Written on July 20th, 2007 at 07:07 pm by Darren Rowse
Alexa Releases Firefox Toolbar
Alexa has finally released it’s long awaited Firefox Toolbar. The little traffic and reach graph/tool that it shows of every site you’re on will be an interesting thing to see as I surf. While I don’t really take much notice of the actual ranking numbers (I have blogs that get a lot more traffic than enternetusers which don’t rank as highly) I do think that the graphs can be useful to see how a blog or site is trending up or down.
Anyone else downloading it?
Written on July 20th, 2007 at 06:07 pm by Darren Rowse
Speedlinking - 20 July 2007
- Read Write Web points to FoldSpy - a tool that allows webmasters to see what part of their site is above the ‘fold’ on different browsers. Quite a useful concept if you’re optimizing your ad positioning.
- Blogging Pointers has just finished a series looking at a variety of blog time saving techniques.
- Daniel is experimenting with just showing excerpts of posts on his blog’s front page and asks what you think about it?
- Web Worker Daily shares the Top Five Myths about Home-Based Web Workers - I’m sure I’ve heard all of them dozens of times (although #2 may well be true occasionally…. not the naked bit…. usually….).
- 10% of companies have fired an employee for a breach of blogging or message board policies - thanks to Michael for the tip off.
- Clever Dude has 50 Tips for New Personal Finance Bloggers (many of which would be good for all kinds of bloggers).
Written on July 20th, 2007 at 12:07 am by Darren Rowse
Link Posts - Rediscover Your Blogging Groove Day 4
Today’s task in the Rediscover Your Blogging Groove project is to write a Link Post.
How has blogging grown from something that a relatively small number of people do into the massive medium that it has become? There are many reasons for the growth of blogging but one of them is that they are traditionally a very outward looking and linking type of website.
When I first got into blogging many blogging blog platforms didn’t even have a comments feature built into them and the linking was even more prolific than it is today. One blogger would see something written on another blog and would add to the conversation by linking up. Another blogger would spot the conversation and would link to both the previous blogs and the web of links would mount up until the story went quite viral. Including outbound links in your posts were seen as normal and a healthy way of blogging with numerous benefits.
These days the link is still an important part of blogging, but with on site comments and with some bloggers quite purposely avoiding outgoing links as a strategy to keep readers onsite I sometimes wonder if the outbound link is less a feature of modern day blogs than it used to be.
Of course there are plenty of blogs out there that do nothing but ‘link posts’ and that simply regurgitate what everyone else is writing (saying nothing original) - but perhaps somewhere between the blog that never links and the one that does nothing but link is probably a happy medium.
Tips for Writing Link Posts
So how do you get the balance right between healthy outbound link posts and poor ones? Here are a few thoughts on how to write a good link post:
- Keep it relevant - the key is to keep the posts that you do relevant to your blog’s overall topic.
- Link to quality - in the same way that you do your best to write quality original content, ensure that the posts that you link to are of a good standard also. Step one for this is to actually read them! Before linking up ask yourself - will this link be useful to my reader or not?
- Add something of value - purely linking without adding anything of your own can do your readers a service (in that it helps them find good stories else where) but adding something of yourself (an opinion, comment, review, suggestion etc) will help your reader to know how to interpret and apply what’s been written in the other site that you link to. I find that readers appreciate even just the smallest comment to help them decide whether to visit the link and how to interpret it when they get there.
Types of link posts:
I tend to write a number of different types of link posts on my blogs:
1. Speedlinking - I’m still not sure who came up with this term but it’s something I obviously do every few days here at enternetusers. For me it’s simply a collection of a handful of good posts on my topic from my day’s surfing. Sometimes I theme them around one topic, but generally they are from the wider spectrum of enternetusers type topics. These posts are a list of links with a very brief comment on each one.
2. Quote and Link - these posts are predominantly a quote (or two) from another blog/site, with a link back to the source. Some bloggers simply make the post the quote and link - but they become more valuable to your readers if you add a few of your own thoughts and comments.
3. Compilation Link and Quote Posts - I’ve not done many of these for a while but another technique that some bloggers use quite successfully is to pick a topic and then go hunting for a variety of quotes on that topic. In a sense this is a combination of ‘Speedlinking’ and ‘Quote and Link’ strategies but the quotes are often a little less recent in terms of when they were written.
