2010 August

Aug

Do you have some blog posts that need cleaning up? Image by Sanja Gjenero

Refreshing one of those “thought-it-would-do-better-than-this” posts is the key for Day 21 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog
(affiliate link). After you’ve been blogging awhile you start seeing some posts that are consistently popular, and other posts that are inexplicably poor performers.

Look for reasons why the post is performing poorly – bad title, poor formatting, outdated information, etc. Your challenge today is to update an older, poorly performing post. Take an honest assessment of how to improve it.

Thoughts for improving your older post are included in the ebook, and I recently purchased the newest problogger book, The Copywriting Scorecard (affiliate link) and I think it would be perfect for this type of exercise. I am going to be printing out this book tomorrow and working through some of the posts on this site that were written in rush and need to be fixed.

Aug

Commenting on Other Blogs – Day 20

By AngEngland | Build a Better Blog

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It’s probably one of the things that most bloggers are told to do right off the bat but something that tends to fall by the wayside far too easily. I know it’s certainly true for me! And while it seems odd to “schedule time” to comment on my friend’s blog, it is important to stay connected.

So Day 20′s challenge of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog is to spend 10-15 minutes reading and interacting on other blogs featuring or specializing in your topic. You have to comment thoughtfully in order to avoid seeming like a spammer.

Bottom line – if you LOOK like a spammer, you are probably not going to get your comment published. If your comment just says “Very nice” or “I agree”, you are probably not going to get much attention from the comment you leave.

Go beyond just a statement of agreement – enhance a post, offer a differing point of view, ask a question, provide additional resources but stay on topic. I never approve comments that are completely off topic as they do not provide anything meaningful to my readers.

Here are some additional resources for blog comments (getting and leaving them) from some other websites.

Aug

Write an Opinion Post on Your Blog – Day 19

By AngEngland | Build a Better Blog

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In 31 Days to Build a Better Blog (affiliate link)Darren talks about the fact successful bloggers are often bold enough to share their opinions – sometimes strong opinions! I’ve said it time and time again with my consultation clients….if people only wanted the facts they would read the encyclopedia. Readers come to blogs for opinions, thoughts on how certain facts might apply to real-life situation, and to hear your spin on a subject.

So, for example, instead of just announcing a new change with Examiner, I took the time to explain what it meant, why someone might choose to stay with Examiner, and how to maximize your earnings there if you chose to apply. It’s a very popular post and one that I get lots of comments and emails about.

Almost any topic can have the potential for an opinion piece, even if it doesn’t seem apparent right away. Some topics – politics for example, have clear opinion relevance. For other topic areas you might have to get a little more creative. How could blogging be open to opinions or controversy? It’s shocking, but I barely got 10 posts into this site before I had a strong comment response to a blog post and it definitely created a lot of strong opinions.

The fact is, once people see an opinion stated, they are more likely to give their own opinion. That can create a very interesting dialogue with your readers. So are you ready?

Challenge – Create an opinion post for your blog. It can be as simple as a review of a product or book, or as daring as tackling a controversial subject in your topic area. Just remember – kindness goes a long way towards smoothing feathers ruffled by different opinions. So get out there – put your two cents in!

Aug

Create a “Sneeze” or Hub Article Page – Day 18 of Build a Better Blog in 31 Days

By AngEngland | Build a Better Blog

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Image by mcfarlandmo

Day 18 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog (affiliate) focuses on creating “sneeze pages” as Darren calls them. I love these. I call them index pages or hub articles because they serve as hubs from which you can drive traffic to several other areas of your site. For example, in the sidebar of this site I list popular posts or series like Ten Habits of Blogging Success.

By sending readers to this one page, they are able to access several other older posts they might otherwise have missed. Another great example of a post I did like this is Best Books for Preschool Educational Story Stretchers which rounds up two dozen individual story stretchers all in one place.

A hub page can show off your post archives around a specific theme. Sometimes a fabulous post gets buried by other, newer pieces and loses the limelight. This is a great way to highlight posts that are worthy of attention even after several weeks or months.

The SEO for a hub page is usually really good. Having a resource post usually gets lots of incoming links because it has a high value. And it can decrease your bounce rate by keeping people on your site longer.

