“The Shocking Truth about Consistent Blogging Success: How to Find Your Voice” plus 1 more

The Shocking Truth about Consistent Blogging Success: How to Find Your Voice

Posted: 14 Nov 2012 12:02 PM PST

This guest post is by Bill Zipp of billzipponbusiness.com/.

It’s one of the greatest feelings in the world!

You write something on your blog that goes viral. Likes explode, comments go crazy, tweets multiply, and open rates are off the charts.

That’s what’s great about blogging.

So when the dust settles and the warm feelings of success fade, you ask yourself, “How did this happen?” and, perhaps more importantly, “How can it happen again?”

Here are the usual answers to those questions:

The article had an amazing headline.
After the headline, there was a killer introduction.
Your content was both original and compelling.
Subheadings powerfully drew people into the post.
You told great stories that kept readers engaged.
Your call to action was irresistible.

And all of these things are important. They’re essential to our craft.

But I believe they are secondary to consistent blogging success. Consistent blogging success has at its very core this one thing: voice.

Everything else, as important as it is, flows from there.

When you find your blogging voice…

When you find your blogging voice, even posts with generic headlines get read without fail.

When you find your blogging voice, you build a community of readers who devour every word you write.

When you find your blogging voice, your community grows exponentially as more and more readers become raving fans.

And when you find your blogging voice, you unleash a source of passion that keeps you writing incredible content day after day, year after year.

What is a blogging voice?

Blogging voice is the intersection of two lines: your personal experience and people’s pressing needs.

If all you talk about in your blog is personal experience and never address the pressing needs of people, you’re really not blogging. You’re journaling.

Nothing wrong with journaling. I’ve kept a journal for years.

And I have friends who’ve gone on a trip or trained for a marathon and journaled about that experience on a blog. But the clear intent was to keep a circle of family and friends informed on their life developments, not to lay a platform upon which to build a business.

Conversely, if all you do is address people’s needs apart from your personal experience, you join the ranks of thousands on the internet selling stuff they never actually use themselves.

Sadly, I’ve bought a product or two from people like this. Halfway into a “revolutionary” training program, I’ve gotten the sinking feeling that I’ve been had. Not only is the material not original from the author, but it doesn’t work. Or it doesn’t work any more, and this person has moved on to other things (and I can move on too, for an additional $2,995).

So these two lines must intersect.

We learned all about this in high school geometry: a point on a plane is created when two line segments cross. And because they are your two line segments, and nobody else’s, that point is a unique place in the blogging universe.

So let’s add one more phrase to our definition: blogging voice is the intersection of your personal experience and people’s pressing needs that creates your unique contribution to online content.

How do you find your blogging voice?

There’s a two-step process for drawing these intersecting lines.

The first step involves one’s self—what I call looking in the mirror. The second step involves looking outside one’s self, through the window into the marketplace.

First, look in the mirror

This is, of course, the first law of great writing: write what you know. Unfortunately, like the pauper who dies in a freezing apartment with thousands of dollars stuffed in his mattress, we tend to ignore what we know. We don’t appreciate its true value.

Ask yourself these important questions:

What issues burn in your heart?
What challenges have you overcome?
What mistakes have you made?
What answers have you found that no one else is writing about?
What gets your attention in a way where you lose all sense of time?

If you’re like me, the two most difficult questions in that list have to do with the challenges you’ve faced and the mistakes you’ve made. Who wants to remember that stuff?

But that’s the stuff that voice is made of: real, authentic, genuine personal experience.

This kind of experience is not found on the mountaintop, but in the valley. It doesn’t take shape in the light, but in the darkness. It’s forged in adversity.

I love to cook. In my cooking I use various herbs and spices. Next to the oven sits a mortar and pestle. Before I put many of these enhancements into a dish, I first crush them in my mortar and pestle. That’s when their true flavor emerges and transforms an ordinary dish into something exceptional.

The same is true in finding your blogging voice. Where you’ve been crushed in life is where the greatest potential exists for you to help others.

Then look out the window

The second intersecting line in finding your blogging voice is uncovering the pressing needs of people. It involves looking out the window and seeing a match in the marketplace for the personal experience you possess.

Again, ask yourself these important questions:

Who needs what you have to say the most?
Where do these people live, work, worship, and play?
What keeps them up at night?
What gives them their deepest joy?
What are their biggest challenges?

I once accepted the position of General Manager at a radio station that was dead last in ratings for its market.

There was a clear reason why, as well. In the morning the station aired talk, mid-morning they played music, then live call-in shows, then some music, then more talk in the evening, with the occasional infomercial thrown in for good measure. No one knew what was going to air next, so they tuned out completely.

One of the first things we did as a management team is define our target listener. We gave that listener a name, Kelly, and put pictures of her and her family all around the studio. As a staff we became obsessed with answering this question, “What does Kelly care about?”

