Top 5 Strategies For Efficient & Effective Blogging - DailyBlogTips

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Top 5 Strategies For Efficient & Effective Blogging Posted: 20 Aug 2012 03:27 AM PDT Continually cranking out content for your blog that is consistently fresh, engaging, and audience-building can be challenging, to say the least. And unfortunately, blogger's block doesn't discriminate, and it can affect everyone from the greenest writer to the one pulling in six figures. So, what does it too create a chain of content that grows your traffic and keeps audience enthusiasm high? Here are five tips to help you refocus your blog and succeed at creating quality, memorable posts: 1. It's all about the reader You know what you like to read… now forget about it. What interests you specifically isn't worth a hill of beans as compared to what interests your readership. They're in the driver's seat and you're barely a back seat navigator. Every blog post you approach has to be taken from the perspective of your reader. You have to instinctively know the questions that the reader will ask about the industry sector you cover and you must cater to those queries by providing in-depth, unique, and compelling information. It is also extremely important, especially for bloggers in the technical field, to give industry buzzwords and other assorted jargon a wide berth. Sure you may know exactly what "you can’t get decent bogon suppression with AFJ filters at today’s net volumes" but what chance does your non-programmer reader have at deciphering that gobbledygook? 2. A picture sells a thousand blogs What is the reason behind the massive explosion in interest for Pinterest? The answer is fairly simple as it is that since Pinterest is essentially a blogging platform for people who don't care to write and for readers who don't care to read, it's at the forefront of the new blogging world! By replacing long-winded gray blocks of type with pretty pictures, Pinterest is a vivid example of what bloggers should be striving for in building visual allure into their blogs. Visual allure doesn't mean changing the color of your header or background, it indicates a blog that has integrated both static and video imaging into its story telling process. There will likely never be an age when written blogging is completely extinct and only replaced by images, but all bloggers should strive to incorporate as much visual flair into their posts as they possibly can in order to further engage your readership. 3. Hawking your wares should be an ancillary, not primary focus We've all witnessed the disintegration of blogs that we once treasured but have since descended down into nothing more than thinly disguised shilldom. Many bloggers start out by offering phenomenal and insightful content and as their audiences grow, they shift their focus almost entirely to improving their monetization. So a blog which was once chock-full of great information is now doing little more than pushing the blogger's latest paid ebook, online paid course, or selling tickets to their national seminar tour. Although a certain level of ancillary marketing is expected from bloggers who have to pay the rent somehow, when the entire blog turns into a sales pitch, you can be certain your readers will pitch your blog… right into the trash. 4. 95.5% of the world's population is not American Sure, you were born in Nebraska, went to college in Michigan, and raised a family in Texas… but that doesn't mean that the perspective reflected in your blog should end at Portland, Maine on one side and Portland, Oregon on the other. The vast majority of blogging topics are of equal interest to readers in Portland, Canada; Portland, England; Portland, Australia; and every other port on the high seas. With the rise in international blogging, your readers outside of the USA may be finding your Americancentrism disturbing and detracting from the value of your content. Either neutralize your geographical references or make a solid effort to cover events outside the USA. 5. Write well Far too many bloggers write like uneducated dolts. Set yourself aside from the lowbrow, inept, and artless by cultivating a high standard of spelling, grammar, and overall mastery of the English language. You can accomplish this by double-checking your writing, but you should also use the Internet to learn tricks to help you write cleaner and faster. Efficient and effective blogging isn't a fantasy, you can achieve it today by applying these top five key strategies. The rewards for succeeding are steady traffic, plenty of comments, and lots of incoming links. Hal Licino is a successful author, award-winning freelance writer, and frequent contributor to a blog hosted by Benchmark Email, an email marketing service for small businesses. He also writes a weekly column for Daily Blog Tips. Original Post: Top 5 Strategies For Efficient & Effective Blogging

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ProBlogger: Learnings from My Pinterest Experiment

