bloggers who join are discovering the power of running such a project on their blog.

There are many other challenges you can run. Check out FatMumSlim’s Photo a Day Instagram challenge for example which is participated in by many thousands of people. Similarly Fox in Flats runs a Style Dare a Day challenge that is always popular.

Add to the conversation: If you’ve run a challenge like this – please tell us about it in the comments below so we can learn about it!

6. Real Life Events

One of the most powerful ways of building community with your readers is to actually meet them – face to face.

I know this is full of all kinds of logistical challenges but IF you can meet your readers – take the opportunity because face to face interactions and a real life shared experience certainly seems to speed up the building of community.

I first experimented with this in the early days of my first blog when I didn’t have a heap of readers but when I posted that I would be in London on a holiday and asked readers if they wanted to meet up for a drink. I had 3 people show up for a beer – not a large crowd but the first time I’d met readers face to face.

Now almost any time I’m in a new city I’ll try to tweet/post out a time and place to have a meet up. Sometimes we get a good turnout and other times it is small – but every time it gives me an amazing opportunity to meet readers and build relationships with them (and for them to meet one another).

The other way I put myself out there to meet readers was to attend events that I thought my readers might be attending. In the early days for me this was about buying a ticket for popular events just like everyone else but in time it meant accepting speaking invitations when they came for the events I knew my readers were attending.

Over the last few (pre-pandemic) years I’ve of course had opportunity to not only attend other people’s events but to run my own ProBlogger Training Events here in Australia. This started relatively small with a hastily arranged 100 person event but each year it has grown – to the point that our September Gold Coast event sold 200 Early bird tickets in a couple of hours.

The added bonus of our real life event is that a virtual event runs alongside it both in the selling of virtual tickets but also through the hashtag for the event. While not all ProBlogger readers are able to get to Australia in person the event hashtag last year saw a lot of readers engaging with one another and the ProBlogger brand and created a real buzz.

What I notice after running an event or meeting people face to face is that in the days and weeks after we meet in person I’m much more likely to see that person engaging with me on social media and on the blog. It’s one of the fastest ways to build deeper engagement.

The perfect example of someone who has run hundreds of real life events around the world is Chris Guillebeau who when launching his books has done meetups in every state in the US and for his recent book every continent around the globe. I was fortunate to go with him to one of these events in Melbourne and was amazed at the enthusiasm his readers turned out to the event with – it’s no wonder Chris has had such a massive impact upon so many.

7. Put Your Readers in the Spotlight

Way back in 2006 I wrote a very short post encouraging bloggers to ‘Make Your Readers Famous‘.

At the time it was a bit of a throw away idea and not something I’d pondered too much but in the last 7 years it has been something that I’ve seen the power of many times.

The idea is simple – put your readers in the limelight on your blog. Most blogs keep the blogger on the stage with the microphone and the readers inn the audience – but what would happen if you allowed your readers onto the stage?

The answer to that question is that readers will take real ownership over your blog and become a lot more loyal to it if you allow them opportunity to share the limelight.

Most bloggers use their blogs to build their own profile – but when you use your blog to help your readers to build their profile and achieve their own goals something special can happen.

Here are a few ways that you can make your reader famous that I’ve previous published (updated for 2013):

Promote a comment to a Post – sometimes readers make incredibly insightful and wise observations and tips in the comments of your blog. While they will be read by a handful of people in the comment thread – why not pull it out and use it as the basis for one of your post – highlighting the wisdom in it and the person who made the comment.
Write a Post about a Reader’s Blog – visit the blogs of those leaving comments on your blog and pick one that you resonate and that is relevant to your readers. Write a link post linking to that blog highlighting the best posts and what you like about it.
Send Your Readers to Comment on Someone Else's Blog – write a post that links to someone else's great blog post and instead of asking your readers what they think about it on your own blog ask them to head over and comment on it on the other person's blog. Shutting down the comments in your own post and saying that you've left a comment on their blog already can help make this more effective.
Give Readers an Opportunity to Promote Themselves – run a project or write a post that gives readers an opportunity to promote themselves in some way. For example on dPS I wrote a post asking readers – do you have a photoblog?' As I wrote the post I thought I'd add a line inviting readers to share a link to their photoblogs. I didn't think much of it until the next morning when I woke up to 250 comments on the post and a whole heap of emails thanking me for giving readers the opportunity to highlight their work.
Run a Reader Poll and Highlight Answers in a followup post – have a post one weekend where you pose a question to your readers. Then in the week that follows do a followup post where you add some of your own thoughts on the question and pull out some of the best comments left by readers. Alternatively you could survey your twitter followers on a topic relevant to your blog and then highlight their responses as a blog post (example of this).
Invite Guest Posts – often ‘guest posting’ is talked about solely as a way to get free content for your blog. While this is nice – one of the things I love about it most is that it puts the microphone in the hand of someone else and lets someone who would normally be constrained by the comments section have a little more power and influence on the direction of your community for a moment in time. This can have a real impact upon the person doing the post – but also upon your readership as they see someone like themselves featured on your blog.
Invite your Readers to Promote their Social Networks – a fun project I ran here on ProBlogger a number of years ago was to have a ‘social media love in‘ where I invited readers to share their social media accounts with us here on the blog. Readers left comments sharing their Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, StumbleUpon (and more) accounts and we compiled all the submissions (over 700) into lists so readers could all follow one another. It was a massive amount of work but helped our readers grow their profiles.

