Author Archive for Les
Put Your RSS Feed To Work
If you are blogger then you no doubt include an RSS feed of all your posts. If not – you should and while you’re at it, include an option to receive the feed via email. Once you have your RSS feed in place, don’t waste it – put it to work for you.
Your RSS feed can offer a lot of opportunities to increase the value of your blog – to both your readers and your self.
If you are looking to monetize your site, including advertisements in your RSS feed is fairly easy to setup. If you use Feedburner then you can include Adsense ad units in your feeds. An alternative, particularly as your blog becomes popular, is to sell advertising space on the feed. You may never make a fortune from advertising on your RSS feed, but every dollar helps.
Aside from advertising, your RSS feed is a terrific opportunity to promote your blog. In this day and age your RSS subscribers will be continually dropping off with new subscribers joining every day. Including links to related articles may encourage those new readers to visit some of your older posts. If they like the content and find it helpful, you may even earn a link or two to that post.
One of the most important additions to an RSS feed is a copyright notice. You can include your name, the name of the website or blog and any other relevant information. If your content does get scrapped, this information, including a link back to your site, gets scrapped as well. Search engine spiders will see this information and often classify the scraped post as duplicate and not return it in search engine results. One way to thwart scrapers and protect your content.
If you create e-books or have products of your own for sale, the footer of your RSS feed can be an ideal place to promote them. Ensure the promotion has a clickable link through to more information on the e-book or products to make it easy for your readers to take action. This may increase sales more than any other single activity – and its free promotion.
RSS feeds are very popular. If you have 100 subscribers to your feed, you have an audience of 100 to promote your blog, your products or services, or the products and services of others. Use your RSS feed wisely without abusing it and your readers will welcome some of the changes. In the meantime, your blog is receiving free promotions – more so if you submit your feed to the RSS feed submission sites.
Let us help you with your blog configuration to ensure maximum results
Will A Quick Glance Catch Their Attention
If you check your blogs statistics you can see whether or not your content is holding your readers attention. If you have a high bounce rate and a low page read, your not selling your content and quick glance doesn’t hold their attention.
Your blog should be set up in such a way that a reader can quickly see what is on offer. Most visitors scan and if the scanning shows value, they will either bookmark to come back later, or settle back and start reading. The key to catching their attentions is a simple as black and white.
White Space
The first key is white space – not plenty of it, but carefully balanced. The idea of white space is to enable the important information to stand out, particularly paragraph headings. White space around graphics can also be important. To get white space around your graphics, include the vspace=”x” and hspace=”x” at the end of the graphics code: the number in brackets represents pixels. For example, your code may look like the following (I have omitted the opening and closing < >)
img src=”http://yourimageurl.jpg” alt=”suitable alt tag” align=”alignment” vspace=”10″ hspace=”10″
That code will place a white space of 10 pixels around your image.
Black Space
Black space of course is your text. You need to highlight the important sections, such as paragraph heading by using bold or a strong color. If there is sufficient white space, the ‘black’ section should stand out. Another example of using ‘black’ within whitespace is by using bullets or numbering. These work particularly well for short sentences as their use creates plenty of white space.
The use of black and white space has been a technique used successfully over the years by marketing consultants, particularly when it comes to flyers and business cards. Used carefully, a quick scan of your content should be enough to sell the opportunity to stop and read. Let us check out your white space with a free blog consultation.
Three Ways To Create Anticipation On Your Blog
The most successful blogs are those that are able to create a sense of anticipation; a desire to come back and read more. There are many ways to achieve this and in today’s post I would like to highlight three effective ways to create that anticipation.
- Controversy:
If your blog is often controversial then readers will come back just to read and perhaps participate in a controversial debate. The key to being controversial is finding story lines that are current, will have a ‘life’ and can be written without being too offensive – blog writers can/have/will be sued. People often appreciate debates and will often appreciate a controversial spin on a topic simply because they agree with you, but have not been willing to put pen to paper on the topic. - Series:
Writing a post that extends of several days can be a great way to create anticipate on your blog. Obviously the content needs to be on a topic and of a standard that fulfills a readers needs. ‘How to’ type posts can fit this category quite well particularly if the concepts involved require time and practice before moving onto the next steps. - Promoting:
Write today for tomorrow. If you are able to plan your posts you can use a magazine style of promotion. By writing today for tomorrow, when you publish today’s post, you already have tomorrow’s post written and saved. Before publishing today’s post, add a short preview to tomorrow’s post to the end. Readers can then see what is coming tomorrow. This can be very effective in bringing readers back.
There is no reason why you cannot use two or three of the above techniques at once. The third tip can also help with your blog SEO as you can go back and turn the preview into a link once the preview’s post has been published. This will also help readers find that post a later date.
Creating anticipation is one of the most powerful tools in your armory for delivery repeat traffic to your blog. If you are able to capitalize on it you will find an ever growing legion of loyal return visitors.
How To Generate And Write Good Content
I titled this ‘generate and write’ as there is a difference between the two. Generating is the art of finding a topic and developing the content. Writing is the final act of putting onto paper what you have generated. So how do you ‘generate and write’ good content? Here are a few keys:
- Enjoy what you are doing.
There is nothing worse than sitting down to try and come up with a post when your heart is not in it. You are better off walking away for awhile and coming back when you are ready to start. If your heart isn’t in it – it will show when you do finally come to write the content. - Prior knowledge is gold.
Select topics or subject areas that you have a reasonably working knowledge of. Research is much easier and your knowledge of the subject matter will shine through when you do write your post. Using prior knowledge often means you can sit down and plan an article in minutes rather than hours. - Experience.
If prior knowledge is gold then experience is the diamond in the crown. You can generate so much content just from your experiences in a particular field. Putting together a ‘how to’ article is so much easier when you have actually gone through the process yourself. - Research.
The final key. If you are generating content from experience or prior knowledge then the research part becomes so much easier. You know what you are looking for and more importantly, you will know when you have found it – your not floundering around in the dark trying to find answers that ‘might sound good’.
It all comes back to point number one. If you generate and then write content based on what you already know, the research comes easily, and you enjoyment level rises and the results flow through to your writing. If you are trying to generate content in an area that you are not familiar with, you find frustration creeping in and with it a dislike of the process. It all becomes a chore and, believe it not, that mindset makes the job harder and eventually flows through to the writing.
Generating and writing good content should flow easily from the mind through to the keyboard and onto the page. If it doesn’t flow naturally or if every word has to be dragged out then perhaps you need to go back to square one and find a more suitable topic.
