Monday, December 6, 2010

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.

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

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.

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

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.

Setting the Hook: Fishing for New Readers with Social Media Lures

This guest post is by Ben Harack of the Vision of Earth project.

Regarding readers as fish, and bloggers as fisherman, might seem strange. Bear with me as I show you part of why I like the idea of blogging as being similar to fishing.

Those of you who are familiar with fishing know that getting the fish to bite the lure is only the first step of the process. A good yank from your end is often advisable in order to “set the hook”, ensuring that the fish will be less likely to escape.

A new reader to your page doesn’t have the hook set yet, in fact, they might not have bit at all. They might just be moving closer, perhaps to sniff the lure.

Modern media speed and information overload has caused readers to be more cautious with the way they spend their time reading or browsing. The fish might just swim in a bit closer to see if the lure looks tasty. If the lure looks dead or unappetizing the fish will likely swim on to find something more interesting.

Lure readers in

One of the major topics on ProBlogger lately has been social media. While search engines have been very important in the development of the Internet, social media has led a revolution in how we interact with content.

I feel that the onslaught of social media has exacerbated the short attention spans of Internet readers. Social media information tends to come in small bites. I feel that this evidenced by the naturally short nature of Facebook statuses, tweets, and news headlines on Digg, Reddit, and others.

How is it best to lure people in with social media? This website is absolutely full of tips on this subject. To capture the power of social media, I can honestly recommend reading about:

Social media in general: The 5 Foundations of Social Media Success that No One Talks About
Digg: 4 Ways I Compose Posts to Drive Millions of Pageviews to Blogs Through Digg
Facebook:5 Ways I’m Using Facebook to Drive Traffic, Build Brand and Increase Reader Engagement
LinkedIn: Top 10 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog Using LinkedIn
Twitter: Top Ten Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Small Business Blog Using Twitter

In a recent post about the small size of tweets, Darren raised the idea of a possible swing towards long-form content. From his post, and my own experience in the area, I have concluded that social media tends to facilitate the creation of connectivity, conversation, and community around content of value.

For bloggers, the hub of our content tends to be our blogs and websites. Social media can be regarded to some extent as the cloud of human interaction around a website. Darren illustrates this well in his post Home Bases and Outposts – How I use Social Media in My Blogging.

It is important to note that social media is not just another outlet for your standard content. If you only use it to link directly back to your blog, you are missing out on most of its potential. Social media is primarily a conversation created around you and by you. Without your interaction, conversations will still happen, but they will progress without you being involved. A megaphone isn’t a good conversation partner. To create a strong following, you need to connect with the people who are interested in what you do.

In the world of social media, quality of communication is key. Being restricted to about 30 words per unit of communication means you have to make each one count. With practice and care, it is possible to show that brevity does not preclude quality. It is possible to convey great meaning with even a single tweet.

We live in the age of the sound bite, the slogan, and the catch-phrase. In order to tame the beast of social media, we need to master its language.

Set the hook

You can’t force people to read what is on your page, but you can certainly encourage them. You can’t force them to come back, but you can provide some good reasons why they might choose to.

The specific techniques that I try to use are:

Blog titles: 15 Ways to Rework Your Next Blog Title
Opening lines: 11 Ways to Open a Post and Get Reader Engagement
Scannable text: Writing Blog Content – Make it Scannable
Lists: 8 Reasons Why Lists are Good for Getting Traffic to your Blog

These tools cater to the tendencies of Internet readers. The intent is to grab their attention so that they will actually consume your content more fully rather than scanning it.

It is hard to set a dull hook. Sharpen your hook by making your website easier to navigate. Highlight your social media connections, and provide clearly visible ways for people to subscribe to your content or newsletter. Provide interactive elements such as contests and polls to generate additional interest.

I experimented recently with the creation of my own blog carnival called the Renewable Energy Review. Unfortunately as I found out, there is extremely little in the way of quality writing being pushed around the blogosphere on this topic. Our standards at Vision of Earth are high enough that only one article submitted thus far merited a link from us. This might sound harsh, but we have established standards of editing and fact-checking that are not matched outside of professional periodicals.

