Tuesday, December 7, 2010

10 Lessons I Learned from Gaining my First 1000 Subscribers

My blog, YoungPrePro, recently surpassed its first 1000 subscribers, and there are a lot of lessons I learned along the way. Below you’ll find ten that come to my mind right away.

1. Your Subscribers are Your Most Important Readers

I learned this lesson the hard way, and if I had knew this I would be having far more subscribers than I have now.

I didn’t focus on gaining blog subscribers when I started blogging. All I wanted was to be getting a lot of daily visitors. Later I started seeing the importance of having blog subscribers as opposed to having daily visitors. Your daily visitors can stop visiting your blog after a sign of inactivity from you for some time, but your subscribers will always receive blog posts from you as long as they’re subscribed. On top of that subscribers also have a deeper relationship with you.

2. Content is King

I have disputed this statement once or twice, but after seeing the effect of writing great content I realized how important content is.

I have discovered I get more subscribers anytime I write a great post that can impact the lives of my readers. Sure they take a lot of time to prepare, but the results are worth it.

I get triple my usual traffic anytime I write a great post and I also end up being featured and interviewed in so many places, and this eventually boosts my traffic, reputation and brings in more subscribers.

3. Your Design Matters

I am a a guy who didn’t want to spend any money building my blog, except for my hosting fees, I used a lot of free themes for my blog and I later become unsatisfied which led me to changing my theme several times.

I went on with this for some time and I decided to give a premium theme a try. After I started using a premium theme on my blog I noticed a significant increase in my traffic and in my subscriber count. So yeah the investment was worth it.

4. Marketing is a Must

I blogged for the first few months with less than 50 subscribers, I didn’t do much to promote my blog and this had a great impact on the success I had. After that I realized that content can’t do the trick alone, and that you have to invest in marketing your blog too.

I started guest posting as much as I could, and this had a very positive impact on my subscriber count. The good thing is that the increased traffic I get from promotional activities tends to stick around month after month.

5. Networking is a Must

You will have heard people talking about you networking with other bloggers or having blogging buddies. I also had some blogging buddies who I connect with on a regular basis and as a result of this I am included when they write a new list. This alone has helped me gain some subscribers and it also helped me gain thousands of dollars in affiliate sales.

It might feel weird to try to connect with other people online, but believe me, having strong relationships with people inside your niche can go a long way to improve your subscriber count and your blog overall.

6. Having Goals is Important

I might be a little bit ashamed to say this, but my goal was to have a minimum of 20,000 subscribers before the end of 2010. Even though this goal is unrealistic (now I know!), it still had a great influence on getting my first 1000 subscribers – first, it made me work harder to improve my subscriber count and second, it kept me motivated not to quit.

7. Traffic is not Everything

My subscriber count is only a fraction of the traffic I get and I have realized with time that getting traffic is not everything. Conversion is what matters.

Getting more subscribers to your blog is not all about you focusing on how to get more traffic but how to convert that traffic to subscribers. There are a lot of blogs with less traffic than I have yet they have more subscribers than I do. Why? Because they’re good at converting traffic to subscribers.

8. Social Proof Works

When I got over 800 subscribers I started displaying my subscriber count and I have since noticed a boost in the rate I am getting new subscribers.

People love to be involved and they don’t love threading a path alone, they want to be assured that what you preach works and there is no better way to convince them than to let them know that there are tons of other people already subscribed.

9. Making Subscribing Easy is Very Important

One thing that amazes me is that over 700 of my subscribers are email subscribers. It is a major mistake to think that enabling RSS feed subscription alone is the way to go. Many of your readers don’t know what RSS is but there is hardly any one of them who doesn’t have an email. Don’t let people begin to know what RSS is before they can subscribe to your blog. Rather, make subscription available in any format you think they will like.

10. Feedback Matters

Many of us only care about getting subscribers, but we hardly care about retaining them. Another lesson I learnt from gaining my first 1000 subscribers is that what you think about your blog is not what matters but what your readers think.