4. Links in Posts - I guess the other type of link post is when links are used within posts as a way of giving an illustration or example of what you’re talking about. In these posts the links become a little secondary or supportive in their nature while the content takes the primary focus.
Homework - Write a Link Post
Your homework today is to write a link post on your blog. Go surfing through other blogs and sites in your niche and find something that you’d like to highlight to your readers. Link up!
Feel free to head back to this post to show us how you did it so we can all learn from what you’re doing. Please only include links to new posts when you do this.
Written on July 19th, 2007 at 02:07 pm by Darren Rowse
Guest Blogging 101
North x East has a helpful post titled Why Guest Blogging is a Powerful Way to Gain Exposure for Your Blog which makes a good companion piece to some of my own posts from a few months back on Guest blogging:
- Why Guest Bloggers are Great for a Blog
- How to Find a Guest Blogger for Your Blog
- How to Get Guest Blogging Jobs
- How to Be a Good Guest Blogger
Have you been a guest blogger? How did you find the experience? Have you had guest bloggers on your blog? What were the benefits and costs?
Written on July 19th, 2007 at 05:07 am by Darren Rowse
The 4 Pillars of Writing Exceptional Blogs
The following guest post has been submitted by Leo Babauta from Zen Habits.
Too often it seems that we bloggers get caught up in worrying about monetizing our blogs, or the design of the blog, or SEO techniques — but although it may sound trite, the major focus of our time should be on our writing.
I’m often asked how I got 12,000 readers for my blog, Zen Habits, and made it into the Technorati Top 500 in 5 months — other bloggers seem think I have some secret that I can impart upon them, but I don’t.
I follow the same advice given here on enternetusers, and by many of the other top blogs: create valuable content and good writing, and the readers will come. Content is king, as they say, and that should be the focus of all your efforts.
I write about this topic more on NorthxEast, a new blog with great weekly articles for bloggers, but the key is to focus on your readers and give them what they want.
Why Not Much Else Matters
Are there other things that matter in creating a successful blog? Sure there are, but they don’t matter nearly as much as some people think they do. Let’s take a look at a few examples:
- Design - While the look of your site may be attrActive and very usable, you won’t attract any readers from design alone. You need to attract them with good content … and then hope your design doesn’t scare them away. But content is really what matters here. If the design isn’t great, but the content is insanely useful, they’ll come, and they’ll stay.
- SEO - While I agree that SEO techniques can help, what matters most in SEO is getting links. If you don’t get a bunch of links, all the SEO optimization in the world won’t do you a bit of good. SEO really makes the biggest difference when the page in question has a bunch of links coming to it — SEO doesn’t change the ranking of a page with 1 inbound link. So how do you get those quality links? Great content, and nothing else.
- Social media - Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Netscape … these kinds of sites can help your traffic tremendously. And sure, it helps to have friends and be Active on these sites. But all of that doesn’t matter a lick if you don’t write a knock-out post.
- Monetizing - All the monetizing in the world won’t get you a dime unless you get traffic, and that traffic won’t come until you start creating a destination site, with amazing content that attracts the readers and keeps them reading. In fact, a site with ads that aren’t optimized can make more money than a site with optimized ads if the traffic is much higher from great content.
Am I saying that none of this stuff matters? Again, these things are useful, but they are not nearly as important as the content.
Which leaves us with the question: how do you write great content? It’s actually very simple in concept, but takes a lot of practice to perfect. I’m still trying to perfect these things myself, but in general, there are four pillars of exceptional blogwriting:
Pillar 1: Be extremely useful.
It all starts with the topic of the post. You need to consider your reader, and center the topic of your post on your reader — not on yourself, your ads, your blogger friends, or anyone else but the reader. What are his needs, wants, hopes and dreams? What problems does he have in his daily life that you can solve?
Now choose a topic that will solve one of his problems, help him achieve something he’s always wanted to achieve. Create a resource for him: an extremely useful set of practical tips, links, tools to solve that problem.
The more practical your tips, the better. It’s not enough to say that the keys to losing weight are eating less and exercising more. Those are both difficult things to do. Give the reader extremely useful ways of doing those things, and you’ve created a resource.
Pillar 2: Write great headlines.
Once you’ve got a useful topic, crystalize your main point in the headline. You should write the headline first (and then come back to it to make it better later) so you know in your mind the main point of the post. It helps you keep the post focused.