There are many more ways to put your readers into the spotlight and help them out with their own online projects and goals. Please let us know below how you’ve done this type of thing on your own blog!

If you're serious about building an audience for your blog and want to go beyond engagement and unlock the power of Community, ProBlogger's Build Community Course will give you clear action points to develop your audience into a community.

This post was first published on 28 March 2013 and republished 24 March 2022

The post 7 Strategies for Growing Community on Your Blog appeared first on ProBlogger.

ProBlogger: The 5 Stages of Building a Culture of Community on a Blog

noreply@blogger.com (work smart) — Sat, 19 Mar 2022 09:39:00 +0000

ProBlogger: The 5 Stages of Building a Culture of Community on a Blog

The 5 Stages of Building a Culture of Community on a Blog

Posted: 16 Mar 2022 08:26 PM PDT

The post The 5 Stages of Building a Culture of Community on a Blog appeared first on ProBlogger.

Photo by Park Troopers on Unsplash

Last week we looked at some of the benefits and costs of building community on a blog – today I’d like to move onto some of the ‘how to’ by examining the stages of building community that I went through on Digital Photography School.

Build a CULTURE of Community – Not Just Engagement

Let me start by repeating the advice I gave last week that building community and reader interaction on a blog takes time. It won’t happen over night but develops day by day.

It is also something that YOU need to take the lead in as a blogger.

‘Be the community you want to have‘ is advice I regularly teach because what I’ve found is that readers often take a bloggers lead when it comes to engagement.

If YOU are obviously engaged with your content, passionate about helping your readers, interested in who they are, writing in an inviting way and willing to interact with others then you’ll be on the right track to developing a culture on your blog where interaction is normal.

Note: I really want to emphasise this idea of building a ‘culture‘ of community on your blog. This goes way beyond using certain ‘techniques‘ to get comments or engagement.

Engagement is great – but the most successful bloggers I’ve come across go beyond that to build something deeper with their readers whereby readers not only interact but have a deeper sense of belonging, ownership and where they embody and live out the values of the blog with one another.

The Stages of Building Community on a Blog

Stage 1: You

In the early days of your blog community generally looks like this:

Yep – just you.

Maybe if you’re lucky you have a partner, or a parent, or a friend who drops by once in a while – but it’s largely you. This is totally fine and normal. I remember my first 10 or so blog posts going up to the deafening roar of silence – I couldn’t even get my wife to read them!

In those very early days you can still write in an engaging way – but probably more important than lots of reader engagement is you writing engaging and compelling content so that when people do arrive they’ve got something to read.

This is also an important time to get your mindset right. Identify what type of community you want to have. What values do you want it to have? What are the boundaries of acceptable behaviour? The clearer YOU are on what you want to achieve the better position you’ll be in to start building and modelling it to your readers (remember – YOU have to BE the community you want to have).

Hopefully – with a little time and you putting yourself out there you’ll begin to find a few readers for your blog.

Side Note: ‘Finding Readers’ is a topic we covered recently in another series but a key component is putting yourself out there into the places your potential readers are already gathering. I cover this (and a lot more on the topic of Finding Readers in this free webinar). It is probably the most comprehensive thing I’ve produced on the topic of finding readers for a blog to this point.

Stage 2: Readers Engaging with You

After a few readers begin to arrive on your blog here’s what community looks like:

At this stage YOU are still the centre of your community and all interactions revolve around you. Your readers tell YOU what they think of your posts, they email YOU with questions and YOU need to take the initiative a lot.

In my own early days of blogging I used to email every person who left a comment on my blog to thank them for their comment and to let them know I left a comment responding to theirs. This had a BIG impact – in fact I know of a couple of readers who still read ProBlogger today who read my first blog because I emailed them in that way.

This is really where your ‘culture of community and engagement’ needs to find its foundations. If you look after the small group of readers you have really really well – in time you’ll find they’ll start to ‘catch’ what you’re on about and do it themselves.

Stage 3: Readers Engaging with One Another

What often happens next is pretty cool. It looks like this!

This is like when you have a party where you invite lots of friends who didn’t previously know you – and your friends start to hit it off with each other.

It’s actually something that I know some bloggers struggle with a little because suddenly readers start showing up on a blog to not only talk with you – but to interact with other readers.

It can be a little disconcerting to see this happen (and to see some readers run off with each other to start interacting on social media or their own blogs) but it is actually where real ‘community’ starts to happen on a blog.

When you start see readers interacting on a deeper level with one another you have a much deeper level of community engagement than you did when YOU were the central point of contact for everyone.

Stage 4: Community Evangelists

The next stage doesn’t always happen – but when it does you know you’re onto something pretty exciting!

In this stage you begin to see engaged readers begin to evangelise your blog for you. They’ve found something that they’re so engaged with and find so useful to them that they can’t help but bring others in.

I saw this at Digital Photography School when we started a forum for the blog (now a Facebook Group). I noticed a small group of readers who had been reading since the start of the site and who’d been starting to get to know each other began a thread in the forum about asking how they could help to grow the forum.

