Want to know three easy to fix problems that can be the difference between your blog being good or great?
Of course you do.
These three lessons have helped improve interaction with you, boost subscribers, and increase repeat visits. All great things to have more of in my opinion.
First off, Where are your images?
Not using images in posts misses a chance to engage your users. The more you engage your users the more they remember you. Images are easy to get you can use your camera or get them of the internet. There are several sites that even give them away for free. Morguefile, Stock.Xchng, or Stockvault are all good options for free photos. Other options are to pay using a microstock service where you can buy stock photography ala carte. I personally use iStockPhoto some other options that others recommend are Fotolia and Shutterstock.
Be honest, was your last post more than a week ago?
Fail to post on a regular basis your users will forget about you. If they aren’t thinking about you then they can’t recommend link to you. If you are not recommended then your subscriber base won’t grow. (pssst… No growth is death). In regular marketing they call the remembering bit “mind share”. Mind share is the thought that you need to occupy a place in your audiences mind if you don’t then your competitors will. Without having laid claim to a section of your readers attention they will forget to link to you, to tell their friends about you, and eventually unsubscribe from your blog.
Stop making your subscribers click!
Do you want subscribers or page views? If you answered subscribers and your not publishing a full feed then your doing it wrong. Why are you turning your users off by making them work to read your feed. They have a perfectly good Feedreader to read your feed in so let them. Making them work to get your article means that they have an opportunity to reevaluate whether they should be subscribed to your blog at all. Don’t give them that opportunity if you want your subscriber numbers to grow.
Don’t learn these lessons the hard way… follow them and grow your blog today.
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| Filed under: Misc — Scott @ September 18, 2007 12:13 am |
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‘Stop making your subscribers click!’
This feed itself was only a few paragraphs with a ‘more’ link in my feedreader. So are you looking for page views, then?
lol.. yeah I just noticed that too. I used the “more” tag ant it made that happen. I didn’t think it did that for the feed.
That’s cool. I am not trying to be rude about it, just wasn’t sure if you knew or not. OR - if you were looking for pageviews - that could be a legitimate goal.
I didn’t take it to be rude. I was glad you pointed it out. :-)
Funny Scott that this post was only going out partially in the feed. I could also not it’s been awhile since you posted last.
I’ve been trying more and more to incorporate images in my posts. I used to shy away from them, but each time I’d add one I could see how much they improved things visually. I’m still not to the point where every post has an image, but I’m trying to get there.
In addition to adding images I think it’s also important to make use of whitespace. Using headings, lists, blockquotes, and even being conscious about the length or paragraphs can all make the page more interesting visually.
I know I went stupid for a minute when I published it… lol. I smacked my forehead when I checked my feed and saw the post went to the feed as a partial. :-)
Yeah your definitely right about using whitespace and formatting posts to be more digestible. I think thats something we all learn the hard way, no?
[...] Web Professor hands out three great tips on making your blog more [...]
Thanks for reminding us Professori! I can say these are the essentials of blogging and we just simply forget them. No images, no posts, no growth, no subscribers, all equals death to the blog.