Written on April 6th, 2007 at 07:04 am by Darren Rowse

Dealing with Affiliates

Affiliate Programs 14 comments

Rhys asks - ‘I’ve been running a site with a few affiliates on it, I have enjoyed a healthy relationship with said affiliates, and likewise they’ve commented to me on a number of occasions that I have generated business for them from my site. Recently my site has experienced a huge upturn in visitors, and the amount of money I’m getting from the affiliates - which previously covered my hosting bills - is no longer covering it.

I am wondering if it is reasonable to ask at the end of the current agreement to ask for more money. If so, how would you go about asking them?’

Interesting conundrum Rhys.

I’m a little curious about why the increase in traffic hasn’t brought about an increase in affiliate sales? I suspect it’s the source of that traffic - for example I find Digg traffic doesn’t’ generally convert well for ad or affiliate program performance and loyal readers tend to become blind to them also.

Whatever the reason - you’ve got an interesting problem on your hands but I think you could have already stumbled on the answer.

Talk to your affiliates and see what they can do for you.

I deal with a number of people whose products I recommend and have found that they are often quite willing to accommodate you IF you are driving enough business to them. It might be that they’d be willing to pay you a little money to pay for a little extra advertising and it might be that they’d increase the percentage commission that you receive per sale. The other thing that I’ve seen one or two of them do is develop a special product for my readers which I can exclusively promote. Some will even write content for you in exchange for an affiliate link in each post (you win because you drive new sales and get free content - they win because they drive new sales).

The key will be whether your business is significant enough for them to cut you an individual deal.

If they don’t you have a few other options to pursue:

• Improve your Affiliate Program Promotion Strategies - perhaps it is time to find a new position for your affiliate ads or perhaps its time to write some reviews of the products they offer. I’ve written quite a few tips on affiliate programs here
• Find New affiliate products - if your problem is that your readers have seen all the affiliate programs that you promote already and are becoming blind to them it might be time to find some new alternatives.
• Advertising and Other Income Streams - perhaps its time to add some advertising into the mix to help you cover your costs? Depending upon your niche AdSense, Chitika or YPN might be worth exploring (see some direct income earning streams like advertising here). Alternatively you might want to explore some indirect income earning streams for your blog like consulting, writing a book, developing your own e-product etc.

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Written on April 5th, 2007 at 11:04 pm by Darren Rowse

AdSense Give Ad Units a Spring Clean

Adsense 43 comments

AdSense have today announced that they’ve given their AdSense units a ’spring clean’. They write that this is a result of testing and research and that the new look ads should lead to better performance for both publishers and advertisers.

The new look ads will be rolled out in the coming days and will incorporate the same colors and fonts that existing ads have.

AdSense also notes that you cannot opt out of the new designs but also hint at more format options ‘in the future’.

Here’s how the new ads look (click to enlarge)…. it’s not a massive change as you can see.

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Written on April 5th, 2007 at 03:04 am by crate engine

The Ultimate Guide to Getting Lots of Link Love

Search Engine Optimization, Blog Promotion 60 comments

This Guest Post was written by Wendy Piersall from eMoms at Home.

Good link love, bad link love, do we really care who links to us? A savvy blogger would say yes and no. Based on the 80-20 rule of business - 80% of your traffic will come from only 20% of your links (by my stats, it’s less than 20%).

Of course, links from A-Listers and high Google Page Rank sites are a worthy pursuit. But why should we care about the 20%, those links from anyone, especially the sites that will likely only send us a couple of visitors a week?

Quite frankly, there are four compelling reasons to care about “little links”:

• Little links can turn into big links. One of my top referrers of all time, Steve Olson, linked to me in the fourth post he wrote. His blog has grown so big that this post still sends me consistent traffic to this day, and we’ve become great friends in the process.
• Technorati. If the A-Listers only had links from A-Listers, they wouldn’t BE A-Listers!
• The long tail of referring domains. If I added up all of the referrals from domains that sent less than 4 people a week to my site, together they would be my fourth largest source of traffic.
• Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first. (Rather shallow of them don’t you think?!)

I don’t advocate spending tons of time in the pursuit of mass quantities of links from small sites. I do advocate spending a little bit of time each month cultivating links from a wide variety of sources, regardless of the amount of traffic potential.