They’d found dPS to be a useful site for them but realised it’d be more useful with more members. That began a competition within this small group to see who could recruit the most new members to the site. They did it purely for bragging rights and because they wanted the community to grow!

I promoted this small group to be the forums first moderators!

Stage 5: Engagement

The final stage is a mess…. but at the same time music to most community managers ears.

YOU as the blogger are still there but relationships and interactions go on above, below and around you. In fact some days you may even wonder if anyone would notice if you disappeared (although they will).

How to Build Community on a Blog

I’m sure not every blog develops in the above 5 steps exactly – but it is how I’ve seen emerge a couple of times now on my blogs.

Next week we’re going to get a little more practical on the topic of building community on a blog by really drilling into some specific tactics on how to do it!

This post was first published on 27 March 2013 and republished 17 March 2022

The post The 5 Stages of Building a Culture of Community on a Blog appeared first on ProBlogger.

ProBlogger: 9 Benefits [and 3 Costs] Of Building Community On Your Blog

noreply@blogger.com (work smart) — Fri, 11 Mar 2022 01:45:00 +0000

ProBlogger: 9 Benefits [and 3 Costs] Of Building Community On Your Blog

9 Benefits [and 3 Costs] Of Building Community On Your Blog

Posted: 09 Mar 2022 10:47 PM PST

The post 9 Benefits [and 3 Costs] Of Building Community On Your Blog appeared first on ProBlogger.

Photo by Duy Pham on Unsplash

Do you ever feel – as you blog – like you’re talking to an empty room?

Day after day you publish posts only to have them greeted by….

If that is how you feel – then you’re not alone. In fact one of the most common questions that I hear from bloggers is:

“How do I get my readers to interact with me?”

Over the next little while I’d like to suggest some ways to increase reader engagement and would love to hear how you do it on your blog too in comments below.

But first – today I’d like to talk about WHY community and interaction on a blog is so important.

Blogging – More than Just Creating Content

There is no one way to build a successful blog but in my experience a blog really comes alive when there is at least some level of community on… or around… the the blog.

Perhaps the best example I can think of to illustrate this is the time I started Digital Photography School (my main blog).

When I launched dPS in 2006, I launched it without comments being activated on the blog. This was an experiment to see what impact not having comments would have on a new blog.

I quickly discovered that by starting a blog in this way had quite a few negative impacts upon the site – the main one being that not having reader feedback just felt plain weird and left ME as the blogger thirsting for interaction with readers. I guess I’d become used to getting readers engagement on my other blogs and without it just felt ‘wrong’ for my style of blogging.

Within a few weeks I’d not only turned comments back on at dPS but was already working towards starting a photography forum on the site too!

The impact of adding more and more opportunity for community engagement on the site was immediate and big. Page views went up, repeat/loyal readership increased and I feel the quality of the site also improved.

Why Build Community on Your Blog?

Let’s take a bit deeper look at some of the benefits of focusing upon reader engagement and building community on your blog.

1. Community Increases Your Blog’s Usefulness

Right from the early days of ProBlogger my mantra has always been that a good blog is a useful blog.

If you’re not being useful to your readers on some level (and being useful can be many things from being informative, to entertaining, to keeping them up to date) it is very difficult to have success with your blog.

My experience of having community on a blog is that it makes the blog exponentially more useful – something James Surowiecki wrote about in his useful book – The Wisdom of Crowds.

Together we are a lot smarter than any single one of us.

I’ve seen this many times over on my blogs. While I work hard to have as much expertise on my topics there will always be things I don’t know but which my readership has experience and insight.

For example I once received an email from a reader – Mandy – asking how she should go about photographing her dying grandmother with dignity. This was a long way out of my expertise so I asked my readership and we had over 90 responses.

Without the community on dPS I would have been unable to help Mandy.

This is a fairly extreme example but I see it in action on a daily basis in the comments sections of my blogs when readers have their questions answered by others in the community.

Ultimately for me – increasing your blog’s usefulness to readers is the number 1 reason to build community on your blog. However there are other reasons too.

2. Community Builds Social Proof

Have you ever chosen to eat in a restaurant purely because you can see it is popular with other patrons or passed by one that is empty?

If so – you understand the concept of social proof.

People attract people in all kinds of places – a blog is no exception.

It is much easier to attract and get engagement from a reader if there is already engagement from other readers.

I’ve seen this numerous times on my blogs (but also social media accounts). The more genuine interaction you have on your blog the easier it is to convince others that your blog is worth a second visit.

3. Community Increases Page Views

Page views won’t matter as much to some readers of ProBlogger as others but for those of you monetizing your blog with advertising you might want to take note.

Page views are important for those using Ad networks like AdSense or selling ads directly to sponsors because the more times the ads are seen on your blog the more you’ll be able to earn.

Community increases page views. If someone leaves a comment on your blog on most blogs that means 2 page views instead of 1. That person is also more likely to return to see if others leave a comment responding to theirs so you’re up to 2, 4 or 5 page views (and even more if a conversation between readers emerges).

Add a forum area to your blog and the average pages viewed per visitor can skyrocket – we regularly see as many as 10 pages view per visit on the Digital Photography School Forum.

4. Community Makes Your Blog More Attractive to Advertisers

Speaking of advertising as a model to monetize your blog – I’ve discovered over the last few years of selling advertising directly to advertisers on dPS that many advertisers are looking to not only see their banner ads on a site – but they are willing to pay for engagement with your readers.