You can do hub pages according to posts in a series, best of round ups from a time-frame, or centered around a specific theme. For example, I will probably create a post soon listing all the sites that writers can contribute to – just a list of links going to the more in-depth analysis of various websites I’ve written about here.

One thing that is recommended is to promote the hub pages or “sneeze pages” in prominent places on your blog. As part of this challenge, and with angengland.com growing much larger, I plan to clean up the sidebars on this blog a lot more and streamline the entire blog by adding additional hub articles.

Alright then – challenge time – Create a new “sneeze page” for your blog. 10 Tips for X, Y and Z. Best Ways to Blank. Resources for Whatchamacallits. You get the idea.

Aug

Assess How Your Site Appears to a First-Time Reader – Day 17 of Build a Better Blog

By AngEngland | Build a Better Blog

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I love this idea. I will definitely have someone do this with the redesign of Untrained Housewife next time I connect with a friend offline. The challenge for day 17 of Build a Better Blog in 31 Days (affiliate link) revolves around assessing the user-friendliness of your site through a new visitor’s eyes.

Send your friend, or stranger that you’re holding at gun point in Starbucks and have forced to do this exercise for you, to your site. Let them wander around for a few minutes IN SILENCE (that means you don’t say anything to them.)

While they are surfing through the site – take notes. Where are they clicking? What areas have they skipped? Which features seem to attract their attention?

Once they finish surfing, spend about five-ten minutes chatting about their experience. What was their overall feeling? What did they like/dislike? Easy to navigate? What suggestions do they have for improving the user experience?

It would be most helpful to have people of various web-savvy-ness do this I think. Ask someone who isn’t very technical to visit your site. Ask someone who has a lot of tech-savvy. And maybe someone who falls in the middle a little more.

Aug

Create Blog Posts by Identifying and Solving Readers’ Problems – Day 16

By AngEngland | Build a Better Blog

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Help your readers fill in the pieces. Photo by daniel wildman

When you solve a problem for a reader they are more likely come back to your blog and/or tell a friend about your helpfulness. Solving problems is a great way to build up your blog traffic and target interested readers.

Often for me, this has been writing about my OWN problems that I’ve been researching. I started writing about pregnancy when I was pregnant with my firstborn and taking childbirth education classes. I started writing about gardening and landscaping when I was researching the landscaping in my first home. And of course, Untrained Housewife was definitely born from sharing and solving my own dilemmas.

If your own problems don’t give you enough blog fodder, take a look through your Google Analytics and find the keyword phrases that have been bringing people to your blog. If I do this for AngEngland.com, for example, I immediately see some questions that people have I could address in future blog posts: “examiner make money”, “topics for making money in Examiner”, “selling ads on my blog” and “affiliate sales or residual revenue better”.

These actual keyword phrases give me a great idea of what my readers are looking for information about. Some of these keyword phrases, like “Can you make money writing for Examiner” I’ve written specifically about. Others, would make great supplementary posts and fill in the gaps of what my readers are needing to learn.

This covers just one of the seven ways Darren lists in 31 Days to Build a Better Blog for identifying a reader’s problem and solving it. Your challenge is to select one of the seven ways and create at least one informative blog post idea based on what you discover. Let us know what you find!

Aug

Blogging Buddies Rule! Do you Have One Yet? – Day 15

By AngEngland | Build a Better Blog, Community

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This is the part of blogging that I love – collaboration and communication! Really…it’s fabulous to me to connect with other bloggers, offer them a guest post opportunity, stumble their link, leave a comment or introduce a couple bloggers who might benefit from touching base with eachother. I cannot count the number of times I have passed along a writing, blogging or other opportunity (even book opps!) to fellow bloggers because I KNEW what they were about.

This is where speaking up, shaking hands (even if virtually) and making some connections can be so valuable. So that if a friend hears about an opportunity for a pet blogger they won’t say “I do not write about animals” and hit delete, but will think “Oh this would be perfect for Lorie” and hit the forward button. I do a lot of this as Editor-in-Chief of Blissfully Domestic, and at Untrained Housewife, where I’m able to pass along review, interview and other opportunities to my columnists.

In addition to commenting on eachother’s blogs or helping to promote via social bookmarking sites (also known as “link love”) connecting with another blogger can help motivate and encourage you. Do you have another blogger in your niche topic area that you can partner with? I remember reading an article once about a group of five individuals who created a “Blog Alliance” for themselves. I think this is a fabulous idea.