The few words that make up the headline are the most important few words in your post. Why? Because most readers will read your post in a feed reader (think Bloglines or Google Reader) or come across it on a site like Digg or another blog that links to your post. In all of these examples, just about the only thing they’ll see before making a decision about whether to read the post is your headline. If the headline is catchy, they’ll read more. If it’s not, you’ve just lost a reader.
How do you write a great headline? It’s not an exact science, but I’d recommend Copyblogger’s Writing Headlines That Get Results, and my post, The Sexy Art of Writing Headlines that Kill.
Pillar 3: Make the post scannable.
You’ve got your great topic, your killer headline, and an extremely useful post. Your reader decides to give your post a few seconds of his time.
But then he comes upon the post, and it’s a huge block of undifferentiated text, and he thinks to himself, “This is going to take a good chunk of my time.” Your reader, of course, is a very busy person, and doesn’t have 20 minutes to devote to each post. In fact, even if he does have a spare 20 minutes to spend on a single post, he won’t give those 20 minutes to yours unless he’s convinced that it’s going to be extremely useful — and he can’t do that unless he knows what’s in the content.
Don’t make your reader dig through paragraph after paragraph to know what your post has to offer. He won’t do it — he’ll move on quickly to the next item in his feed reader.
Make your post scannable — your reader should be able to quickly glance through the post and pick up the main points without reading too deeply. The best ways to do that are with lists, but other great methods are subheds (the smaller headlines for sections within a post), block quotes, images and graphics, and the use of bold or italics.
Pillar 4: Write in a plain, concise, common-sense style.
Once your reader decides to spend some time with your post, he’s going to want to get through it without too much work. The key to that: simplicity.
The great writing manual, The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, instructs us to write in a way that comes naturally. It also says to avoid fancy words and to omit unnecessary words. Readers enjoy writing that is conversational, without being wordy. Write in a way that speaks to your reader, not down to him, and doesn’t confuse him with jargon and acronyms and technical stuff.
Pretend that you’re having a conversation with a friend, and write like that. Then go back and edit out sentences and words that are unnecessary, and revise sentences that aren’t clear.
Your blog become more powerful if you omit the noise and leave the signal. Do this, and your reader will not only read the post, but will likely stick around long enough to become a long-term reader.
Written on July 19th, 2007 at 12:07 am by Darren Rowse
Write a Review - Rediscover Your Blogging Groove Day 3
Today’s task in the Rediscover Your Blogging Groove project is to write a review of some kind.
There are many successful blogs and websites that have built themselves on the back of writing reviews. They are able to do so because so many people use the web to research purchases and make decisions about products and services.
Review posts require some knowledge of the thing you’re reviewing and they can take a little time to write (because you need to think carefully about what you write as your readers may base decisions upon your opinion) but they can be a highly effective post to include on a blog from time to time as they express an opinion rather than just write what everyone else is writing in your niche.
Some of the benefits of reviews that I’ve seen include:
- incoming links - some of my most linked to posts are reviews.
- conversation - stating an opinion about something can be the starting point for wonderful conversations, debates and exchanges of ideas.
- relationships - I’m amazed by how many of the reviews that I’ve written have been the thing that has actually put me into contact with the creators of the products or services that I review.
- search engine traffic - I quite often see traffic from SE’s coming from terms like ‘xxxx review’. ‘Review’ is a hot word.
- reviews can work well with affiliate programs - one of the best places to put an affiliate link inside a well written and balanced review of a product. Warning - don’t fall for the temptation of talking up bad products just to get an affiliate commission, all you’ll do is put readers offside. Give pros and cons of products that you’ve actually used and you’ll find readers respect that and will make more informed purchases.
More reading on how to write reviews - 10 Ways to Maximize the Value of a Product Review
Homework - Now it’s time to go write your review post. This might be easier for some of you than others as some of you have actual products or services that directly relate to your niche - however you don’t need to just review products.
Here are a few ideas for what to review:
- Review a related website or blog to yours
- Review a book about your topic
- Review the last few months of your own writing on your blog (highlighting some of your best posts)
- Review a movie, play, TV show, song, restaurant
Once you’ve written your review come back to this post and share the link to it so we can all be a little inspired by what you’ve written.
note: while your previously written review posts might be interesting - I’d prefer it if you only posted links to new posts in comments below - after all, this series is about helping you to improve your blog NOW rather than looking back - thanks for understanding.
