Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Twitter Backgrounds are Branding Machines

I don’t use Twitter as much as I probably should, and I actually use it for more of a blog feed than anything else. No matter how you use Twitter, it’s important to get your name and brand across. With that being said, think about your Twitter account and how many people are visiting your profile page ever day, weekly or even yearly. Even if YOU aren’t actively posting on Twitter, it doesn’t mean that people aren’t visiting your page, so it’s important to leave a lasting impression.

Twitter Backgrounds Leave an Immediate Impression

What’s the first thing you see when you visit someones Twitter page? Most likely it’s their background image. Not only do the backgrounds give us a creative insight on what the person is about, but it’s also a cool way to get your message or web site across. Who are you, what’s your business and how can I learn more about you? These are all different topics that you can use in your background.

Since going live with a new blog design, I thought it would be a good idea to change things up and go with a new Twitter background as well. You can see the new background below, which was designed by DesignPax.com.

twitter backgroundsMy New Favorite Twitter Background – View Full Profile

My first Twitter background had some basic information on myself and where you could visit my blog and social pages. This time around, I just wanted to go for a big branded effort and get “ZacJohnson.com” across to the user.

Excellent Twitter Backgrounds and Resources

What are some of you favorite and most memorable Twitter backgrounds that you’ve come across while scouring around Twitter? Instead of running to Twitter and having to visit all of your followers pages individual, many design blogs have done the work for us. I love looking through galleries of Twitter backgrounds and seeing the creative ideas and designs that people come up with. Below are a few sites that feature some of the best designs we’ve all come across.

twitter backgroundsEffective Twitter Backgrounds: Examples and Current Practices
100+ Incredible Twitter Backgrounds
42 Twitter Backgrounds
40 Cool Twitter Backgrounds
25 of the Best Designed Twitter Homepages

If you don’t have your own unique Twitter background, you should! It’s free branding that may be getting seen by hundreds, if not thousands of people daily. Get creative and design your own Twitter background, or find someone that specializes in design work, like I did with DesignPax.com.

What’s the inspiration for your Twitter background, or some of the favorite designs you’ve come across?

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Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Introducing the Social Eyes Theme for WordPress

image of the Social Eyes theme

The importance of owning your own online real estate is becoming more obvious every day. Why make others rich off the sweat of your labor and your passions?

So if you’re in love with all the traffic and reach that social networking sites provide, you’ll want to take a long look at one of the latest creations from Copyblogger Media’s StudioPress division — the Social Eyes Theme.

By all means, stay engaged with your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn communities. But do it smartly, by bringing them back to a socially-optimized place of your own.

Here’s a quick look at what you’ll get “out of the box” with the brand-new Social Eyes theme:

  • Quick-change between two different color schemes without touching a line of code
  • A beautiful social networking feel for your website design
  • Evolve with your site’s growth using six different page layout options
  • Show off your latest content using the featured article function
  • Logical navigation & category layout that lets your readers get to what they want, fast
  • All the SEO, security, and design benefits of the Genesis Framework
  • Unlimited updates, domains you can use the theme on, and support (you’re not on your own)

Click here to dig deeper into the Social Eyes theme.

Or, click here to get more details on the Genesis Framework and find out why it’s the smartest way to build any WordPress site.

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How to Harness Your Email List to Help Pay Your Rent

This guest post is by the Blog Tyrant.

Wouldn’t it be nice to send out an email or two and pull in $10,000+ to pay your rent or mortgage payments for the year? It is actually possible using your own products or those of selected affiliates. And while some of you will be thinking that word “affiliates” sounds dirty and underhanded, I’m here to tell you that affiliate marketing is actually one of the most honest ways to make money on the Web.

In this post I am going to show you how you can make $10,000+ a year using your email list and a product or affiliate program. I’ll even do a bit of math to prove it.

eMail
Creative Commons License photo credit: Esparta

How it works

Let me start by giving you a little overview of how this all works, in case you’re totally new to the idea. I’ll go in to more detail later on.