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Learnings from My Pinterest Experiment Posted: 19 Aug 2012 07:02 AM PDT Over the last couple of days I’ve begun to play with Pinterest again. It’s been ages since I first set up an account but when I did I didn’t really really click with it. Interestingly, despite not being active on it, I seemed to gather followers til it got to 1000. I also saw some decent traffic from Pinterest to our photographic tutorials on dPS. I guess our articles are just naturally pinnable, as we have a lot of images. Pinterest has been sending us around 40,000 visitors a month, which is nice, although not a massive amount in the scheme of overall traffic. In terms of social media traffic, it comes in behind Facebook, but ahead of StumbleUpon and Twitter. An experimental strategy Given than we’ve gained decent traffic from it, I decided to start playing with it this week to see what I could learn. My strategy has been very simple and very primative so far and has centred around a photography board on my personal account. There, I’m simply sharing the following: photos that I love tutorials from other sites that I think are good a few of the better tutorials from dPS. The links to dPS are in the minority, but over the last few days I must have pinned 20 or so items from the site. I’ve also done a little liking and commenting on a few other photography-related Pinterest boards—but not heaps! Preliminary results It hasn’t been long, but in the time I’ve been experimenting, I’ve seen some interesting results. Follower numbers are up around 450. I did link to it from my Facebook page and Twitter account, but most of that growth has just steadily come in (I’m guessing) mainly as people repin my images. I’m seeing decent repinning. The numbers aren’t huge, but already I’m seeing some nice traction on some of the pins I’ve put out there. Actually, I’m fascinated to see what is and isn’t getting repinned. Obviously its largely about the image, but  tips-related pins seems to be getting traction. I’ll continue to experiment to see what more I can glean about what’s working over time. I’ve noticed an increase in Pinterest traffic coming to the site, but given that I’ve only pinned a handful of dPS, stuff I wasn’t expecting much. In fact, a couple of days after my experiment began, we had the biggest Pinterest day of traffic for dPS since May. While we were averaging about 1400 visitors a day over the last couple of weeks, but it increased to around 2100—not a massive boost, but encouraging. Follower numbers at he time of writing had also steadily grown to more than 1600 for that board. Reader engagement, as shown by the comments on some of my pins, was interesting. Followers were mainly asking questions. On one pin (on a set of images), a follower asked if I knew of any tips for a particular type of photography. I was able to link to a dPS tutorial on that topic in a reply to her comment. I’m seeing quite a few opportunities here and have committed to take my Pinterest activity to the next level over the coming weeks. I’m not going to reveal what we have planned yet, but you can expect to see dPS on Pinterest in a more formal way in the near future (I’ll share what we do when that happens). Update: now a week into this experiment I can compare traffic for the last week from Pinterest to the week before. The blue line is this last week of referred traffic from Pinterest – the orange line is last week’s referred traffic from Pinterest. While it goes up and down from day to day (the last two days have been weekend traffic) you can see we’re up to 7 days of increased traffic on the previous week. The increase is 38.94% on the previous week with Friday being up by 91% on the previous Friday. While this isn’t a massive rise in terms of our overall traffic for the site the signs are positive. Even if we just sustain this increase for the next 12 months it is an extra 200,000 visitors to the site over the year (of course I hope we can ramp it up further with some further new strategies that will be implemented this coming week). Straight to the source! For those who don’t know, Pinterest has a Source page that shows you the most recent pins made to a site. For example, the dPS source page is at http://pinterest.com/source/digital-photography-school.com/ To find yours, just substitute the dPS URL for your blog’s URL in the link above. If you don’t have much pinning action on your blog, you might not have one yet, but quite a few of the small blogs I tried it on did. On this page, you can see all the pins that people have made for articles on Digital Photography School. The page doesn’t seem to update minute by minute, but it is relatively up to date. This, my friends, is what I consider gold information! There are many possibilities for how you can use this: Share this page with your community: I linked to this page a few months back on the dPS Facebook page with a call to action like, “See what’s hot on dPS right now.” I noticed a rise in traffic to dPS that day (and an increase in pinning action too). Research what type of posts are pinnable: Watch this page and you’ll quickly see what kind of articles readers find pinnable. Create more of them! Add Pin buttons to your hot posts: I’m currently getting a redesign of dPS done that will include Pinterest buttons on every page on the site. But while I’m waiting, I’ve manually added them to the pages on dPS that are getting the most pins—this page helps me to find them (so too does digging into your Google Analytics account). By adding this button to the right pages, you make the post more pinnable—so when people arrive from Pinterest they’re more likely to pin it themselves. Networking opportunities: Another benefit of this page is that you can see who’s pinning your stuff. What a perfect place to watch and thank those who are pinning your work with a quick comment. This is an opportunity to network with your readers, and not just any readers, but those who are evangelists for your blog! Knowing what content on your site is being shared is great information. How are you using Pinterest to engage, and engage with, readers? Share with us in the comments. Update: if you’d like a sneak peek at Phase 2.0 of the dPS Pinterest experiment take a look at our brand new dedicated dPS Pinterest account which I’ll write more about in the next week. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger Learnings from My Pinterest Experiment

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