PS: I wrote a review today of my own of the Canon EOS 5D DSLR
Written on July 18th, 2007 at 12:07 pm by Darren Rowse
Why doesn’t Online Main Stream Media link?
I’ve often wondered - but why don’t many online main stream media sites link when they refer to blogs or websites?
I find it slightly ironic - particularly when they write about new media/blogging.
I’m not sure if it’s laziness, fear of loosing readers from a site or if it’s just a different philosophy of web design - but I would have thought if a site was seriously interested in providing useful content for their readers that they’d hyperlink mentions of other websites.
Inspiration for this post - Business Week’s How Top Bloggers Earn Money (I resisted the temptation to just give you a dead link). Thanks for the mention in the profiles BW, it was a real surprise as I’d not heard anything about it until I saw Shoemoney write about it (he’d not heard anything about it either). I really should get a new set of head shots taken!
Written on July 18th, 2007 at 07:07 am by Darren Rowse
Speedlinking - AdSense News
A couple of short pieces of AdSense news today.
Over at the official AdSense blog they’ve announced that there’s a new feature just been added to AdSense that will help them serve up more relevant ads for password protected areas of your blog. For example if you have a members only area you can now tell the AdSense crawler/bot how to access these areas so that it can assess what content is on them.
How do you access this new feature?
“just check out Site Authentication in your account and follow the instructions on the page. Please note that you will only have access to this feature if you’ve updated your AdSense login to a Google Account. We appreciate your patience as we roll out this feature to additional publishers.”
In other AdSense news - Self Made Minds reports that they’ve been approached by AdSense to be a part of a test for ‘AdSense for Mobile’ to allow publishes to monetize their sites for mobile devices.
Written on July 18th, 2007 at 12:07 am by Darren Rowse
Answer a Question - Rediscover Your Blogging Groove Day 2
Today’s task in the Rediscover Your Blogging Groove project is to answer a reader’s question.
One of the simplest ways to find something to write about that connects with readers is to answer one of their questions. Today, if you’re taking part in the project, I’d like to encourage you to give it a go. If you’re not participating you still might find the post helpful - so lets read on…
Even in the early days of my blogging I remember getting comments and emails from readers asking for information, opinion or insight on the topics that I was covering. Sometimes the questions were quite to the point and bite sized, other times they were more open ended.
At first I would answer these questions in the medium that they were asked (in the comment thread or by replying to email) however I very quickly realized that I was being asked the same questions repeatedly and that the answers might be relevant for a wider audience than just the person asking them.
The result of this realization is that I regularly post answers to questions as posts.
I have a folder on my computer’s desktop called ‘reader questions’ that I place some of the questions that I’m asked into (as they hit my inbox or comments section). By no means do I answer them all but they do provide a treasure trove of inspiration on those slow days when I’ve run out of things to write about.
A few suggestions on answering questions:
- Pick Relevant Questions - not every question that you are asked will be appropriate for answering on your blog. Keep on topic and don’t keep answering the same question over and over.
- Ask for Permission or Keep Anonymity - before I post answer someone’s question I attempt to seek their permission to do so. I’m not sure on the legalities of answering someone’s question in public and using their name as the questioner - but I think it is polite and helps to show that you value your readers. If you can’t get permission (either you don’t have email details or they won’t reply) then I would change the question slightly to protect the questioner.
- Credit the Questioner - if they give you permission, give the person asking the question credit with their name and a link if they have one.
The beauty of using reader questions is that you end up with a post to point people to when you’re next asked the question. This will save you a lot of time in future.
The other great thing about answering questions is that they can be a very effective way of bringing in search engine traffic. Many of the searches done on Google are done in a ‘question’ format and smart bloggers who incorporate questions into their posts position themselves well for this traffic. Check out Ask Dave Taylor for an example of a blogger who has based his whole blog on answering questions.
“What if no one asks me questions?”
I can hear some of you thinking this already. Well let me answer your question with a few suggestions….
- Ask for questions - on numerous occasions I’ve solicited questions from my readers in blog posts and on each occasion the response was quite amazing with questions being asked that I’d never have considered writing posts on. Don’t promise to answer them all in your post or you could set yourself up for a bit of a disaster.