Not infomercials! We dropped them immediately.

But we also asked that question about one of the most basic radio programming elements: the weather. We came to believe that Kelly really didn’t care about raw data related to the weather, but rather how that data affected her life.

So when our jocks gave the weather, they didn’t thoughtlessly repeat the temperature and the forecast. They talked about how Kelly’s kids should dress in the morning for their wait at the bus stop, or the fact that she may need to put her car in the garage that night because the first freeze was on the way.

That’s what Kelly cared about.

Within a year we had moved into third place in the ratings, and in two years we were competing for first place in our demographic with a country music station that had dominated the market for decades.

Why you need Kelly

Most bloggers suffer from the same malady as that radio station.

They write about one thing one day. Another thing the next day. And a totally different topic the third. And people stop reading, because they don’t know what the blog is about.

Finding your blogging voice involves knowing exactly who you’re writing to and what they really care about. Creating a persona, like we did for Kelly, is a powerful way to focus your writing. Put a picture up of that person next to your computer monitor and talk to that person as if he or she were in the room sitting right next to you.

A blog persona will also help answer questions related to writing style. As in what stories to tell, whether you use swear words or not, or how much personal information to reveal in your blog. Simply ask yourself, “Is that what I would say if this person were sitting in the room right next to me?”

This isn’t easy work, and it shouldn’t be.

Take time to answer the ten questions above and talk with others about your answers. Write a first, second, and third draft. Then a fourth. When you do, you’ve begun to find your blogging voice.

But really, what difference does all this stuff this make?

Your voice can change the world

Finding your blogging voice is no mere exercise in artistic integrity or a way to finally quit your day job.

Your voice can change the world.

There are single mothers who need the inspiration you provide to get them through another impossible day.

There are struggling entrepreneurs, ready to give up on their life’s dream, who need the ideas you possess so the doors of their business stay open.

There are people with a dreaded diagnosis—cancer—who need the alternative treatments you know all about so they live long enough to attend their daughter’s wedding.

There are bored business men and women who need to be challenged to forgo their big bonus and another Caribbean cruise and do something that makes a difference in people’s lives.

You are the one with the words in your heart that can make these amazing things happen. And more.

In the words of Seth Godin in Tribes, “We need you to lead us.”

Go start a fire!

I have very few memories of growing up as a kid, but one is vividly etched in my mind. It was Christmas Eve and I was four years old. We were gathered in the basement of our church singing Christmas carols by candlelight.

For some inexplicable reason, I was given a candle and a carol book.

From the moment the wick was lit on that candle, I could think of nothing else than this: what would happen if the candle in my left hand touched the carol book in my right hand?

I pondered this dilemma throughout the service.

As festivities came to a close, I realized I would lose my opportunity to answer that question. It was somewhere during the singing of Silent Night that I found out. When the candle in my left hand touched the carol book in my right hand, the dry paper burst into flames.

I screamed at the top of my lungs and threw the flaming mess on the floor. My mom screamed as well, probably more in embarrassment than fear, and my dad jumped from his seat and stomped on the blaze in the middle of the room until it went out.

When we got home, I received the spanking of my life.

This is how you start a fire, and this is what delivers consistent blogging success. Take the flame that flickers in your soul and put it in contact with the real needs of real people. The blaze that burns will be your blog, alight with likes and tweets, comments and subscribers.

So go start a fire! There are people out there who desperately need what you have to say. These people will read everything you write and pass it on to others who’ll do the same. If, and only if, you find your blogging voice and stay true to that voice post after post after post.

And that’s the shocking truth.

Speaker, coach, and consultant, Bill Zipp helps busy leaders do what matters most in business and in life. He also helps other consultants build a thriving, successful practice. To learn more about Bill’s work visit: http://billzipponbusiness.com/consultants.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

The Shocking Truth about Consistent Blogging Success: How to Find Your Voice

5 Steps to SEO Friendly Split Testing, Sans Stress

Posted: 14 Nov 2012 06:05 AM PST

This guest post is by Justine Smith of FreshBooks.

Split testing.

For many bloggers, the very words inspire visions of code and feelings of stress.

Also called A/B testing, split testing is an art that allows you to divvy up your blog visitors so one group sees a slightly different website than the other group.

While split testing for Adsense has been covered on ProBlogger before, doing split tests for your blog can be just as beneficial to help ensure that you’re giving your visitors exactly what they want.

To start you off on the right foot, here are my top 5 tips for SEO-friendly split testing that won't damage your blog or stress you out.

1. Keep your test pages from being indexed

The first thing you need to address is keeping those test pages from getting indexed by the "Big G" (a.k.a. Google). There are several ways you can do this. It sounds a little techie, but I promise it's painless.

First, use canonical tags. Using the rel=canonical tag lets search engines know where your "original" page is located.

