How to Build Community on Your Blog
April 25, 2008
@SmallFishMedia asks - “What can you do to make your blog more of a community?”
There are many things that you can do to build a sense of community on a blog. Here’s a short list of ideas that come to mind:
- Take the lead and be the community that you want your readers to be - readers follow the lead of bloggers in how they’ll interact with each other
- Ask Questions - the key to more comments and interaction on a blog
- Give readers homework - try it, it works
- Give readers a job to do on your blog - bizarre but it works
- Link to reader’s blogs - it’s amazing what impact this can have
- Answer Reader questions - this has real power
- Invite Readers to Take the lead with guest posts, giving advice to each other etc
- Make Readers Famous - celebrate your readers publicly
- Do projects where readers can participate, submit things and be active. The more you have them DO the more loyal they’ll become.
Blog Design - Does it Matter?
April 25, 2008
@mattpacker asks - how important is the design of your blog and how hard a decision do you think it would be to develop a new theme for it?
There will probably be a little debate over this one in the comments on this post because every time I see someone write about design there are two opposing arguments.
On the one side are some blogger who argue that design is secondary and not that important as that it’s content that is what draws people to a blog and keeps them there. This camp often argues that with a lot of people reading blogs these days through RSS that design is less important as people rarely see it.
On the flip side we have the argument that design is very important because it creates a first impression in the mind of potential readers and that it’s around this first impression that many readers base their decision about whether they will subscribe.
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How to Build Your Blog’s Readership
April 25, 2008
@jeremyjacks asks - How did you get to be a big blogger? And what should I do to get more site hits?” also - @JoshAnstey asks - “whats the best way to build blog exposure?”
I’m not sure I’m famous outside of a very small segment of the internet - but the growth I’ve had on my blogs has come over a long period of time and I would say that one of the ’secrets’ to growing a blog readership is to stick at it and work hard for a sustained period of time. I’ve been blogging 5 and a half years now and have worked a lot of hours in that time.
Outside of hard work (and a bit of luck) there are many techniques you can use to grow readership to a blog. I’ve summarised some of the many articles I’ve written on the topic here on my How to Find Readers for your Blog page. Also check out my 6 part series on How I’d Promote My Blog if I was Starting Out Again. I really believe that the topics covered in that of guest posting (on relevant blogs in your niche), networking, viral content, advertising and social media are a great place to start.
Also - get on Twitter (I know you’re on it Jeremy and Josh but others should) because it’s a pretty hot spot at the moment when it comes on online activity and I think the potential to drive a lot of traffic from there is still only just being realized. It’s a space that is still in it’s early days of development so get in early (even though it’s been a year or two since it launched) and position yourself for the future.
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Social Media Study: Universal McCann Power To The People - Wave 3 Report
April 25, 2008
Is it Worth Getting Local Domain Names for a Blog?
April 25, 2008
@PopularWealth asks - “I’d like to see geo-domain blogging addressed since you ask Darren. I think geo domains, and “local” sites are getting hot again”
I’m no expert on this topic but I do think that there is something to it well worth exploring from my own personal experience. My first domain was LivingRoom which is a .au (Australian) domain.
I blogged heavily on this domain for a number of years and it got a lot of incoming links in the early days of running it and as a result began to rise in it’s search engine authority. What I found was that despite blogging in some very competitive niches (including Digital Cameras) on that domain it got quite a lot of traffic to it from Google. The traffic didn’t come from the global Google but Google.com.au (the Aussie localized version). For a while there the traffic was quite massive (although less so these days as I’ve let the blogs slip to focus more on my main blogs).
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How Do I Get More Relevant Readers for My Blog?
April 25, 2008
@happygirl08 asks about how to - “get more relevant readers to your blog/ mailing list??”
Good question - some bloggers tend to focus on getting more readers of any kind - they don’t really care about who they are, they just want their numbers to increase. So I think it’s good that you’re asking about ‘relevant’ readers because some readers will come to your blog and then leave, never to return, whereas others will come back again and again because they click with something on your blog (I presume this is what you mean by ‘relevant readers’. OK - now that I’ve said that - an answer:
Here’s the question that I encourage you to ask - “where are the readers that I want already gathering in numbers?”
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Having an Opinion: The Secret Sauce for a Popular Blog
April 24, 2008
Seesmic Brings Video Comments To Wordpress
April 24, 2008
5 Ideas to Come Up with Blog Content from Your Daily Life
April 24, 2008
Many bloggers suffer from the daily grind of having to find new posts for their blog - but what if there was an easier way? What if your next post was right before you in the activities that you do each day?
One great way to find new content for your blog is to capture things that you do in your daily routine that relate to your topic and then to present them as a blog post.
This won’t relate to every blog topic but many of us are living lives that are a gold mine of content - we just need to learn to capture and repurpose it.
Let me give you five examples of how to capture and repurpose daily activities for blog content:
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AdSense Roll out Ad Review Center to All Publishers
April 24, 2008