One of the best examples of this is an annual competition we’ve run on dPS to give away a price from one of our regular site sponsors.

This competition is part of an advertising bundle that we run with this sponsor (they also run some banner ads but also sponsor our newsletter regularly).

While they get value out of the banner ads and newsletter ads that they run it is the competition that really converts well for them because it gets our readers visiting their website and engaging with the products that they offer (because to enter the competition you need to leave a comment saying which product you’d like to win and why).

This is the third year in a row we’ve run this particular competition and we’ve had 700+ comments left on each year we’ve run it.

5. Community Makes Your Blog Easier to Create and Sell Products

Back in 2005 I ran a series of blog posts here on ProBlogger titled – 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. The project was so successful that I ran the project again in 2007 and then again in 2009.

Each time I ran the project it grew larger and larger and readers became more and more engaged with the concept but also with the rest of my blog (it was a great community building project in and of itself).

At the end of the 2009 project a strange thing happened – my readers began to beg me to compile the 31 posts I’d written that year into a PDF… to sell to them as an eBook.

Yes you heard it – out of a period of intense reader interaction and delivering tangible value my readers asked me to sell them a product.

Not only did they ask me to create a product – 31 Days to Build a Better Blog (now updated from its 2nd edition into a course) went on to become my biggest selling eBook.

This illustrates just how powerful community is if you’re looking to monetize your blog through selling products of some kind.

I’ve seen the same thing happening on dPS where we’ve developed 11 photography eBooks – the readers who buy our products are often the most engaged members of our communities and interestingly when a discussion happens in our forum area on topics covered in our eBook it is our community members who ‘sell’ our eBooks to new members the best.

6. Community Makes Your Blog More Attractive to Sell

Over the years I’ve had a number of companies offer to buy my blogs. While I’m not looking to sell them it is always an interesting discussion to have.

In most cases the conversation starts with a potential buyer interested in your traffic numbers and income – however what I’ve noticed is that when you begin to talk about the high level of reader engagement that you have on your bog many buyers become a lot more interested and start talking about higher purchase prices. In fact the most recent acquisition approach I had was from a company whose main interest was in the community I had built and how I could also help them build community.

This will depend a little on the business model of a potential buyer – but I’ve seen this happen on at least 3 occasions in the last few years.

Community makes your blog more attractive to potential buyers.

7. Community Creates an Army of Advocates and Evangelists

An engaged and loyal reader is a powerful thing – not only because they’ll make your site useful and might buy your products – but because they are also much more likely to help you grow what you do.

This happens very naturally really – when you help someone on a daily basis and they feel a sense of belonging to your site they’re highly likely to tell someone about your blog.

I’ve seen it time and time again. I’ll often meet readers at a conference and ask them how they first became readers – the story is regularly ‘I am friends with Jim/Sarah/Bill/Joe/Anne… and they told me what a great site it was’.

Engaged readers don’t only help find you new readers – they can help you in many other ways.

Example 1: Several years ago one of my readers emailed me with an introduction to a New York Times journalist that they knew who was looking for someone to interview for a story. A week later dPS was featured in that publication.

Example 2: Around the same time a group of readers started a campaign to get our site on the radar of Canon and Nikon because they wanted them to advertise on dPS. They started a petition and did end up helping us land a small advertising campaign!

8. Community Can Help with User Generated Content

In a similar way – engaged readers who feel that they belong are more likely to contribute to your site by generating content for it.

This again may not be something that all bloggers are interested in – however if you’re looking to supplement your own content with guest posts from readers it can be an effective way of generating such content.

The other aspect of this is that you may not want to feature full posts from readers – but having engaged readers can help you generate other kinds of content.

For example I recently asked readers of my Google+ Account to share with us their advice on the topic of ‘finding your voice’ as a blogger.

I had some great responses and am compiling the answers into a post for ProBlogger (to which I’ll add some of my own thoughts). While not a ‘guest post’ as such it brings the wisdom of readers out of my social media community areas and onto the blog.

In the past I’ve done exactly the same thing by asking readers for their advice in the comments section of a blog and bringing those comments into a blog post.

9. Community Brings More Personal Satisfaction to Blogging

When I first drafted this post I didn’t have this point but on reflection of my last decade of blogging perhaps the biggest benefit of having community on my blogs has been it exponentially increases the personal satisfaction I’ve received from blogging.

I’ve had 30 or so blogs in the last 20 years and the ones in which I’ve invested into the community and had readers invest back into it have been the ones that I’ve been able to sustain over many years.

The blogs where community didn’t really click (and this can be the result of many factors) were blogs that I found most difficult sustain – probably because I wasn’t getting the engagement, feedback and encouragement of readers.

Maybe it is just me – although I suspect not – but it is community that is a fuel that feeds my blogs. Without it I can only sustain them so long!

The Costs of Community

The benefits of building community on a blog are many (and I would encourage you to add more that you’ve experienced to the comments section below) however it would not be balanced of me to talk about the benefits of building community on a blog without at least acknowledging that there are some ‘costs’ involved.