Next, use your robots.txt file. A robots.txt file is created to provide critical information to search engine bots, and is one of the first things they will look for before they crawl a site.

With a robots.txt file, you can keep them from crawling as well as indexing certain pages, including your test pages. Just be aware that SEO-savvy competitors will often look at your robots.txt file to get ideas from your secret test pages, so be careful of what you include.

Use the noindex meta tag on your variation page. Again, this tells the Google Bot to back off.

And don’t forget to check your work. You can input site:yoursiteurl.com into Google search to verify that your test pages aren't getting indexed. You can also use tools like Open Site Explorer or Majestic SEO to see if there are any external links pointing to your test pages. If there are, your site could get indexed—so be sure to check your work.

2. JavaScript doesn't always work the way it’s supposed to

JavaScript is a programming language that’s used to make web pages interactive. In the context of a split test, it is a piece of code you place on a web page that enables you to actually 'split' traffic between your control page and your testing page.

Search engines aren't supposed to see or index Javascript, and usually they don't.

To split traffic between pages A and B, JavaScript is often used at the top of the control page. Common sense tells us that if search engines aren't supposed to follow the JavaScript then they shouldn't index the test variation URL.

Unfortunately, sometimes they do it anyway.

So once again, check your work. Do a site: search for your test URL every so often to verify the test pages aren't being indexed. You can also segment your site analytics by search referrals and note the top entry pages as another way to see if any of your test URLs are getting indexed by accident.

3. Take steps if your test pages are indexed

Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools. Besides the option to remove your accidentally indexed pages, this toolset gives you a plethora of other free tools that'll get your site much more search visibility.

Also, be mindful of:

Keyword cannibalization: This is where two similar pages wind up competing for the same rankings. Ultimately Google will arbitrarily favor one and ignore the other. There are several rank-boosting benefits that can be lost when this happens, so do your best to avoid it.
Duplicate content: This is another biggie that can have similar results to cannibalization. If you don't keep careful tabs on this, test URLs that are indexed could result in your important pages getting de-indexed. Not exactly what you were hoping for, right?

4. Try testing SEO-safe page elements

This is a case where small changes can add up to big gains. Did you know a simple color tweak could make a big difference on your conversation rate? The bonus is these changes won't affect your rankings in any way.

Consider testing:

Headlines and calls to action: Simple changes like text size or typeface can be a great way to shake things up and impact conversion rates. Different people respond to different things, so making changes will help you to gauge what your readers respond to best. Just be sure when changing text size not to use the header H1-6 HTML tags, as those are reviewed by Google.
Colors: Another great way to split test without messing with SEO is to play with colors on your site. Once you get a good look at all the areas where color lives on your landing pages, the possibilities will seem endless. Speaking of color…
Text color: This is also something that can be tweaked. Changing a few important words to another color can make a difference. Just remember not to use too much color, because then it just becomes distracting and folks are put off. You can also change highlighted text, both by changing the color of the highlights and also changing which words are highlighted.
Adding and removing graphics: Finally, manipulating your graphics can also effect conversions. Simple changes like removing graphics from your site altogether are easy to implement. Google does index photos but it's not going to break your SEO if you no longer have them on your site. By the same token, you can also add photos to spark a change. People respond to social proof, so adding images like press logos and testimonials from people who adore you can go a long way in increasing response rates of your visitors. Just be sure not to mess with your existing photos’ ALT text too much, since this might already have been indexed.
Changing graphics: These can be simple changes. You can swap out an illustrated graphic for a photograph, or see if people respond better to stock photos or real-life snapshots. Or you can play around with the positioning and size of your images. If the thought of changing your graphics makes you queasy, you could try simply playing around with the things that compliment your graphics, such as using borders, overlays and text on top, just to see what happens. Oh, and tying in with the call to action tweaks from earlier, you can also tweak that Buy Now graphic you may be using. Rumor has it The Belcher Button with its orange hue, and credit card images make a huge impact on buyer numbers.

5. Give Content Experiments from Google Analytics a whirl

As the "artist formerly known as Google Website Optimizer", Content Experiments might be of interest in your split testing fun.

This is basically a quick and relatively easy tool that you can use to create A/B tests without being overly technical or messing with a lot of code. You can test your main pages and even get email updates about how your experiment is faring.

A final word

Split testing is an essential long-term tactic for a variety of business types, including freelance bloggers and even bigger companies like FreshBooks, who use the results to make educated decisions about how to write and design for potential and existing customers.

Now that you've ventured over to the geek side, it's easy to see that split testing isn't nearly as scary as many people tend to think. As long as you know where some of the hiccups lie, there’s no hair pulling, code whizzing, or messing with your hard-earned rank required.

Justine Smith is the Outreach Manager at FreshBooks, the #1 Cloud Accounting Specialist for Small Business Owners.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

5 Steps to SEO Friendly Split Testing, Sans Stress