  1. Use your blog to grow an email list
    If you’ve read any of my other guest posts on Problogger you will notice that I have a pretty (un)healthy obsession with email lists. I’m constantly telling my readers to focus on growing a list of active, engaged, and interested email subscribers. It should be the main focus of almost every blog.
  2. Provide value
    The most important thing to remember with this process is that you need to provide value. You need to enrich the lives of your subscribers. You need to solve their problems. Without this step you will find that your list grows largely unresponsive.
  3. Create a product or find affiliate programs
    The next steps is to create a product of your own (ebook, ecourse, etc.) or find a product of someone else’s that you can promote and sell to your email list. It needs to be highly relevant, valuable, and helpful.
  4. Promote it to your email list
    This stage is actually rather complex and can involve a pre-launch and launch, as well as automated messages and so on. The net result is that you make a lump sum of money during a launch period, or an ongoing stream of income from automated sales that happen over time.

The whole thing can be a very exciting process and, if it’s done correctly, it is an extremely ethical way to make good money while enriching the lives of your subscriber list.

Doing the math

Now, let’s do a little math to see if $10,000 per year is really possible. In fact, if you really catch a hold of this concept you’ll find that $10,000 is actually rather conservative. The possibilities with this type of marketing are endless.

Let’s take a look:

  1. Capture four email subscribers per day
    Let’s assume you are able to capture four email subscribers per day. It is a very small amount that any one can do with ideas like this and this.4 x 365 = 1460 subscribers per year.
  2. Sell a $37 ebook to 20% of your list
    If your followers are loyal and engaged you should be able to sell to around 15% to 20% of them.1460 subscribers x 0.2 = 292 sales @ $37 = $10,804

Now, for those whose lists are significantly larger than this, the estimates are conservative. For those who have smaller lists, this can serve as inspiration to keep going with your blogging work. Remember, an ebook is just one example of the multitude of things you can promote to your list.

How to make $10k+ per year with email subscribers

George is Keeping an Eye On You!
Creative Commons License photo credit: peasap

The wonderful thing about this process is that it can be expanded upon to incredible levels. For some bloggers, $10,000 is a tiny sum of money. My hope is that this post serves as a catalyst for you to learn more about the field and really take your blog to its full potential.

1. Grow the email list

The email list is the backbone of all good blogging income sources. If you can capture a large number of email addresses of readers who love what you write, trust your advice, and look to you for help and new information, then you are setting yourself up to be in a very profitable situation.

I know what you’re thinking: “But isn’t it rude/annoying/spammy to sell stuff to my followers?” This is a very common question. I encounter so many people who don’t want to sell anything to their subscribers but, to be honest, the logic doesn’t make sense to me. Why? Because, like everyone else, you also have bills to pay, you aren’t trying to rip anyone off, and with the right products, you can help your subscribers to better their situations.

Don’t get me wrong: some people abuse their lists. I don’t condone this at all. But guys like Darren, who only sell high-quality ebooks or training courses that can help you grow a bigger and better blog, are helping their subscribers. Why shouldn’t Darren make some money selling a product that has taken him years and years to acquire the knowledge to create—and helps you in a big way?

How can you grow your list quickly?

  • Focus on value and quality information
    Your blog needs to publish high-quality content that adds value to the lives of your readers. Every time someone sees a post on your blog, they should leave feeling like a problem is solved. This is important.
  • Have an angle
    There are hundreds of millions of blogs out there. You need an angle. Why should people read your stuff over someone else’s? Without an attached story or angle, you give a person no reason to subscribe to your blog.
  • Use Aweber to add subscription boxes and send a free ebook
    I recently wrote a post about why I switched to Aweber and the reasons are simple: you can add a subscription box to your blog in about five minutes, you can send out a series of automatic follow-up emails and, best of all, you can send out a free ebook automatically. This is a tried and tested method for capturing a lot of email subscribers: write a highly valuable ebook that appeals to your niche, and give it away in exchange for their subscription.
  • Write guest posts related to your niche
    Once your free ebook offering is up and running, get out there and start guest posting on as many of the top blogs as possible. Darren has a thorough post on how to do this, so the only thing that I’ll add is that you should make your posts as good as possible, and in some way relate them to your free ebook. This ensures that all the visitors that trickle through to your site are interested in your stuff.
  • Engage people in email, Twitter, comment threads, etc.
    If you want your email subscribers to be loyal and engaged, you want to make sure you engage them in as many places as possible. As a general rule, I reply to every comment on my blog, and Twitter and Facebook accounts. I work from home so it’s easy for me to do this, but even if you work in an office, you should make an effort to reply to contacts and commenters each evening when you get home.