1. Building Community on a Blog Takes Time

Relationships and community don’t just appear out of thin air. They take time – in two ways:

Firstly – building true community is something that generally takes a long period of time to gradually happen. While you can get comments on your first blog post – to get readers deeply engaged can take months… and years. We’ll talk more about how to build this culture of community on a blog in the coming days.
Secondly – once you have community (and building community) can be something of a time suck and if you’re time poor it can be a challenge to do on a day by day basis.

2. Building Community can be an Emotional Roller-coaster

Building relationships with readers can be something of an emotional roller coaster.

In the early days it can be incredibly disheartening when community doesn’t seem to be happening despite your very best efforts.

But then in the longer term after community does begin to happen it can be so difficult to maintain once your community begins to pull in different directions and on those occasions when things go badly.

When community goes well it can be powerful – but when trolls, spammers or competitors infiltrate it can make you wonder why you bother at all!

3. Community Can be a Little Risky

I can think of a few instances over the years when a ‘community’ or readership of a blog have turned against a blogger and have really hurt the brand of a blog.

While these instances are certainly in the minority it is worth noting that if you’re not willing to invest into a community and lead it that you leave your blog’s brand in a vulnerable position.

We’ll talk more about this in the coming days as we talk about how to build a good culture of community on a blog.

How to Build Community on a Blog

In the coming days here at ProBlogger I want to explore the idea of building community and deepening reader engagement on a blog further.

Next week we’ll take a look at 5 stages of building a Culture of Community on a Blog and then the following week we’ll get a little more concrete and look at 7 Strategies for Growing Community on Your Blog.

As always – subscribe to our newsletter by adding your email address in that box on the right sidebar for a wrap up email at the end of this series so you don’t miss out!

This post was first published on 26 March 2013 and republished 10 March 2022

The post 9 Benefits [and 3 Costs] Of Building Community On Your Blog appeared first on ProBlogger.

ProBlogger: How to Grow Your Blog with Viral Content

noreply@blogger.com (work smart) — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 15:12:00 +0000

ProBlogger: How to Grow Your Blog with Viral Content

How to Grow Your Blog with Viral Content

Posted: 02 Mar 2022 09:00 PM PST

The post How to Grow Your Blog with Viral Content appeared first on ProBlogger.

Photo by Andrea Lightfoot on Unsplash

Recently, I’ve been exploring five strategies that I’d employ to promote my blog if I were starting all over again.

I said earlier in the series that I’m assuming ‘great content’ is being added to the hypothetical new blog that we’re promoting. However when it comes to blogging not all ‘great’ content is equal when it comes to drawing attention to your blog.

Take a look around your niche at any given time and there will be posts appearing on blogs that are of a high standard that are largely ignored – and posts appearing that are spreading like wildfire throughout the niche as everyone links up to it.

This type of ‘Viral’ content can be an elusive thing for bloggers and I’m fully aware that it’s something that most bloggers attempt to do but something that many don’t achieve.

Sometimes the key to viral content is luck – the right person reading it at the right time and linking up can send it to the top of every social bookmarking site there is – but many times it’s the result of good research, creative thinking, clever writing and getting the right people to promote it.

I can’t teach you how to create content that will go viral because there are so many ways that it happens – however I will give you one tip that helps me a lot every time that I do it.

Spend Time Analyzing the Success of Others

I’d encourage you to take some time out to analyze the types of posts that are going viral in your niche (and other niches) at present. The simplest way to do this is to look at what’s ‘hot’ on social media sites like Digg, Medium, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Techmeme etc

I regularly spend time on these sites and find myself learning a lot from looking at what’s most popular on them.

What is it about them that seems to be key to them doing so well?
What can you learn from them?
How can you put some of these principles into action in your own writing.

Pay particular attention to the titles used on the social media sites themselves but click through to visit the content itself. Look at how it’s presented, written, the topics covered, post length, intended audience etc.

The key to this is not to do this analysis to simply copy it – but to come away inspired to apply some of the principles that others are using in your own writing.

Share Your Examples

Lastly – I’d like to open things up to you to share your own examples of ‘viral content’ – whether they be posts that you’ve had success with on your own blog or posts you’ve seen others do well with. Tell us about these posts and hopefully we’ll all come away from them a little inspired.

This article was first published on March 16, 2008 and updated March 3, 2022

The post How to Grow Your Blog with Viral Content appeared first on ProBlogger.

ProBlogger: How to Use Social Media to Promote Your Blog

noreply@blogger.com (work smart) — Thu, 24 Feb 2022 12:06:00 +0000

ProBlogger: How to Use Social Media to Promote Your Blog

How to Use Social Media to Promote Your Blog

Posted: 23 Feb 2022 08:00 PM PST

The post How to Use Social Media to Promote Your Blog appeared first on ProBlogger.

Photo by Adem AY on Unsplash

This month we’ve been looking at five different methods that I’d use to find readership if I were starting a new blog. So far we’ve explored guest posting, advertising and networking – but today I want to turn our attention to the dynamic area of social media.

Social media sites have exploded onto the online publishing scene over the last couple of years and can generally be divided into two types of site:

Social Networking Sites – where the primary activity of the site is ‘connecting’ with others. Some of the most prominent sites in this space are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube.
Social Bookmarking – where the primary activity is the finding and sharing of web content through different systems of ‘voting’ on sites. Examples of this type of site are Reddit, Digg and Mix (formerly StumbleUpon).