So what did I do? My team and I simply transitioned into creating a high-quality periodical of our own. Even with the publication so early in its life, we have noticed that it has already begun to draw some substantial interest. As a fledgling volunteer project/blog, we have been happy with the results.

More commonly, bloggers will write a series of posts on a topic to generate interest and subscribers. When people like what you write, and know that you will have more of it soon, they have an incentive to come back. All of the techniques for setting the hook eventually depend on you having content that is of value to readers to such an extent that they will come back again to experience more of it.

Eat your readers

Analogy taken too far? I think not!

Your readers consume your content, but you are the one who is attempting to make a living off them. If you are a Professional Blogger, the number and quality of your relationships with your readers are what literally put the food on your table.

Try to understand your readers and cultivate respect for them. Understand, because you may be fishing with the wrong lures or in the wrong part of the lake. Respect, because a genuine conversation requires some degree of shared positive regard.

Ben Harack is the leader of the Vision of Earth project, which attempts to study the key challenges facing society today. They publish on topics as wide-ranging as nuclear energy, ending poverty, and deliberate social change.

How Many Hours Do You Spend Working On Your Blog?

questions and answers This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. If you want to ask a question just send it via the contact form.

Bill Yann asks:

How many hours do you spend working on your blog every day? I am a new blogger, and I am having trouble to set a schedule for my blog.

There were basically three periods in my blogging journey, and during each I would work a different amount of time on the blogs.

When I first started blogging it was just a hobby, and I remember I used to work around one hour per day on it, usually at night, before going to sleep. This period lasted around one year.

After that I started monetizing the blogs, and eventually I quit my job to work full time on the Internet. The three blogs I was running at the time represented the bulk of my revenues, so I spent all day working on them (around 8 hours per day). Activities included search engine optimization, web design, research, content writing, promotion and networking. This period last around three years.

Then around one year ago I started diversifying my projects, and launched new websites. Some of these make money with affiliate marketing, others selling products directly to the end user. As a result I sold a couple of blogs, and kept only this one and Daily Writing Tips (where I have staff writers so I don’t need to put too much work).

So right now I spend around 2 hours per day on both blogs. Half of that time is spent moderating comments, answering to emails and running other maintenance related tasks, and the other half is spent writing content here.

I have some tips regarding how you can create an efficient schedule for your blog, but I’ll save that for a separate post.

Building Your Business Through Logo Branding

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Logo Mojo. All opinions are 100% mine.

If there is one thing I’ve learned over the past few years while running this blog, it’s the power of a good logo. The Zac Johnson toon has taken on a life of it’s own and has become a very recognized symbol in the affiliate marketing and blogging niche. Without the extra branding from this logo and having it seen all over the place, it would be tough to achieve the same success the blog has seen over the past few years.

Not currently using a logo or design to brand your blog or business? You should be. Imprint an imagine in the minds of your followers, readers and customers. Doing so will not only allow them to remember a symbol and not just a name, but it helps extraordinarily for your branding purposes. Pepsi, Apple and Nike are all recognized by their logos… not their names. Twitter has been an amazing tool for branding purposes. If you are using Twitter and just have a basic background, you are missing out free branding and advertising every day. Most of the big name bloggers and branded companies have their own Twitter backgrounds which usually include their logo, web site name and personal or company info.

As easy as it sounds to brand yourself, it’s actually one of the hardest tasks to accomplish. First you have to think about what type of message and visual appearance your logo is going to display. Since the majority of us are not designers, you will also have to find someone to design your logo and make it look professional. I’m going through this process all the time, as I like to launch new web sites with only the highest designs and with their own unique logos. Logo Mojo

is a design company that actually covers the majority of what I talked about above. I’m always looking for new quality designers to work on projects. After looking through their site and portfolio, they have a nice selection of logos that they’ve designed, and compared to other design services, they prices are quite reasonable. The design process is laid out really well on the web site, as it walks you through the process on how to best describe your logo concept and how you would like it to be perceived.

Whether you are looking to have a new logo identity created for your web site, blog or Twitter, it’s a great idea to visit Logo Mojo. Not only can you get inspired by their designs and tips, but walking through their design questionnaire will also help you determine the look and feel you are trying to get with your new logo.

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