Monthly Trends + Resolutions for a Better Blog

Happy 2011! How are the ole resolutions holding up so far? Have you stopped biting your nails, started a daily exercise regimen, and organized your closets yet? Me neither. Still, ’tis the season for new starts, and while you’re thinking about improving your health, your home, or your life balance, don’t forget about your blog. Make a resolution today to take your blog to the next level in 2011.

It’s the beginning of the month as well as the year, so, as always, Regator has provided blogosphere trends for the month, and I’ll use posts about these popular stories to inspire you to make a vow to improve your blog in the New Year. (The most-blogged about stories for December 2010, in order, were: Christmas, Wikileaks, Tax Cuts, DADT/Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Tron, New Year’s Eve, Net Neutrality, Elizabeth Edwards, Oprah, and Michael Vick.) Let’s make some resolutions!

1. I resolve to be funnier.
Inspiration: Cracked’s The 12 Most Unintentionally Disturbing Christmas Ads. Obviously, humor isn’t always appropriate, but it certainly has its place and can breathe life into a dry subject if it’s used correctly. If you can handle a bit of rough language, comedy blog Cracked.com provides plenty of inspiration, putting an amusing spin on everything from Christmas to science to pop culture.

2. I resolve to take extra time to write gripping intros to my posts.
Inspiration: The Chronicle Review’s Why WikiLeaksIs Bad for Scholars. The first few lines of your post will determine whether readers will stick around or click around. Don’t save your genius for the third paragraph. Use your first paragraph to make a promise, create intrigue, hit readers with a killer quote, or—as in this example from The Chronicle Review—build suspense with a story.

3. I resolve to help my readers solve more problems.
Inspiration: The Consumerist’s Calculate How Much Of A Raise You’ll Get On January 1 [Tax Cuts]. You’ve read it over and over here at ProBlogger, but it can’t be said enough: Be useful to your readers and they will come back for more. As you sit down to write each post, ask yourself what the reader will get out of it and why he or she should take the time to read it. Even if it’s not a straight-up, service-oriented post, like this example from The Consumerist, all of your posts should provide some benefit: entertainment, knowledge, advice, etc.

4. I resolve to take more time to craft my headlines.
Inspiration: Queerty’s Why Fox News’ Story On Gay Soldiers Living UnderDADTNever Got Filed. Your headlines should not be an afterthought and, if they are, this is the resolution for you. They’re all people see when your link is tweeted and the first thing potential readers see in RSS readers and aggregators. A great post with a mediocre headline will lose countless potential readers. This example from Queerty is keyword-heavy, potentially controversial, and seems to promise an intriguing bit of information.

5. I resolve to be more creative and to break out of the echo chamber.
Inspiration: Pushing Pixels’ The colors of “Tron: Legacy”. While many were blogging about Tron’s opening weekend numbers or its (awesome) Daft Punk soundtrack, Kirill Grouchnikov took a different approach and blogged a fascinating breakdown of the color usage in Tron’s computer world. It’s a perfect fit for that blog’s readers and a unique twist on a frequently covered story. If bloggers in your niche are writing about one particular story, find a way to put your own unique twist on it.

6. I resolve to use more photos and/or video.
Inspiration: The Big Picture’s A New Year rolls in. Photos and video add interest and depth and if you aren’t using many, this may be the resolution for you. Just be sure you’re using them legally. This example from The Big Picture shows just how striking the right photo can be.

7. I resolve to be more opinionated.
Inspiration: Tech Talk’s

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Big Good Tips From A Little Book And Other Stuff

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There’s lots of advice for writers out there today—books on how to write and what to write about, where to submit your work and how to get your literary foot in the front door when you want to be published. Some of the advice you can get is helpful and some is just thinly disguised advertising designed to get you to buy something someone has to sell.

It all comes around full circle in the end to a little book that I got way back in the day when we worked on typewriters and smoked in newsrooms. The Elements of Style by William Struck and E.B. White is a timeless manual for anyone that wants to be a writer because it is clear and concise and it tells you what you need to know about expressing yourself with the written word and leaves out what you don’t need.

And that brings me to other stuff. Has anyone else been following the social  media trending that been going on lately? I just read a study from the business experts at Deloitte that said while a fair percentage of new and forward thinking business is looking into social media, a large percentage still don’t understand what it’s all about and what kind of ROI they can expect on their investment. That makes me wonder if this is a real tool for business to use or just a fad that will slip from prominence eventually.