Your challenge today is to introduce yourself to a blogger you’d like to partner with OR formalize a blog-buddy relationship with an existing friend. Darren’s suggestion in 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, is to find someone who’s blog is on a similar level as yours…..if you’re both extremely new, fairly established, or well established you’ll have similar challenges and better relate.

If you need help finding someone LET ME KNOW. I know literally hundreds of bloggers in the various venues I haunt and can probably make an introduction for you if necessary.

Aug

Update a Key Page on Your Blog – Day 14 of Build a Better Blog

By AngEngland | Uncategorized

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In 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Darren talks about the importance of key pages on your blog and how identifying and updating these pages can be so important. Make a list of the ten most important pages on your blog – perhaps the About Page, the Front Page, etc. Use your stats or analytics to determine which posts get the highest traffic on your site – these might be key pages on your site as well.

What does your front page say about your blog? Is it obvious what the blog is about from this first impression? Does it clearly lead to other important pages on your blog? Can readers find everything they need from this first page?

One of the things that I am most impressed about with the new Headway theme I’m using on a few of my websites is the ability to customize the sidebars. I can have different widgetized sidebars in the front page than I have on the other pages – allowing me to easily personalize what I want readers to see on that front page.

Refresh your most active pages, even if you don’t rewrite the content, on the posts that bring in consistent traffic. In my case, I had a post on angengland that was one of the very first posts I wrote and it gets thousands of hits a month and has hundreds of comments. So the first time I went through this challenge I didn’t change the original content, but wrote an updated post related to the first and linked to the new post. Today I am putting in a call to action, reminding readers that they can subscribe to my blog or purchase my ebook for more information on this topic.

Challenge – Go make a list of ten most important pages on your blog and update them. Let us know in the comments if you get stuck on a certain page or want more ideas for updating them and we’ll try to answer you in the comment field!

Aug

Improve Your Blog While Window Shopping – Day 13

By AngEngland | Build a Better Blog

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Day 13 of Darren’s 31 Days to Build a Better Blog suggests a trip to mall for blog improvement. A trip to the mall? Really? Yes, really.

Stepping away for a day can help clear your mind and refresh your purpose – not to mention keep your eyes from drying up and sticking to your eyelids. Darren includes a list of observations to make note of during a 30 minute jaunt through the mall so get out your list and hit the road (I won’t republish the list in full here to prevent plagerism).

Be sure you have a notebook and pencil, pen or writing utensil with you. For me personally, Wal-Mart is the nearest “big store” but I am able to hit the mall about once a month when we go to the “the city” so even bloggers in rural areas like me can do this exercise.

Walk around for 30 minutes and mull over the list Darren gives in the book. Then find a place to hang out and sit and muse. Since this whole post is a challenge I won’t bother posting a seperate challenge, but rather encourage you to leave a comment with what you learned. A new marketing idea? Way to catch attention of readers? Spot a new trend? Color scheme for your blog design?

Leave a comment and let us know what you learned and observed for your blog during your walk through the mall.

Aug

Schedule Your Blog Posts by Developing an Editorial Calendar – Day 12 of Build a Better Blog

By AngEngland | Build a Better Blog, How tos

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Get out your calendar, or create a spreadsheet on the computer, and get your list of blog posts from yesterday’s challenge. Then, as Darren recommends in 31 Days to Build a Better Blog (affiliate link), start plugging the article ideas into the slots.

So if you plan to publish every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, you’ll put three articles per week in your spreadsheet until you’ve run out of article ideas. Don’t be surprised if new ideas come to you as you start filling in your calendar!

The other type of editorial calendar that Darren mentions is one I’ve worked out with a couple of my consultation clients, where each day is a specific type of post. You’ll notice that I loosely follow that type of posting schedule for the Examiner Blogging Column; Tuesday is a Blog Tip, Saturday is a resource or review, etc.

Readers will come to expect a certain level of consistency if you begin blogging in this fashion so keep that in mind when creating your calendar.

Challenge – Think about the type of schedule you want to have for your blog. Will you post seasonal material? Themed posts? An eclectic and varied collection? Create an Editorial Calendar for the next month’s worth of posts.