As a general rule of thumb, the number of email signups you attract is a good indicator of how successful your blog is. You might be getting all the traffic in the world, but unless you can convert it somehow, you probably aren’t making much progress. Capturing as many email subscribers as possible is the first and most important step in affiliate marketing.

2. Create a product and/or find an affiliate product to promote

This section is broken up in to two parts—your two different options. The first option is to create your own product and sell that to your list. I prefer this option because you can tailor it to suit your readers’ needs and wants. The second option is find someone else’s product to promote to your list for a commission (i.e. an affiliate program). Let’s take a look at both.

Creating your own product

The wonderful thing about the Internet is that it allows you to create your own product without much in the way of difficulty or start-up costs. In a recent article on how stay-at-home moms can make money, I said that a product launched off the back of an expert blog is one of the easiest and most rewarding ways to make an honest living online. This is true.

Your product could take one of many forms:

  • an ebook
    Creating an ebook is one of the simplest ways to make money from your blog. All you do is brainstorm a concept, write it out in Word or Open Office, tizzy it up with graphics and pictures, and then convert it into a PDF. Instant product. The problem? There are a lot of them out there. People have become a bit blind to them. If you are going to sell an ebook, you have to make sure it is of an outstanding level of quality and addresses a problem that’s massively relevant to your blogging audience. Ideally, it will cover a topic that hasn’t already been heavily written about.
  • an ecourse
    Another popular option is to develop an ecourse that teaches your readers how to do something. It could take the form of a series of emails sent out every week, or it could be an ebook mixed with video and delivered in module form. This is sometimes a better option because, the course content can be created or amended on the go, to respond to the feedback you get from users.
  • a membership site
    This is new black: it seems like everyone is creating membership sites nowadays. A membership site is basically a password-protected area of your blog that people can only access by paying. It could contain tools or courses or a forum of experts, for example. Some of the more successful membership sites are SEOBook and SEOmoz.
  • a physical product
    If you are one of these talented people who have an actual real-world skill like painting or designing clothes, you might want to make your product a physical one. This can work extremely well if you have a big list of people who admire your work.

Whatever you decide to create, you have to make sure it appeals to your readers and continues to add value as you’ve done on your blog. People simply will not pay for something unless they know that it will add to their lives in a meaningful way.

Promoting someone else’s product

If you don’t have the time, energy, or ideas to create your own product, you can start out by promoting other people’s—by becoming an affiliate. For example, if I created an amazing Blog Tyrant ecourse, I would offer people the opportunity to sell that ecourse on my behalf and earn a commission (usually 40% to 80%) on every sale. If you believed in that product (trust me, it’d be awesome!) then you could sell it to your list. Money for jam.

There are a few prerequisites to generating an income through affiliate sales:

  • The product must be relevant.
    If you run a dog-training blog there is almost no chance that my amazing Blog Tyrant product would sell to your list. You need to find affiliate products that are highly relevant to your blog.
  • You must believe in it/use it yourself.
    Personally, I never promote an affiliate product unless I use it myself. My site is all about helping people dominate their niche and grow an online business that allows them to work from home. Why would I risk my reputation (and in some cases friendships) promoting a product that I’ve never used?
  • It must be reputable and safe.
    Some affiliate programs out there really do not offer good protection for their customers. It’s getting rarer and rarer, but every now and then you come across a program that gets people involved with spam, or makes it difficult to get a refund. If you are going to promote something to your list, you want to make sure it comes from a reputable source that you know and trust. Shoemoney says that he never promotes an affiliate unless he has met the owner in person. This is a good rule.

Please do not think that affiliate programs are all dirty. They aren’t. There are some really solid brand names out there who are promoting very valuable tools and information. Darren’s one of them. With a little bit of research and planning, you will be able to find something great for your crew.

Finding affiliate products to promote
There are so many different places to find affiliates out there—some good, some bad. What you often find is that it is best to locate the product you want to promote first, then figure out what company that product creator is using to sign up affiliates. Some of the main ones you might want to look at include:

A lot of the larger companies run their own affiliate programs. In this case you want to visit the sites of the sellers themselves, scroll down to the very bottom and look for the Affiliates link that will direct you to the signup page.

3. Sell the product to your email list

The final part of this post is all about selling your product, or your chosen affiliate product, to your email list. This topic could be studied for a lifetime, but here, let’s look at a rough game-plan.