From a seo standpoint, Facebook or Twitter can drive traffic to your site but you need to be aware of the fact that these social media sites don’t work with keywords and links in the same manner that traditional seo does. Still, if enough people are talking about these sites being the next big thing, then they are bound to be some kind of self fulfilling prophecy in the sense that business will continue to flock to them regardless of their seo effectiveness.

So all that brings things back full circle. Regardless of whether you want to write for the social media or the seo world, you need to know how to write well. The medium doesn’t really matter in the end, it’s the message that counts. So here’s a few more techniques that you can use to make sure that your words attract attention.

Self editing always helps. I’ve just read an article that says you should read aloud when you’re proofing and only use a spell checker as a first screening. Remember too that Less is More. Usually the best way to write something is with the fewest words

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Buying and Selling Blogs with Strong Personal Brands

This guest post is by Andrew Knibbe of Flippa.

The responses to my last post raised the crucial issue of selling a blog that’s built around a strong personal brand.

Mark Wolfinger wrote, “When I write a blog, it’s my passion that the readers see. It’s my writing style and knowledge. Buy an existing blog and the blog’s voice changes immediately. How can you keep loyal readers who loved the previous voice?”

This is of course a key consideration in buying or selling a personally branded blog. It’s true that the strength of some personal brands may make a blog unsaleable, but that doesn’t need to be the case.

The blog as a business

In response to Mark’s comment, the Blog Tyrant pointed out, “Mark you read ProBlogger and hardly any of the posts are by Darren nowadays.”

This reminds me of that old saying that if you want to have a saleable business, you have to be able to step back at some point and work on it, rather than in it.

This seems to be the approach that Darren has taken with ProBlogger. He’s spent years building a strong personal brand, and building a blog that revolves around that. By establishing ProBlogger as a leading light in the niche, he’s able to attract some of the best bloggers and source high-quality content for the site, and that’s let him step back from the blog to work on aspects like product development.

We can guess that he’s now spending time he used to spend writing blog posts preparing courses, writing ebooks, and coming up with new concepts.

But the things that make ProBlogger what it is remain here, even if Darren’s time and presence on the blog has decreased from what it was when he started all those years ago. There’s a large and loyal community, a strong brand, an enormous, high-quality content inventory, and  a raft of happy advertisers, affiliates, and so on. So if ProBlogger was for sale, you can see that it would have a lot to offer a potential buyer.

Getting personal

What if this site was called DarrenRowse.net, rather than ProBlogger.net? Sure, that might reduce the overall sale price of the site, but it certainly wouldn’t make it unsaleable. As a potential buyer, you might choose to move it to a new domain, but if you were smart, and Darren was a caring seller, you’d probably negotiate a handover arrangement whereby you as the new site owner could be introduced to the ProBlogger readers and community.

Before you agreed to buy the site, you’d probably assess the alternative domains you could use, and you might buy one—possibly one like, say, ProBlogger, which talks about the niche more than a personality—as you bought the site. Perhaps you’d also secure Twitter and Facebook accounts with the same brand, or negotiate with the owner to transfer the existing account’s ownership with the blog.

During the handover period, you might undertake a gradual rebranding of the site and announce to users that its location was changing. Rather than switching off DarrenRowse.net the day your turned on the ProBlogger domain, you might have the two running in tandem, with a redirect attached to the personal domain, for a while.

Buying (or selling) an existing blog isn’t like buying a used car: it doesn’t need to be a take-it-or-leave-it situation. As the buyer, you can request any assistance you need to transfer the blog safely to your ownership, complete with its full complement of readers. If the seller cares about the community he or she has built up, they’ll hopefully be pretty happy to negotiate this kind of thing among the terms of the sale.

Finding opportunities on a personal blog

Another response to Mark’s comment on the article came from Alex, who wrote, “buying a blog which already has a small reader base and some articles can save you quite a bit of time, otherwise you’d need to “get the ball rolling” yourself, which is the hardest part of blogging, IMO.”

Mark replied, “It’s funny. I find writing to be the very easy part. And I have a decent number of readers (24,000 monthly unique). It’s the monetizing that’s difficult for me.”