I once got an email from one of my subscribers who told me that he was about to unsubscribe and that particular email would be his last communication. He told me I have been writing a particular type of post lately (which is true) and that he was tired of receiving that same type of post. He also told me that it is important to be alternating the type of posts I write. I took this reader’s suggestion and I saw a boost in my subscriber count.

Conclusion

Your subscribers are the lifeline of your blog because if every other thing collapses, they will still be there. The above are 10 lessons I learned from gaining my first 1000 subscribers. I hope you can use them to increase your own subscriber count.

About the Author: Onibalusi Bamidele is a 16-year-old entrepreneur living the Internet lifestyle and the founder of the young entrepreneur blog, YoungPrePro.com. Make sure to subscribe to his blog to get all his updates.

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Blogging with Keyword Research In Mind

When you have a blog, it is one thing to post whatever is on your mind and then it is another to spend a little time to research your headlines so that they not only grab the attention of your readers but they also get the search engine traffic you need as a result of choosing the right keywords.

The problem is deciding if the keywords you want to use will be competitive or not and if you are a new blog choosing low competitive keywords is the better option, while if your site is older and has good authority backlinks than you can afford to chase higher competing keywords. It is known that if you research keywords properly for your headline and can get them under 100,000 competing pages you can rise to the 1st page fairly quickly and easily.

As a general rule I tend to stick to using keywords that have 1 million competing pages or lower and that have a growing search trend so they will get a good click through rate, the 3 main tools to use is Google Competition, Google Insights and Google Trends. The problem is having to go back and forth to these windows each time you write a blog post takes a considerable amount of time so for this I recommend you use a SEO plugin called Keyword Winner.

You can use something like Google Ads Tool which is also free but the problem is you might have good search count and than next month search count is down, so again remember Google Trends which can give you an overall search count over a six month period or so to see if the keyword is gaining more searches over the months or not.

There is no rule that you should stick to dense keywords in your headline meaning 4-5 words, sometimes I use around 10 words in my headline but are consisted of 2 or 3 sets of key phrases and again can rank well for each set provided I do a quick check on competition before hand.

By researching keywords properly and getting to the 1st page of Google for each blog post you do will bring an exploding amount of traffic to your site, particularly if you keep it consistent. In my experience I have been able to write blog posts that bring in sales using keywords with review or coupon codes and again make money this way too.

Many bloggers fail to spend time to make their headlines in their posts suited for Google and yet by neglecting a small but very important thing can be the main reason why they succeed or fail as a blogger particularly if they take blogging more serious or treat it as a business and a way to generate income.

Always remember having the right headline together with meta title and the permalink is the most important thing. The keywords you choose that go on the page itself is just the icing on the cake.

So what keywords will you use in your next post? Will they be keywords that get you on the 1st page or will you be simply left behind?

This guest post has been written by Daniel Lew - Australian Entrepreneur, Internet Marketer, SEO Professional offering Blogging Tips and Ways to Make Money Online! Daniel Lew is the founder of GSEO.net, Blogger at DanLew.com and Creator of Keyword Winner.

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Monday, December 6, 2010

4 Scientific Tips that Help You Get More Blog Comments

image of scientific flasks

One of the most engaging features of the blogging platform is the commenting system.

Many bloggers believe there is as much or even more value in the discussion than the posts they write themselves. Comments are a classic form of social proof for blogs, and blogs that attract lots of comments appear more authoritative. Comments are also a great way to facilitate user generated content that is perfect for SEO.

Because of all this, comments can become addictive, and many bloggers want to know how to get more of them. While there is a lot of great anecdotal advice out there from experienced bloggers, I thought some might appreciate a more data-driven approach.

Fortunately for you, I’ve spent the past few months analyzing data on more than 150,000 blog posts. And in doing that, I’ve identified four data points you can use to encourage more commenting on your site.

chart with data about blog comments

The first thing I noticed is that while articles published during the week generally tend to get more views, articles published on the weekends get far more comments. This may be because users have more freedom on non-work-days to take the time to share their two cents.

chart with data about blog comments

Then, when I analyzed the hour-of-day blogs posts were published during, I found that commenting peaked on articles posted in the morning, specifically around 8 and 9AM.