The above two classifications of social media sites are fairly broad – in reality there are many different sites appearing every week, many of which have elements of both of the above as well as other features. On Twitter for example, by simply posting links, images, and content with your account means you'll have technically bookmarked them and if you also 'like' certain tweets, you can find and go back to them in the future. Pinterest functions similarly.

The point of this post is not to define social media but rather to look at it as an opportunity to find new readers for your blog. The reason that I include it in this series is that over the last few years I’ve seen numerous blogs virtually launch themselves via social media sites.

The reason for their success is that social media sites are among the largest sites on the web at present (the volume of traffic that they do is mind boggling) but that by their very nature they are about helping people to discover new parts of the web (particularly social bookmarking sites) – and as a result they are used by people actively seeking web content.

As a result I would argue that social media sites are a logical place to position yourself as a blogger. Let me say it again:

Social media sites have a lot of traffic and they are used by people to find content – why wouldn’t you position yourself on them?

Qualification: let me qualify that last statement before going any further by saying that social media is not THE answer to finding readers for your blog. It is not enough just to promote your content on social sites – but it is one element that can help you find a lot of new readers.

9 Keys to Using Social Media to Find New Readers for Your Blog

Much has been written about using specific social media sites to drive traffic to a blog. I’ll include a few links to things I’ve written about specific sites below – however in this post I’d like to speak in a more general sense and share some principles of using social media to drive traffic.

1. Be an Active Participant – it is important to see these sites for what they are – they’re social sites which are designed for regular use and interactions between readers. They are not designed for people to come to to spam their own links and leave – they’re designed for ongoing, genuine and helpful interactions between people. As a result those who spend time using these sites are the ones who generally are rewarded for doing so over the long haul. While there is a temptation to only use these sites on occasion when it benefits yourself you’ll find them more fruitful paces to visit when you regularly participate and genuinely interact with others.

2. Learn the Rules and Culture – different social media sites have different rules, standards, cultures and acceptable behavior. This covers things like how you interact with others, the language you can use and importantly for this article – linking and promoting your own content. Some sites allow (and even encourage) you self promoting – others do not. Some might allow it officially but will have users who don’t like it and who will ‘bury’ your efforts if you do. The key is to participate, observe and learn from your experiences.

3. Find Key Players – one of the best ways to learn about social media is to find and get to know key players on the different sites. Who is using them well? What are they doing? What might they be able to teach you? How might you work with them for mutual benefit? Many social media sites make it easy to find these key players by producing lists of ‘top users’ – these can be strategic relationships to have.

4. Make Friends – extending upon this is the principle of be-friending others on social sites. This is a key part of what they are all about and many of these sites make you more powerful based upon the number of your connections. So get out there – make friends and interact with your network. From this can come many fruitful interactions. It’s also a great branding exercise to ‘connect’ with people in these ways.

I should say at this point that I see people using their ‘networks’ on social sites in two main ways either as natural influencers or in more concerted and coordinated ways. The first (influencers) is about building a network that you naturally interact with and who will take notice of what you do. This makes you a powerful user and both by the social site taking more note of you but also as others will do so also. The second is what some users have been doing for a while now – joining together to vote up each other’s content. DoshDosh has some great tips on making and interacting with friends in social sites (particularly Digg).

5. Don’t Be Self-Centered – I’ve mentioned this already but it’s worth a point of it’s own. If your primary activities on social media sites is self centered then you’ll limit your own fruit from it. I know a number of top Digg users and in each case they are some of the most generous and ‘other serving’ people you’ll ever meet. They go out of their way to help others achieve their dreams. In doing so of course they themselves benefit – but it’s others first.

6. Find what Works Best for Your Blog – a regular comment on posts where I write about the power of using social media is people saying that they’ve ‘tried it’ and it doesn’t work. When I unpack these comments with people I often find that what they mean is that they tried one social media site once or twice – and it didn’t have much impact. The mistakes with this kind of thinking are numerous (ie it takes time to get to know a social media site, get to know people etc) – but one main thing that I’d say is that not all social media sites work for every topic of blog. For example I find that StumbleUpon works really well here at ProBlogger – but that Digg works on some more technically focused sites that I have worked with. The other thing that I’d say is that sometimes the biggest social sites are not always the best ones to use – but rather smaller and more focused ones can have bigger benefits. Every week new social bookmarking sites appear around different niches – search them out and focus on them too.

7. Social Media as a Branding Exercise – while social media sites can send you a lot of traffic very very quickly they can also be excellent places to do branding. Every time a reader or potential reader comes across you on a social media site the more you reinforce your brand. Get active on a site like stumbleupon and promote the content that others publish and you could actually get on their radar and end up benefiting yourself in many ways.

8. Convert to Loyal Readers – one thing that many bloggers fail to do when they succeed in driving traffic to their blogs from social media sites is to convert them into loyal readers. Getting readers to your blog is just half of the challenge – getting them to return tomorrow and every day afterwards is the other half – it can be the difference between a one off traffic event and a blog with an ongoing growth in readership. I’ve written more on converting one off visitors into regular readers here (and also here).