These comments really show the variation that exists in the blog trading space—people buy and sell blogs for all sorts of reasons, and a blog that has real potential for one buyer will hold little appeal for another.

Take Mark’s comment, for example. It sounds like he’s built up a great content inventory, and a loyal, committed readership—but he has difficulty monetizing blogs. Alex says he finds the initial stages of starting a blog the biggest challenge, but perhaps he’s the type to easily spot monetization opportunities and do something about them. The fact that Mark’s been unable to monetize his blog presents an opportunity: if he wanted to, he might sell the blog to someone like Alex, who had monetization skills. After all, strong community and great content are valuable assets.

Mark comments that his unique style and personality are what readers come to his blog for. That’s great, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that, if he wanted to sell the blog, he couldn’t.

Firstly, he’d be choosy about the buyers he considered, looking for someone who knew his site and understood what it was about—he might well find that among the interested buyers were some of his site’s current users. He’d look for a potential buyer who had an appealing writing style that he felt would really engage his readers. Perhaps he’d invite them to write some guest posts so that he could see how his readers responded to the potential buyer, and to help that person build a profile among the readership in advance.

If the sale went ahead, he’d make a personal announcement to his readers, perhaps via email to subscribers as well as in a post on the blog itself. He might also recommend a handover period to help the transition go smoothly, and keep readers as loyal to the blog—and the new owner—as possible.

Personal brands can add an extra dimension to the buying and selling of blogs, but they don’t have to be a problem. A buyer might be able to find a personally branded blog that doesn’t have a strong personal style (we’ve all seen them online)—another opportunity for the astute buyer who knows what they have to offer.

Have you ever though about buying or selling a blog with a personal brand? What other concerns would you have about the process?

Andrew Knibbe is the Marketing Manager at Flippa, the #1 marketplace for buying and selling websites. He blogs at the Flippa blog. Follow him @flippa.

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Three Ways to Take Advantage of Being a Blogging “No One”

This guest post is by Chris, “The Traffic Blogger”.

My name is “no one.” Well frankly, to you, being that you have no idea who I am, my name might as well be “no one.” However, just because I am a “no one” does not mean I have nothing to say! Many of you may actually know exactly what it is I want to say because you also are a “no one” like me.

I am a “no one” and I have dreams. I have aspirations, a good work ethic and although there are others with the same name as me, there is only one person who can be me. So just because my name and situation are not unique, does not make my personality, good humor and helpful nature a common commodity. Nobody else can be me—even other “no one”s!

I am “no one,” and I have something to say! I exist! I want to help people and I need to reach out to them! I write helpful content several days a week but I cannot find other people besides my mother to read my work. I exist whether I have a comment, a follower, or not!

Are you a “no one” as well? I know that I sure was when I first started writing a gaming blog two years ago. It took many months of hard work before 1000 people called my site home and two years later a staggering 9,000 individuals read my content daily. What I did as a “no one” was the difference between building a site that worked and one that would lead to me wasting my time.

There are two drastically different ways to look at being a “no one:”

You can realize this is hard work and eventually give up.
You can take advantage of being a “no one.”

If you chose option ‘B’, good for you! But how can you possibly take advantage of being a “no one?”

1. Be a new presence with fresh ideas.

If you are a new person to any niche you have an opportunity to jump off the band wagon and stand all by yourself on an island build out of your own ideas. Many people find fresh ideas exciting and inspiring, so play off this notion as much as you can by making your site seem very new and inviting.

Write content that is challenging of old concepts and revolutionary at the same time. In other words, don’t be just another site in your niche. If you manage to pull this off then you will be the person everyone wants a guest post from or the one person they all talk about on forums (which you should also be participating in).

2. Experiment and don’t be afraid to mess up.

Making mistakes and learning is what it’s all about. Although you will never stop screwing up and learning, it pays to get the bulk of your speed bumps out of the way earlier on. Write outrageous articles, experiment with cheesy headlines and do all the big mistakes we all learn from early on. You’re a “no one” so nobody will mind your early mistakes. Take advantage of the situation and do some learning.

3. Build a relationship with the few readers you do manage to get, while you have time to do so.

As your site grows you will find it impossible to build relationships with your readers the way you could when you were a “no one.” If you skip this crucial stage of intimately connecting with those who like you from the outset, then you will be building a structure whose foundation is made of Swiss cheese.