I believe this is because posts released early are in everyone’s inboxes and feedreaders when they check them in the morning and the rest of the day.

chart with data about blog comments

I also found some interesting things when I looked at words used in articles and how they correlated with comment numbers.

Posts that mention “giveaways” and “gifts” are commented on more than the average article in my dataset, as are posts that mention “recruiting” and “jobs.” In these tough economic times, everyone loves a present and many people need jobs.

The word “comments” also appears in this list, indicating that directly asking for comments on your post does work.

chart with data about blog comments

On the flip side of the coin, I noticed certain words were correlated with posts getting fewer comments than the average.

The list includes many technical, legal and financial terms like “settlements,” “derivatives,” and “franchise,” “investing.” While people are concerned with their own monetary issues, they’re not so excited about discussing the finance world at large.

How about you?

What does your data tell you about the factors that seem to invite more comments?

Let us know (in the comments, of course!) what seems to increase (or decrease) comments on your site.

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I Am Not a Blogger, I Am a Human Being!

This guest post is by Katie Tallo of Momentum Gathering.

I’ve developed a tweet. It’s involuntary and annoying. My vision’s distorted. All I’m seeing are the letters S, E and O. Worse, I think I’m losing my mind because I don’t know who some of my friends are—at all—no idea who they are. I play with my widget all day. I’m obsessively turning my plug-ins off and on, off and on. I’m stumbling and tumbling around most of the time and alarmingly, there’s a growth mutating out of the side of my name. An @ has attached itself to me wherever I go. I need help.

I think I’m turning into a blogger!

It all started way, way back, seven months and thousands of links ago. It was a tweetless, friendless, skypeless time in my life—a simpler time when my inbox was empty and my surfing, innocent and drifting. A blog was some kind of weird public diary that weird public people did. Like pole dancing—too revealing. And yet somehow intriguing.

Naively, I peeked into a blogging forum one day and was instantly hooked. Suddenly, I was swinging from the nearest web publishing platform. Before I could stop myself, I’d picked a domain name, created a blog, and then brazenly published my very first post for everyone to see.

I was out there, naked. And I liked it.

I joined a blogging club, hung around the forum, attended webinars, blogging bootcamps, skype sessions and even flew off to a big conference in Vegas. Soon, I was being invited to other blogs. I even had some guests on mine. I chatted, commented, liked, moderated, shared and tweeted like a full-on social media butterfly. I was up all hours of the night, creating post after post, strutting my stuff. I couldn’t stop. While I madly typed and wildly clicked, my avatar just kept on smiling.

But all this linking and lurking was taking me deeper and deeper into the web where I soon found myself being chased by an angry mob of marketing-guru-type-experts who could smell my newbie blood. They threw me scraps of promises and secrets, coaxing me with freedom, riches, subscriber numbers and success! I ate up their feeds. I bookmarked their manifestos, signed up for their courses, bought their e-books and grabbed every freebie I could download.

Blurry-eyed and completely surrounded, my fingers moving rapid-fire across the keyboard, my mouth dry with dehydration from hours glued to my laptop, my soul screamed at me to get up, stand up, to even look up … and that’s when it happened … I did look up. I looked into the monitor and saw my reflection. I was a hideous visage of my former self—unrecognizable. I rolled back in my chair, lifted my hands to my face and screamed in anguish,

“I am not a blogger! I am a human being!

Okay, maybe it didn’t quite happen that way, but you get the point. Being a blogger can feel inhuman at times—an existence that’s indifferent to even the most basic of bodily functions, like walking, sleeping, eating, and peeing.

Blogging can completely change you … if you let it.

I blame no one, but myself. I found my passion and that passion caught me by surprise. I felt like there was so much to learn and so little time. I was trying to catch up, trying to get where everyone else seemed to be, trying to make my mark, trying to be everything, all at once.

It’s impossible and inhuman and I won’t do it anymore.

Maybe some of you feel this way too. Maybe you’re burning out big time from blogging. If you feel like you’re twittering on the edge of the grotesque, then it’s time to pry your clammy fingers from the mouse and lean back for a moment.