9. It’s all about the Content – one factor that exponentially increases (or decreases) the impact of your efforts in social media is your actual content. Without content that engages social media users you are wasting your time as it will rarely capture their imaginations and inspire them to promote it. Writing great content is the focus of tomorrow’s last post in this series on growing blog readership – so I’ll say more then.

Further Reading at ProBlogger on using Social Media to Build Traffic to Your Blog:

This article was first published on Mar 15, 2008 and updated Feb 24, 2022.

The post How to Use Social Media to Promote Your Blog appeared first on ProBlogger.

ProBlogger: How to Use Advertising to Promote Your Blog

noreply@blogger.com (work smart) — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 20:34:00 +0000

ProBlogger: How to Use Advertising to Promote Your Blog

How to Use Advertising to Promote Your Blog

Posted: 16 Feb 2022 07:36 PM PST

The post How to Use Advertising to Promote Your Blog appeared first on ProBlogger.

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

Have you ever considered advertising your blog? Today I want to explore this idea as part of my series of posts on how I’d promote my blog if I was starting from scratch.

Most blog promotion tips that I see given are about growing your blog’s readership quite organically (something I firmly believe in) – however one strategy that I’ve seen more and more bloggers using is to pay for advertising to give their blog a kick start (particularly in the early days of their blogs).

One of the wonderful things about the space we’re operating in at the moment is that you don’t need hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote your product or service (or blog) these days via advertising.

While I know that for some even a small amount will be out of the reach of some – if I were starting out today as a blogger and wanted to gather an initial audience (or was wanting to expand my audience) I’d consider experimenting with a number of different advertising campaigns.

I know that this goes against the grain for some blogging purists but my approach has always been to invest at least a portion of the money made on my blogs back into improving them – and one way to do this is to invest that money into advertising.

I’ve concentrated my own limited experimenting with advertising in two types of advertising:

Google Ads – An oldie but a goodie. The reach of AdWords is enormous as it opens up places to advertise everywhere from Google results pages through to many many thousands of websites on any number of topics. Many bloggers have used this with great effect to launch their blog. Particularly useful is the ability to target specific sites that run AdSense and to develop ads that target those readers specifically. This enables you to target specific ads to specific sites (like John Chow did a year or so back when he advertised here on Problogger with personal messages to my readers).
Facebook Advertising – I experimented with this recently with some success. Facebook Ads allows you to run ads that target certain demographics and interest groups. Ads can either be bought on an impression basis or you can pay for them per click for as little as 0.01 cent per click. I tried both and found that paying per click was a much better way to go as at least that way you’re guaranteed some actual traffic.

Please note – there are many many other ways to advertise your blog if you have a budget. I’ve chosen these two because they allow you to have very small budgets and to target different groups of people by interest and/or demographics.There are of course many other options open to you as a blogger to pay for advertising of your blog. Other options include:

Social media – I’ll talk more about non-paid (organic) social media promotion later in this series, but just about every social media platform monetizes through advertising. Some of the best social media sites for advertising are Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter, but if your audience hangs out there, you may also want to consider TikTok, SnapChat and YouTube.Here are a few tips on how to promote your blog with social media advertising:
- Make your ads mobile-friendly (that’s how people will view them)
- Use videos for more attention-grabbing engagement
- Trial different versions of your ad (A/B testing) to constantly adjust and refine
Reddit is one of the biggest online communities, with millions of monthly users but cheaper advertising costs.Content discovery platforms
Native Advertising (often very “click-baity”, but it doesn’t have to be) on content discovery platforms like Outbrain and Taboola provide another option to promote your content.
You could even buy ad space on another blog through a direct sponsorship deal.

Tips for Advertising Your Blog

There are many smarter people than me around that could give us all some tips on using advertising effectively (please give you tips below) but let me give a few quick tips that I’ve picked up along the way:

Landing Pages not Front Pages
I’ve found that instead of directing people clicking your ads to your blog’s front page that it’s much more effective to send them to a specifically designed landing page. The front page of your blog is a good page for regular readers to see what you’ve been writing lately – but for someone coming to your blog cold from an ad it can be a bit of a random destination. So design a page that is aimed at ‘converting’ these first time readers into regular readers. This page could highlight some of your best content, perhaps give some key selling points as to why they should subscribe and then have a call to action (a way to subscribe to your blog for example). This way you’ll not only get a new visitor to your blog – but you’ll have every chance of them coming back again and again.

Relevancy Relevancy Relevancy
I’m not just repeating myself for emphasis – but because I’ve found that three elements of your ad campaign need to have ‘relevancy’.

1. The Site Displaying Your Ad
2. Your Ad
3. Your Landing Page

The more aligned these three things are the more successful your ad will be. When people run ads that don’t relate to the sites they display on they rarely get clicked. When people click ads and then are led to a page that has little relevance to the ad they get angry and rarely take the action that you want.

Track Your Results
The last thing that I’ll say is that you can very easily spend a lot of money with little results in advertising. As a result it is essential that you know what you want to achieve from your advertising and that you have a way to measure its effectiveness. I also take the approach that it’s worth starting out slow with a small campaign to test the waters before pouring much cash into advertising. This enables you to optimize your results without spending much and then to ramp things up when you are confident that things will convert.

Further Resources

How to Create Your Facebook Advertising – 3 Types of Ads to Consider

How to Set Up Your First Instagram Ad

If you’re serious about building an audience for your blog and want to supercharge your traffic ProBlogger’s Find Readers Course will give you the roadmap and guide you through 6 clear steps to find readers.