Pre-launch

The first step is to generate some interest among your subscribers around the product launch. You want to prepare your readers for the big sale day. There are lots of different ways to do this, and many different schools of thought as to what works and what doesn’t. Some ideas include:

  • a free give away
    Having a free give away that is related to your product launch can be a good idea because people circulate the free part to their friends and on their blogs. It can also help you capture more email addresses to use for the actual promotion.
  • a time-sensitive signup area
    Something else that can work is to have a time-sensitive signup area. For example, if you are releasing a membership site you might only want to release it to 100 members. Having an earlybird signup area on the blog a week in advance can get people motivated to join, rather than risk missing out.
  • create an affiliate program
    Around this time, if you’re selling a product you’ve created yourself, you also want to set yourself up as affiliate seller so that other bloggers can sell your products. Email your list of high-profile blogging contacts, letting them know about the product launch and the affiliate program, and ask them to help you out.

Whatever you decide to do, make sure it really does generate some buzz. The idea is to get as many people talking about the product, and sharing news about it, as possible.

Launch

The launch stage is where you actually send out the email to your list promoting your new product. You should also do a post on your blog to ensure your RSS readers hear about what’s going on. Make sure your launch email:

  • has a strong call to action
  • details all the specs of the product
  • uses social proof
  • focuses on benefits, not features.

As I said, this is only supposed to be a rough game-plan. There are some amazing articles out there that give you specific details on this process. I’d recommend starting with Copyblogger’s landing pages tutorials, Darren’s video on product launches, and Yaro’s article on creating an ebook.

Automate follow-ups for affiliate products

One thing to remember is that if you’re promoting someone else’s product you don’t have to do all this launch stuff. You can actually just set it to be entirely automatic. How? Well remember we talked about Aweber’s automatic messages earlier? What you can do is create a series of follow-up emails that go to every subscriber that you get on a sequence of set days.

For example, let’s say you subscribe to my Dog Training blog. On day one I might send you an automatic email thanking you for subscribing. Then on day three, you get an email with a highly useful dog training tip or tutorial. A week later, you get another training tip and then, maybe a day after that, I send you an email with an affiliate product that relates to the tips and tutorials, and really helps you solve the problem. It’s all automatic, and it works extremely well.

Remember, don’t flood your subscribers with emails, and don’t send anything out unless it’s highly valuable and useful to your subscribers. Don’t risk compromising your relationship.

Have you done it? Will you try it?

I’d really like to open up the comments now and ask you guys for any advice from your own email campaigns. Have you tried these kinds of approaches before? Did they work well? I’d also really like to know whether you will give this a try on your own blogs. Do leave a comment and let me know.

The Blog Tyrant is a 25 year old guy who makes a full time living from blogs and online businesses. He has sold several blogs for $20,000 plus and answers every comment he gets on his blog. Subscribe by email or follow him on Twitter, Facebook or

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Monday, February 14, 2011

Should You Use Affiliates to Promote Your Products?

Last week I shared my answer to a common question that many people getting into online product marketing ask: “Should I offer a money-back guarantee?” Today I want to tackle two others:

“Should I start an affiliate program to promote my product?” If so, “how much should I pay affiliates as a commission?”

I had this conversation only yesterday with one blogger who was launching his first ebook. He had decided to set up an affiliate program but was unsure about what percentage to pay. He were leaning towards 10% commissions, mainly because he didn’t want to eat into his profit margins too much. I’ll share the response I gave that blogger here.

But first, let’s take a step back to look at some pros and cons of affiliate programs.

Why an affiliate program could be worthwhile for your product

The main reason that you should consider an affiliate program for your product is simply that it will increase the potential reach that you will have as you promote your product.

Whether your blog is big or small, there’s always room to increase your reach and have your offer seen by more people. Pretty much every topic has other blogs, sites, forums, and individuals interacting on social media. To set up an affiliate program increases the incentive that these sites and individuals have to promote your product.

Of course, not everyone will be motivated by an affiliate commission (some bloggers don’t use them at all), but you will find that some are definitely moved by them and those people could open up a considerably larger audience for you.

Another benefit of affiliate programs is that they help to grow your own list of customers. This benefits you in the here and now with the product you’re promoting at present, but also offers potential for future products.

A new customer that comes in from an affiliate promotion today can turn into a life-long customer if you develop a relationship with them. A $10 sale from an ebook could end up leading to five more $10 sales in the coming year—or it could end up generating a $200 sale if you launch larger products down the track.