It’s time to be a human being again.

This doesn’t mean you stop blogging—far from it. But the human being has to emerge again. I’m going to be a mother, a wife, a filmmaker, a vegan, a runner, a motivator, an organizer, a camper, a volunteer, a writer and then a blogger. I am all of these things. And it’s all of these things that inform my blogging. If all I do is blog, I’ll end up with nothing to write about and my blogging will implode.

You have to live first, then blog.

Seems obvious, but the internet will feed you an endless stream of wants if you want it to. So I will stop wanting so much and remember what it is I really need. I don’t need to be the best, to compare, to win or to succeed at all costs.

I will return to who I really am and get back to what makes sense to me.

I will make my own rules. I will say, “forget it!” to SEO (for now), get to know my friends, sell things worth buying, give away great stuff, make loads of mistakes and focus on having amazing conversations. Most of you will find your own way to be human and make your own rules. The best bloggers already have.

Take Darren Rowse, for example. When I attended that conference in Vegas and sat in the audience at the keynote presentation, there was a tear in his eye when he spoke of his son who peeked over his shoulder, while he was writing “to the world”, and whispered, “Make sure you tell the world something important.” That’s likely Darren’s number one rule.

What’s important is the human stuff.

The stuff we all have in common, our pain, our struggles, our challenges, our worries, our victories, our oneness, and even our blogging. Because that reflection in the monitor is most beautiful when we see both the human being and the blogger looking back at us together. So I guess that makes me both a human being and a blogger after all.

Katie Tallo seeks to inspire simple, joyful life change through her blog, Momentum Gathering. Subscribe to her blog and grab her Life Cleanse Starter Kit if you need a little help feeling human.

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4 Great Tips to Build More Links to Your Blog Posts…Based on Scientific Analysis

This is a guest post by HubSpot’s social media scientist, Dan Zarrella. It contains data from his upcoming webinar “The Science of Blogging” taking place on December 9th.

Many marketers and small business owners see blogging, rightly, as an important aspect of their SEO efforts because of their ability to attract inbound links. And even beyond SEO, getting lots of links for your blog posts is key to establishing yourself as an expert and building traffic.

I’ve spent the past few months analyzing data on over 150,000 blog posts and I’ve identified several ways you can optimize your blogging efforts to drive more incoming links.

Day of Week

I found that blog post published in the early and mid business week tended to attract more links than articles published on other days. This is likely because the “linkerati” (people who control and create links, like bloggers) tend to spend the most time working on their sites during the week, as opposed to on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Time of Day

When I turned my analysis towards the hour of publishing, I found that blog posts published very early in the morning (like, 7AM early) attracted many more links than articles posted at other times during the day. This is because most linkerati are looking at their inboxes and feedreaders in the morning to find interesting content to write about and link to.

Most Linked-To Words

When I studied the words that occured in blog post and how they correlated with incoming links, I found words like “recent” and “soon” that indicated linkers were interested in writing about timely content. I also found many words like “insights,” “analysis,” and “review” that told me people were interested in linking to content that expressed a blogger’s personal and unique point-of-view.

Least Linked-To Words

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Sunday, December 5, 2010

When’s the Best Time to Publish Blog Posts?

This guest post is by HubSpot’s social media scientist, Dan Zarrella.

Of all the data analysis that I’ve done, day-of-week and time-of-day data has been consistently the most popular. So in preparation for my upcoming webinar, titled Science of Blogging, I decided to combine all of my existing data on timing with my new research into one master post on the subject.

The first time I looked at blog post timing was when I was analyzing retweets. I found that retweets exhibit a strong diurnal pattern, in that they’re more common during the day and less so at night. I noticed that retweet activity tended to peak around 4pm EST, suggesting that this might be the best time to tweet a blog post for maximum potential retweet reach.

When I looked at retweet activity over the days of the week, I saw that they peaked later in the work week, specifically on Friday.