Be intimate with your readers and pick their brains on what their problems are, what they think so far of your site, and more. You’ll need these fans later when you want to promote site growth, especially with regards to social media.

Are you a “no one”? If you are, what are you going to do about it? If you aren’t, what did you do to go from a “no one” to a “someone?”

Chris “The Traffic Blogger” writes on the subject of generating traffic for both new and advanced site owners for the purpose of making money online. He is a self-proclaimed expert on building communities and marketing solutions for those communities.

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The Fast Track to Building Your Business with Blogging

If you’d like to figure out exactly how to start reaping the benefits of more traffic, better search rankings, and the free social media word-of-mouth that blogging brings, consider taking the fast track with Blogging Success Summit 2011. And you won’t need to spend money on travel, hotel rooms, or even leave the house.

This is a completely virtual event and it’s currently 50% off (a limited-time early bird rate). Twenty-three of the world’s most respected blogging experts and brands reveal all the latest techniques and proven business-building tactics you need to immediately benefit from blogging.

Here’s the complete line-up:

• Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra
• Scott Monty (head of social media, Ford)
• Debbie Weil (author, The Corporate Blogging Book)
• Douglas Karr (co-author, Corporate Blogging for Dummies)
• Experts from McDonald’s, Cisco, Southwest Airlines, Sony, and Procter & Gamble
• Joe Pulizzi (co-author, Get Content Get Customers)
• Mari Smith (co-author, Facebook Marketing)
• Jay Baer (co-author, The Now Revolution)
• Chris Garrett (co-author, ProBlogger)
• Dave Garland (author, Smarter, Faster, Cheaper)
• Mike Volpe (VP of marketing, HubSpot)
• Rick Calvert (CEO, BlogWorld)
• Michael Stelzner (Social Media Examiner)
• Me! (Copyblogger)

I’ll be presenting along with Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett. This is Copyblogger’s third time as a content and marketing partner with Blogging Success Summit, and this year’s alliance with BlogWorld makes it the biggest and best yet.

The Summit starts February 1st and runs 4 weeks. You can attend the sessions live, enjoy the recordings at your own pace, or both. You also get an extra 17 sessions as a bonus (along with the 50% off) if you register now as an early bird.

Check out all the details here.

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The 3 Keys to Building a Successful Site

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With the new year, many people are looking to start up new sites and begin new projects. But while this is great, the simple truth is that the vast majority of these projects will fail, many becoming nothing but memories before even spring sets in.

So what can you do to make sure your new projects have, at the very least, the best chance of survival possible? There’s no truly easy answer but, over the years, I have noticed something of a pattern in the sites of mine and others that have taken off and done well. It may not be a sure-fire way to guarantee a successful site launch, but I certainly haven’t seen many sites be successful without these elements.

Of these keys there are three big ones that seem to be the best predictors possible of success. So, if you’re preparing to launch a new site or even just thinking about doing so, it’s likely worthwhile to check and make sure these factors are in place before pressing the publish button.

You might find it best to rethink and recalibrate your idea in order to avoid having it run aground later.

1. Choose Something You Are Passionate About

In blogging and website development in general, there is no substitute for passion. If you feel strongly about something, really enjoy it and put yourself behind it, it will show in everything you do.

While it’s great to be knowledgeable about a topic and an expert in the field, you can learn about a subject as you blog about it, becoming an expert as you go. You can’t however, develop a passion for it as you go.

Your passion is what gets your readers excited about your topic, whatever it is, and its what keeps you writing on it after the going gets tough and you would otherwise be thinking about quitting.

In short, if you don’t feel strongly about your topic, you’ll never be able to engage your readers and, when that happens, it will just be too easy to quit and walk away.

2. Find A Good, Under-Served Niche

Once you’ve found a topic you’re passionate about, you need to find a niche within that topic that has a real need for your site. Whether it’s a new audience to target, a sub-genre of that area or just a new angle or slant, you have to do something truly unique with your site.

If you walk into a field where dozens of larger, better-established sites are already entrenched, you’re most likely going to make very little progress. Finding a smaller market that is underserved lets you get your foot in the door and then establish yourself before moving into larger fields.

On the Web, it is much better for a new site to be a big fish in a smaller pond than the reverse. With over a billion users of the Web, you can most likely find an audience even in niches that might seem impossibly small.