Why you might not want to start an affiliate program?

I think it’s important to note that having an affiliate program isn’t always the best option for everyone. There are some costs to consider along with the opportunities they open up.

  • Decreased profit: Let’s start with the most obvious cost—affiliate programs eat into your profit margin. When someone recommends your product they do bring in new business, but you share the benefit of that business with them. A $20 ebook sale effectively becomes a $10 sale if you share a 50% commission. For some bloggers this is a stumbling block, and not something that they want to do (I’ll speak more about it below).
  • Time: One of the big hidden costs of an affiliate program is the time that it can take to manage. I’ve not found it to be a huge time commitment, but there are some extra logistical tasks that you might find yourself doing when you introduce affiliates into your strategy. These include paying them (depending upon the system you use), providing them with sales material, motivating them, helping those who have limited technical knowledge to set up links, and so on. You will find that some affiliates need a bit more hand-holding than others—and some can be quite high maintenance!
  • Loss of control: Another hidden cost of affiliate programs is that you lose a little control over the way your product is promoted. Not everyone will promote it in the same way you do. I can think of a number of times when this has been a problem—particularly when affiliates have used hype and built products up to be better than they actually are in order to get sales. In doing so they created false expectations in buyers that the owner of the product had to then manage.

How much should you to pay affiliates?

This is one of the most common questions I’ve been asked on this topic, but of course there are no real wrong or right answers. You’ll want to consider a number of factors:

  1. Price of product: As someone who promotes a variety of products through affiliate programs, I know that it’s not just the percentage commission that I look at, but also the price of the product. For example, 50% of a $5 product is certainly not as attractive as 50% of a $100 product. There may not be a lot you can do about this, but it’ll be a factor for those considering promoting your product.
  2. Size of the untapped market: If you’re just starting out and don’t yet have much of an audience of your own, you might want to consider a higher commission in order to give an incentive to affiliates to work for you to get things going. However, if you have a large audience of people who trust you already, you might not be as reliant upon affiliates to help you make your product successful.
  3. Future product releases: Some people use affiliate programs more as lead generators than anything else. I know of a number of people who actually offer affiliates 100% of sales to give them a big incentive to promote the product. The hope is that, while the affiliate is the only person to make money from the initial promotion, the sales will generate a list of buyers to which the product owner can promote future products.
  4. Tiered commissions: One strategy that some product producers use is to offer bigger affiliates a higher percentage than smaller affiliates. In this way, they increase the incentive for those who have larger audiences.
  5. Physical vs virtual products (and other overheads): Many information products offer affiliates 40-50% commissions. This is in part because there are limited overheads on virtual products. To sell a $20 ebook only really costs me a few cents for hosting and bandwidth, and a small amount in PayPal and shopping cart fees (after the cost of design and so on). On the other hand, a physical product will have a much smaller profit margin. I have one friend who has an online camera store, and he’s only able to offer his affiliates 4% commissions, because his own profit margin isn’t high.
  6. Consider your expenses carefully: Even if you’re selling virtual products, keep all of your expenses in mind. I had an interaction with an ebook seller recently who didn’t realize what the PayPal fees would be on his $5 ebooks. He offered affiliates 60% commissions on the sale price and, once he took out PayPal fees and his design and proofreading costs, he realized he wasn’t really making more than a few cents per ebook.

Why I pay 40% commissions instead of 10%

Let me finish with my answer to the blogger who was going to offer 10% commissions on his ebooks. He was concerned that commissions would eat into his profits, and was struggling to justify why he should really pay more to someone for simply promoting his ebook when he’d done all the work to make it.

I can see where he was coming from, but my philosophy for paying higher commissions on my own products (I pay 40%) is that any new customer that an affiliate brings in is a customer I’d probably never have had otherwise. So earning 60% (or $12 on a $20 ebook) is $12 more than I’d have had in my pocket than if I hadn’t had an affiliate promoting my product.

I also take into account the fact that that person buying my ebook might also buy future products from me (both my own and affiliate promotions that I promote). They may also recommend my products to their friends and may become a regular reader of my blog (and help to increase advertising revenue). So the inital $12 profit could end up being considerably more in time.

Do you have an affiliate program for your products?

I’d love to hear from others who sell products from their blogs. Do you offer an affiliate program? Why, or why not? If you do, what commission level do you pay, and how did you come to that figure?