Since I first published this graph, the most frequently cited piece of this research has been the idea that Friday at 4pm is the most retweetable time of the week. While your niche maybe different, this data was based on analysis of nearly 100 million retweets, so in aggregate, Friday at 4pm is indeed the most retweetable time of the week.

Moving on from retweets, I started studying Facebook sharing and discovered some things that surprised me about timing there, too.

First, while major news sites and blogs publish articles during the work week, articles that are published on Saturday and Sunday tend to be shared on Facebook more than those published during the week. Perhaps one reason for this is that (as Wired reported), more than 50% of American companies block Facebook at work.

Next, I looked at the effect that the time articles were published had on the number of times they were shared on Facebook. I found that while there is a fair amount of variation, articles published in the morning, around 9a.m. EST, tended to be shared more on Facebook than articles published at other times of the day.

Looking back at these four data points, it may seem that they’re contradictory, but thinking through them a bit more, we can see that they is not necessarily so. Both day-of-week charts tell us that we should experiment with publishing articles later in the week—on Friday and Saturday specifically.

And by publishing posts early in the day, but tweeting them later in the afternoon, we can stimulate both Facebook shares and retweets.

I recently did a survey of over 1,400 blog readers and I asked them what time-of-day they read blogs. Morning was the most popular, followed in decreasing popularity by the rest of the day. Most respondents reported reading blogs at more than one time, so this piece of data reinforces my suggestion to publish early in the morning.

The best timing advice, however, may actually be around frequency. Last week, I analyzed 1000 of the most popular blogs on the web, according to Technorati. I compared their posting frequency with the number of incoming links and visitors they had attracted (according to Yahoo and Compete).

I found that among very popular blogs, publishing multiple times per day led to a huge increase in a blog’s success. This tells us that rather than focusing one perfect day or time, we should aim to publish at many times, and on many days.

Have you experimented with post timing and tweeting? What has your experience shown about the best times of day or week to reach your readers?

Dan Zarrella is HubSpot’s social media scientist. This post contains data from his upcoming webinar The Science of Blogging, taking place on December 9th.

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Friday, December 3, 2010

The Rockstar Guide to Getting More Traffic, Fame, and Success

image of young woman in sunglasses

Have you ever been to a concert where the opening act was just awful?

Maybe their music was okay, but there was something about the performance that undermined your ability to enjoy it. The group just lacked that special something that would make them stand out, that would draw you in.

That quality they’re lacking is called showmanship — and it’s not just for musicians.

You can spot a blogger who lacks showmanship a mile away.

Even after they’ve built a small and loyal following of readers, they still never seem to reach the level of success that the “A-List” bloggers in their niche have achieved. They sometimes spend years trying to overcome that plateau. They can’t figure out why they never get past being the “opening act” for the real rockstars in their niche.

They get frustrated and discouraged. Many of them give up. They hang up their metaphorical guitars and get regular 9-to-5 jobs and tell stories about how rough the industry is.

Don’t become one of those. I’m going to show you how to get the showmanship and stage presence you need to become the main act in anyone’s feed reader.

What is showmanship, and how does it apply to blogging?

Showmanship, according to the infallible Wikipedia, is “the skill of performing in such a manner that will appeal to an audience or aid in conveying the performance’s essential theme or message.”

That should sound familiar. Conveying a theme or message to an audience is exactly what we’re doing with blogging and content marketing. Yet so many people struggle to develop a style that will set them apart from everyone else in their niche.

But even the most mundane niches can be made new and interesting if you’re willing to find something special you can bring to the table.

For example, one of my favorite performers is pianist Victor Borge, who could easily have achieved a fine career as a traditional classical pianist in front of a hushed concert audience.

Instead, he found a way to make the music interesting and entertaining by adding comedy to his performance.

His shows elicit roars of laughter from his audience — and when was the last time you saw the formally-dressed concert hall crowd rolling in the aisles? It was completely unconventional, but his audiences loved him for it.

And his mastery of the piano was undiminished.

What showmanship isn’t

Showmanship isn’t a gimmick. It isn’t tricking the audience.

If Borge had been a less-than-stellar pianist, he wouldn’t have been able to transcend the concert hall standards to create his own way of approaching the music. Putting on a show isn’t putting on a mask.