If you target well and offer something unique, you’ll likely find that the audience is there.

3. Keep Determination Alive

On the Web, “overnight success stories” stories takes months or even years to happen. For every site that’s a hit within weeks of publication, there are thousands of sites that got there by sticking with it and growing it the old fashioned way.

Go into your site assuming that the first 6 months to a year will be fairly abysmal and use that time to create good content and promote it. The efforts may not have immediate returns but will pay off in the longer run.

If your niche truly is unique, you’ll likely even have people telling you that you’re crazy and that you can never build a site in that niche. This is often where passion is the most crucial as it keeps you from giving up when the naysayers show up.

All in all, look at your site as a long-term project and not something to give up on within the first six months or longer and you’ll likely start to see the first rewards for your effort. Once that happens, building toward a successful site is much easier and much more natural.

Bottom Line

When it’s all said in done, the key to building a successful site is to find a topic you’re passionate about, find a niche that you can serve well and then stick with it. It seems simple, but most sites are started without one or more of these variables.

Do they guarantee a successful site? No. But not having them does virtually guarantee a site won’t succeed.

Unless your plan is to get extremely lucky, which is never a good “plan” regardless, these are the things you need before putting words on screen or installing your CMS. Without them, the project may be doomed before it begins and that makes the entire effort a giant waste of time.

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How to Get More Mobile Visitors Onto Your Email List

On Copyblogger recently we’ve talked about why it’s so important to make your website mobile-friendly.

And we’ve hammered on how critical it is to get people onto your email list.

But there’s a problem: it can be really hard for your mobile visitors to sign up for your newsletter.

Here’s why:

Most mobile-friendly themes (in WordPress or other content management systems) hide the sidebars. They show just the main content area. For example, in the mobile theme I used for one of my sites, there’s a built-in way to share posts with Twitter, but there’s no way for a visitor to see the signup box in my sidebar. No matter what they do, they just can’t get there.

Even if you’re not running a special mobile theme (for example you’re depending on the built-in mobile-friendly goodness of a framework like Genesis) your visitors are still just looking at your main content column.

Why? Because even though they see your full page when they initially arrive, the first thing they’re going to do is “double-tap” on the content column to blow it up to a readable size. That pushes those sidebars out of sight and out of mind.

Also remember that if someone is reading your site on a mobile device, you probably don’t have their full attention. So don’t expect them to take the initiative and hunt around for your signup box. They won’t.

How to fix the problem in two easy steps

The solution is simple. You need a call to action for your newsletter at the bottom of your content column.

Not in the sidebar. Not in the footer. You want it right there at the bottom of your text, so it’s the first thing people read after they finish your post.

Step one is to copy the code of your signup box and drop it onto its own page. Give it a sexy name like yourblog.com/subscribe. Add some content that lets people know why it’s a good idea to subscribe. And be sure to test that it works.

(Here’s an example if you need one.)

Step two is to get a call to action and a link to your new signup page onto the bottom of every single page you create. You can do this manually, by typing or pasting it into every post, or you can do it automatically by editing your theme.

I actually prefer doing it manually. (That’s also how they do it on Copyblogger.) I like to vary the call to action depending on the content of the post. And writing it reminds me to make sure that the rest of my content is mobile-friendly.

For example, if I’m showing a video hosted on my own site, I’ll provide a link to a copy on YouTube, so people on iPhones or iPads can see it. And if I’m using a Flash-based audio player, I’ll provide a link to download the MP3, which also allows it to play on mobile devices.

If you’re comfortable with code, you can insert the signup link into your regular theme with a hook or a widget so it shows at the bottom of the content column. Then it will show up automatically on every post, past and future.

But if you’re using a mobile theme, I don’t recommend modifying the code. That’s because your mobile theme is probably a plugin or a module, and any customizations you make will be overwritten when you update the plugin. For normal human beings, the chance that you’ll update your mobile theme without remembering to reinstall your customizations is pretty high, and unless you visit your site frequently on a mobile, you won’t notice the mistake for months.

Getting people onto your email list should be a major goal with every post you write. No matter what device someone uses to read your content, you can make it easy for them to get to your signup box.

It takes just a couple of minutes to copy your signup box onto a standalone page, and only seconds to add a link at the end of each blog post. Start doing it now, because mobile traffic is only going to increase … and you want to be sure you’re there to capture it.

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