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The Financial Cost Of The Egyptian Revolution

While everyone around the world was concerning themselves with the quest for freedom by the Egyptian revolutionaries, there were other matters that needed to be taken into account. There was some quiet talk about the financial fallout from the uprising by those reporters who wondered what happens to any economy when the web goes down, but the real consequences weren’t known until recently.

Now at least some of these numbers are coming in and the cost is staggering and should be a lesson to any of those depots out there who think the best way to getting their way is to repress people’s freedom of speech by shutting off their Web. Read Write Web has recently reported the money number is $90 million for the financial cost of the Egyptian Internet blackout, and they think the real tally might be much higher.

Reporting on that number does not suggest the revolution was in any way unnecessary or counterproductive. There’s no way people in North America should criticize those that need to go to extreme measures to get the basic freedoms we all enjoy. In fact, those numbers should be a lesson to all the despots around the globe that think shutting down the Internet while they line their own pockets is the way to keep their riches flowing.

The point here is that cutting yourself off from the rest of the world might seem like a good idea but everyone needs to take a more long range view of what the internet means to a modern society and that includes what social media can cost when you lose it.

It’s important to keep in mind these are people who rely on tourism, sure, but there’s more to it than that. There have been estimates that place damage to the outsourced call centers that the country relied on for part of their income that serviced overseas customers in the millions.

Forbes even made some calculations that include commerce lost on the fact that Egypt’s ecommerce industry was out millions a day. The point here is clear in that while everyone was getting excited about how the Internet was driving a new social fabric for Egypt, they forgot about how important it was going to be to the new economy when that starts to arise.

It’s worth remembering the web has worked its way into many different areas of life right across the world and while social media is the big driver for change, the tools that are emerging to change history will also be needed to help rebuild and support economies after that change is accomplished. The people of Egypt started a revolution based on their knowledge of what social media was about and they’ll be there to implement it into their financial institutions as well.

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Writing Content Rich Articles with Powerful Anchor Text

Every business has a customer base. And the job of writing web content for this customer base is often a daunting task, particularly if the business is a specialty or niche business. Who are the customers and what are they looking for? What do they want to spend? How do they want to acquire the product or service? Do they want to buy online or simply just do research? These are just a few of the questions web marketers need to ask before diving into content creation.

Niche business web content should shoot to answer those questions or cater to revealing the answers, all while influencing the reader with a call to action (“Buy this product, use this service!”) Doing research on who will be visiting the site, who might potentially end up there by accident, and what their needs and wants are can help direct the content strategy.

Intermix Useful Advice with Your Own Backlinks

A very effective way to create content for a niche business is to build a value-added blog, intermixing useful tips and advice with links back to the store or website. For example, an office furniture company may post a useful “3 Tips for Buying File Cabinets” article to their blog, then hyperlink popular search phrases like “fireproof filing cabinets,” “office storage,” or “lateral files” to the products they have to offer. The reader clicks on these terms, is brought to the business’ website, and, once there, hopefully looks around, working through the different categories of product offerings, whether they realize they need those items or not. The results can be a new customer, new referral or, at the very least, increased traffic to the business’ site.

As with any website, using key words and search terms in product category headers is key as well. In the instance of a furniture company, using the generic term “chairs” would not be as effective as using “office chairs,” “ergonomic chairs,” or “used office chairs.” Being as descriptive as possible without narrowing the term to the point of being non- searchable is important. It’s a balancing act, and becomes easier with experience.

Think Like a Customer When Writing Your Content

While writing targeted copy can seem perplexing and confusing, it’s really not difficult. Remember to keep the potential customers’ needs in mind, consider what and how they might be thinking and develop useful content around those ideas. Pepper your content with links to the business’ website or products, and strive write “notice-me” content that will get plenty of social media attention. This strategy is sure to help increase site visits…and hopefully business!

This guest post was written by Liberty Kontranowski, a freelance writer with hundreds of articles published online and in print. She regularly writes content for a business which specializes in cubicles and discount office cubicles.

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Sunday, February 13, 2011

How to Impress Blog Visitors Before they Start to Read

This guest post is by Darren of Findermind.com

Isn’t the best way to impress readers by providing great content? My answer would be yes, because most people come to your site for your content.

There are, however, some things you can do to impress and build credibility among your (first-time) readers even before they start to read what you have to say. How? Let me explain.