- Trawl for questions - if you don’t have enough readers yet on your blog to get many questions then perhaps you need to go on a question hunt on other sites. Look in the comments sections of other blogs and check out forums on your topics. Forums are a particularly good place for beginner questions.
- Find a Beginner - one of the best readers to identify is someone just starting out on the topic that you’re writing about. I did this a year back here at enternetusers by approaching a couple of random readers who I knew were new bloggers via email and asking them if they had any questions that I could answer publicly. The bloggers were over the moon and I ended up with 15-20 posts based on the needs of beginner bloggers.
- Ask yourself a question - still can’t find a reader question? Don’t give up - ask yourself one! I’ve written many posts like this over the years. They start off with a question that I could imagine a reader asking (they don’t claim to be real questions) and they then go onto me answering the question. These posts are particularly good in the early days of a blog because they show your willingness to answer questions even if it wasn’t a reader that they originated from.
- Remember your previous questions - a little extension on the ‘ask yourself a question’ technique is simply to remember back to the early days of your own learning about your topic. What did you not know that you now know? What did you ask the people who taught you? If you asked these questions - someone else is sure to be also.
Homework - it’s time to go and write your question post. Don’t let it get too complex - imagine you’re talking to the reader who asked the question and simply write it up as you’d answer it in person.
Once you’ve answered the question in a post come back here and share the link to it so that we can all read it and learn from how you’ve done it.
note: while your previous question answering posts might be interesting - I’d prefer it if you only posted links to new posts in comments below - after all, this series is about helping you to improve your blog NOW rather than looking back - thanks for understanding.
update - thanks to Brody for reminding me of a technique to help you find questions to answer - check your blog’s search engine referral statistics to see what keywords people are using to find your blog. You’ll find that many times it is questions that bring them in - and that they’re questions that are ready made topics to write about. I’ve written about how I do this using the 103bees metrics tool previously.
Written on July 17th, 2007 at 12:07 am by Darren Rowse
Write a List - Rediscover Your Blogging Groove Day 1
Today’s task in the Rediscover Your Blogging Groove project is to write a list post.
I find that one of the easiest ways to write a blog post is to write a list.
- Lists are Scannable
- Lists keep Posts succinct
- Lists look ‘neat’
- Lists area easy to link to
- Lists can be a comprehensive to tackle a topic
- Lists can be persuasive
- Lists add to the ease of writing
- Lists can start memes and go viral
The above reasons for writing lists was taken from - 8 Reasons why Lists are Good for Getting Traffic to your blog
There are a few different types of ‘list posts’.
1. Simple Lists - the above post (8 Reasons Why Lists are Good….) is a fairly simple list post.
- There’s a small introduction to the topic (A couple of sentences)
- There’s a short summary at the end (a paragraph).
- The points are all short and quite succinct
- The list makes up the majority of the post and really speaks for itself.
Simple lists are often shorter, sharper and to the point. They can be quite powerful and make a real impact.
2. Longer List Posts - the majority of list posts that I write are slightly more complex lists. I like to introduce a topic, explore a need, give some examples and then launch into a list.
Once I start the list itself I then like to expand upon each point along the way. This suits my style which is a little more long winded.
A few examples of my own include Wedding Photography - 21 Tips for Amateur Wedding Photographers and How to Take Great Group Photos.
In actual fact these sorts of posts border on being more essay like - but are broken up and formatted with headings for each point to make them a little more digestible and scannable to readers.
3. Lists as Parts of Posts - lists can also be used within posts quite effectively.
These lists might help to make one of numerous points along the way or there may even be multiples lists within the whole post (like this one).
Be a little careful not to overwhelm readers with too many lists and sublists (lists within lists can be confusing). But don’t feel that a list needs to be the only thing within your post. If you’re looking at an example of this type of post - you’re reading one. This post has numerous small lists in it with other commentary between them.
OK - so enough theorizing about list posts - it’s time to go and write one. The hardest part is probably going to be picking a topic to write your list about. A few ideas (and another list):
- 10 Ways to Use a….
- The most common mistakes….
- How to be an effective….
- The most popular 17…..
- Reasons why I love (or hate)….
- The most beautiful (ugly, fascinating, crazy)….
- 5 Steps to achieving….
If you want more examples of list posts check out the Lists Group Writing Project which has over 300 examples of list posts.
Go write a list. Post it and come back here to share a link to it in comments below so we can see what you came up with.
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