This article was first published on Mar 14, 2008 and updated Feb 17, 2022.

The post How to Use Advertising to Promote Your Blog appeared first on ProBlogger.

ProBlogger: How to Promote Your Blog through Networking

noreply@blogger.com (work smart) — Fri, 11 Feb 2022 15:22:00 +0000

ProBlogger: How to Promote Your Blog through Networking

How to Promote Your Blog through Networking

Posted: 09 Feb 2022 07:01 PM PST

The post How to Promote Your Blog through Networking appeared first on ProBlogger.

Photo by Saksham Gangwar on Unsplash

This is the second of five ways that I’d promote a new blog to new readers if i was starting out again.

Today I want to turn our attention to Networking as a great way to promote a blog.

If I were starting out in blogging today knowing what I now know I’d invest significant time each day into connecting with others online. The old adage of ‘it’s not what you know it’s who you know’ rings true in blogging.

By networking I mean doing all of those things that I regularly write about here at ProBlogger. Commenting on others blogs, answering comments that others leave on yours, emailing other bloggers when you write something that you think will interest them, making helpful suggestions to other bloggers, connecting with people via social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, emailing people to introduce yourself, linking up to others in your niche…. the list could go on… and on…. when it comes to ways to network but today I’d like to put forward a few more general suggestions.

A number of suggestions that I’d make in networking with bloggers:

Be generous – a lot of the networking that I see going on between bloggers is fairly much about ‘taking’ rather than ‘giving’. One way to make a real impression on another person is to be generous with them. Help them achieve their goals – highlight their best work – encourage them – go out of your way to work on their terms. While you do need to have good boundaries (otherwise people will abuse your generosity) I think a spirit of generosity is the right attitude to go into networking with.
Don’t Expect too much too quick – the most fruitful relationships that I’ve been a part of in blogging have emerged over time. Let the relationship grow naturally as you build trust and a mutual understanding of who the other person is and how you can work together.
Look for the B-listers – many so called ‘A-lister’ bloggers are approached all day long with requests to connect. While you might get lucky – I’ve found that approaching slightly less know blogs can have more chance of working out (and they can still drive a lot of traffic).
Prove Yourself First – if you’re brand new to your niche it could take time to make an impression. This isn’t necessarily because people are being cliquey – it’s often because they’re waiting to see if you’re going to stick with it and if you know what you’re talking about. There’s nothing more frustrating that networking with someone who disappears a couple of weeks later. Show you’re in it for the long haul and that your blog is making a contribution to the niche and you’ll find people more willing to connect.
Persist But Don’t Annoy – some bloggers will take a few emails or conversations before they’ll warm up to you. There’s a lot of noise around the blogosphere so don’t be offended if people don’t respond – try again in a little while – but don’t stalk them :-)
Look in Neighboring Niches – it is important with blog networking to interact with other bloggers in your own niche – however don’t close yourself to relationships with bloggers outside of your niche – particularly in those that neighbor yours. When you limit yourself just to other bloggers exactly like yours you will end up dealing mainly with people who could see you as a direct competitor. While some will be open to interacting with you I’ve found networking with people outside my niche can be fruitful. Another way to be strategic is to not look for networking opportunities just with other bloggers on your topic – but with bloggers who share a similar demographic of reader.
Ask Questions – one key that I’ve found to work in networking is to ask a lot of questions of those around you. Some bloggers go into networking with obvious agendas and goals but fail to listen to the other party. When you become a person who asks others about their goals and objectives, where you know what their strengths and weaknesses are and where you know their dreams you not only create a good impression on them but you’ll be in a great position to know where your situation aligns with another person’s – this is where networking becomes most effective.
Become a Go-To Person and a Connector – as you network with others don’t just focus upon you and the other person – but attempt to draw others into the relationships you have. I find that people are particularly grateful to me when I can’t help them but point them to someone else who can. This creates a good impression upon both of the parties that you connect which can lead them to come to you again with opportunities (ie you become the ‘go to’ person because they know you’ll either help them personally or point them to someone who can).
Have an Elevator Pitch – a lot has been written about business people being able to articulate what they do in a concise statement (having your elevator pitch). I think being able to do this is important with blog networking too. I get many emails every day from people wanting tow work together in some way and in many cases it’s a few minutes into an email that I even work out who they are and what they are on about. Develop a few key sentences that describe who you are, what you do and what you offer others. Another good elevator pitch is on what your blog is about. Having thought through these things will help others understand what you can bring to a relationship – but they will also help you understand that too.
Look for Points of Synergy – perhaps this says more about my personality type, but I’ve found the most profitable relationships to be ones where there was a ‘spark’ or ‘energy’ around our interaction – particularly where there was some sort of synergy around goals and objectives but also some sort of a connection when it comes to personality. My style has always been to look for points of ‘energy’ or ‘synergy’ and going with them. Perhaps someone else has a more technical description of this but it’s worked well for me.

Looking forward to hearing more about your own experience of blog networking and how it’s helped your blogging grow.

This article was first published on Mar 13, 2008 and updated Feb 10, 2022.

The post How to Promote Your Blog through Networking appeared first on ProBlogger.