Provide quantitative instead of qualitative statements

People are not stupid. Messages like “we are the best blog providing blogging tips” won’t work. Your visitors are skeptical. They want evidence to show you’re the best blog for blogging tips. That’s why it’s important to provide quantitative instead of qualitative statements. Here are some examples of quantitative statements:

  • 116 new subscribers daily
  • over 56 new twitter followers every day
  • join over 170, 000 subscribers (this example’s from ProBlogger!).

In conversion rate optimization, using statements such as these is considered a best practice. Why? Because it consistently produces higher conversion rates.

There is, however, one good way to provide believable qualitative statements…

Let somebody else do the bragging for you

This concept is used a lot around products releases, where it’s known as “providing testimonials.” But, of course, you can use the same concept for your own website? If, for example, Darren mentioned something nice about your blog, why not showcase it to your readers? An example might be:

“Absolutely the most useful blog on WordPress Tips”—Darren Rowse, ProBlogger.com

As you can notice, this is a qualitative statement (without any specific evidence). People won’t believe you if you brag about yourself. “We’re the best, the greatest, the cheapest…” Sorry, that doesn’t work. Do you believe it when the author of a specific blog says they’re the best in their niche? One of the first questions that comes to mind after reading this is, “Why are you the cheapest, greatest, and best?”

There is some research, however, to support the claim that if you let another person do “the bragging” for you, then you can establish credibility quickly. In chapter 22 of his best-selling book 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, Dr. Robert Cialdini mentions a study he’s done with Jeffrey Pfeeffer (you can view the study here in PDF format).

The pair asked study participants to imagine themselves in the role of a chief editor for a particular book publisher. Their current job was dealing with a particular author. To get an impression of that author, they had to read an excerpts of a negotiation for a sizable book advance. The results showed that the participants rated the author more favorably in every area when his bragging was done by his manager, than in those areas where the author bragged about himself.

If you mention a quote from someone else (like in the above ProBlogger example), then it’s best to put it above the fold—next to your logo, for example. There’s often a lot of empty space there, and some people use that for ads, but you can use it for building credibility among first-time visitors.

Put a universal Like button on your blog

The above screen shot is from Mashable.com. At the top of their sidebar, they display a universal Like button which is visible on every post and every page.

This can communicte significant social proof, and has one big advantage: it’s very easy to click on. Also, it’s very easy to locate—more on that later.

Why use this instead of the Facebook social plugin? After all, Problogger does:

The answer is that the Facebook social plugin has several disadvantages :

  • It has to be placed below the fold and in the sidebar. Space above the fold is most commonly used for ads.
  • The Facebook Like button is a lot harder to find, with so many elements competing for users’ attention. I would estimate that the single Like option on the universal button is at least three times easier to find because there’s a number next to it, and eyetracking studies tell us that people’s attention focuses on numbers (mostly because they are an indicator of facts, and people love to read facts online).
  • Why would I like to “Find the Blog on Facebook” if I’m already on the blog? That instruction simply doesn’t make sense. It’s not one of the things I want to do. The thing I want to do while on a blog is read its content, and if it’s good, I can either like it or not. As such, a simple Like button is more relevant to users’ intentions.

The universal Like button creates credibility very quickly. Everyone’s on Facebook. By seeing your Like button—and the number of people who like your blog—visitors will understand that there are real people reading your blog. This further establishes social proof: the bigger the number of people who Like your blog, the better.

When to apply these principles … and when to ignore them

Are these principles applicable to all blogs? No. It  all depends on what you blog is about, and who’s in your audience. For example, I blog about people search, and I can’t really apply these principles to great effect, because I can’t built a loyal audience. My audience members’ goals are pretty short-term: they are looking for a person’s details, and once they find that information, they’re gone.

But I would recommend these principles to owners of blogs that have a potential to build long-term audience relationships, like people trying to build a more successful blog, people trying to make money online, people trying to save money, and so on. I would recommend these principles for people trying to build a loyal audience—and I’m pretty most of you are doing that.

What other techniques have you used to impress visitors to your blog as soon as they arrive? I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

Darren loves to do guest posts on blogging/social media. His current project involves teaching people how to use social media to successfully re-unite with friends and family members. If you ever wanted to do that, start by reading this article, titled 25 Free People Search Engines to Find Anyone. Good luck!

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