Find something that works for you and pursue it. No trickery or attempting to be someone else required.

Good showmanship, the kind that engages your audience, needs to have authenticity at its core in order to work. If you become a sleazy Internet marketer, resort to spamming, or engage in bait-and-switch schemes, your audience won’t care if you have the best show on earth.

No amount of showmanship can hide a scumbag. Instead, take your authentic self and add some style to create a “wow” factor that grabs the attention of your audience and won’t let go.

Showmanship and stage presence

Your showmanship is what you bring that’s unique.

But “unique” doesn’t necessarily mean “good.” You could be the only blogger out there dressing in bacon and playing a ukulele, but that doesn’t mean you have valuable information to impart.

If you’re going to help your audience feel confident about your authority, you’re going to need something more than showmanship.

You need stage presence.

Stage presence is your ability to connect with an audience.

At this year’s BlogWorld, Brian Clark gave an excellent example of how to use stage presence.

Especially when it comes to marketing, people are like ‘Oh, well I’m supposed to do this, or I’m supposed to do that.’ No you’re not, because then you’re going to do exactly what everyone else does and you’re not unique.

So don’t feel like you need to be Naomi Dunford. I’m probably more like her in real life, but I choose to keep that on the down-low.

(…) I try to help people out. I try to help them learn something and make a business related to that.

And it’s as [much] the “real” me as any other part of me, but we all play different roles.

So that’s just my two cents on authenticity. Be who you want to be to your people. Be the best “you” you can be for them — not for you, for them.

That’s stage presence. Knowing what part of your authentic self connects with your audience — and then choosing to emphasize that aspect — is the first step to becoming the main act instead of just the ho-hum opener.

7 ways to use showmanship to command the attention of your audience

  1. Choose a style that belongs to you. In order to be unique in your niche, you need to create a style that conveys who you are and what you do, in a way that your audience can get excited about. Find that “sweet spot” that will set you apart.
  2. Immerse yourself in the style you’ve chosen. Once you’ve decided on your style, immerse everything you do in that style. That’s what showmanship is all about — taking what you do and wrapping it in a unique angle that gets your audience’s attention. If you don’t infuse everything you do with a single style, your audience will be confused by the conflicting brands you’re presenting.
  3. Know what part of your personality connects with your audience. Being authentic doesn’t mean baring everything about yourself to the world. As Brian says, it’s about being the best “you” that you can be for your audience. Figure out what part of your personality “clicks” with your audience, and show more of that.
  4. Focus on your audience, not yourself. I love what Sonia said at BlogWorld right after Brian finished his definition of authenticity. She said: “It’s not about you. It’s never about you. In business, it’s always about your customer.” If you want an engaged audience, you need to focus on what they want, what they need, and what they like.
  5. Know the difference between authenticity and “too much information.” There’s a fine line between being authentic and telling your audience something they really didn’t want to know. Don’t cross the line into TMI. As Sonia says, “No one wants that much authenticity.”
  6. Act like an authority if you want to be seen as one. If you want to be seen as an authority in your niche, you need to present yourself in a way that’s consistent with that level of respect. If you’re a financial advisor and you constantly complain about being broke, no one’s going to be very interested in your advice. Be mindful of how you present yourself.
  7. Be consistent. At its core, branding is all about consistency — giving your audience the same positive experience every time they interact with you. If you want to command the attention of your audience, you need to be consistent in everything you do. Make sure everything you publish is in line with your overall brand, and stick to a consistent publishing schedule.

Being interesting isn’t enough

Being interesting isn’t enough if you want to establish yourself as an authority. Being talented isn’t enough, either.

Let’s face it, talented bands that are one-hit wonders are interesting for a time — then they fade into obscurity. No one wants that for their blog.

If you want to build a sustainable business model, you need to create a unique style that commands the attention of your audience, builds a solid connection with that audience, and establishes you as an expert.

Develop your showmanship and stage presence and you’ll be headliner for years to come. Even after you’ve turned old and gray, you’ll still be a rockstar.

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