So without further ado, here is the world’s greatest list of posts dedicated to the fine art of Link Love. Note I didn’t say longest, because there are a lot of long lists out there (which can get quite overwhelming). These are the BEST posts on the subject written within the last year…

The Best of the Best

101 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006

66 Ways to Build Links in 2007

How to Attract Links and Increase Web Traffic – The Ultimate Guide

Link Strategy

Setting Proper Link Strategy Goals For Your Links Pages

SEO 101: Establishing and Evolving an Effective Link Strategy

12 Different Types of Links and How To Get Them

Additional Ways To Get Links

Developing a Reciprocal Link Strategy

Linkbaiting

An Introduction to Linkbaiting

Andy Hagans’ Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting and Social Media Marketing

The Resource Linkbait - Using Lists to Build Authority, Traffic and Links to your Website

The Enormous Linkbait List

Relationship Building

Linking Relationships

A Strategy for Relationship Linking

How To Get Links from Bloggers

Link Building is Relationship Building

Buying Links

Link Buying Guide : Directories, Ads and Reviews

The Definitive Guide to Link Buying (PDF)

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Written on April 5th, 2007 at 01:04 am by Darren Rowse

The Secret to a Successful Blog Post

Miscellaneous Blog Tips 15 comments

This post has been submitted by Neil Patel. Neil is co-founder and CTO of ACS) and writes regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog, Pronet Advertising.

Are you looking to start a blog but have absolutely no idea how to write a blog post? On the outside it may seem simple as if you were writing a short essay. Unfortunately, that’s not exactly what you are doing. One thing I’ve learned and helped others learn is that blogging is actually quite different than what Mrs. Talbot taught us in the 10th grade. Instead of worrying about the placement of your concrete details, take a look at the following key elements that can make a great blog post:

• Talk to your readers and not at them – Blogging is a two way street and you want to create a conversation. If you talk at your readers like a professor you aren’t likely to create much of a conversation. Take to your readers like you would talk to one of your friends, in a very casual setting, but leave the beer for later.
• Get to the point – No one wants to read a ten page blog post. There is no minimum length requirement with blog posts so feel free to get to the point and don’t beat around the bush. People like skimming and reading a post with depth, precision, and as few words as possible can deliver value to your readers.
• Don’t wander off topic – This might have come from Mrs. Talbot. Make sure you have a central idea and stick with it. If you are writing a blog post about the latest and greatest plasma television don’t talk about VCRs or the latest blue ray scoop.
• Value is the key to success – Don’t you hate reading stuff that brings no value? There are only 24 hours in a day so make sure whatever you write has the potential to be beneficial to your readers in some fashion.
• Entice your readers – If you can’t get anyone to read your content and interact with your blog, what’s the point of writing? You may be just writing for yourself, but chances are you want others to read your content as well. Use catchy headlines and ask your readers for their thoughts.

What other elements do you feel makes a great blog post?

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Written on April 3rd, 2007 at 01:04 am by Darren Rowse

What Bloggers Can Learn From … Focused Blogs

Miscellaneous Blog Tips 30 comments

Today’s guest post is from Chris Garrett from chrisg.com.

My last two posts at enternetusers focused on two successful individual bloggers, Darren Rowse and Robert Scoble. While we can learn a great deal from observing individual people, for this post I am going to look at examples of a particular type of blog; the Focused Niche Blog.

It’s standard advice to go niche but these bloggers have made their blogs so highly focused and so identified with their topic they are the leaders and standard bearers for their niche.

First, let’s take a look at how they define their blogs:

Strobist - At Strobist, our goal is to promote more effective use of small, shoe-mount flashes. To teach you to use your small strobe to get results like the professionals get.

Copyblogger - Copyblogger is all about helping you:

• get traffic
• gain subscribers
• attract links
• sell something!

Lifehacker - Lifehacker makes getting things done easy and fun. Delving deep into the technoweb, Lifehacker brings back simple and totally life-altering tips and tricks for managing your information and time.

macosxhints - To provide as many answers about using OS X as possible in one location

So what is the lesson here?

1. Identify an under-served niche - It is very very difficult to get a photography blog noticed in todays blogosphere, David chose a micro niche, a niche of a niche, and served it comprehensively with his Strobist blog. Make it easy on yourself, choose a niche where you can make a difference.

2. Define your blogs mission and articulate it in a benefits-lead way - if a reader sees your blogs mission and thinks “so what?” you have failed. How does your blogs mission help the reader? Each of Brians CopyBlogger bullet points would be enough of a benefit to make you want to read more.

3. Own your mission and stay focused - It would be so easy for any of these blogs to see their growing audience as permission to cover anything they like. Once in a while they can get away with it. Kind of like a popular pop star deciding to release a swing album. Too much though and the valuable and unique quality that attracted readers would go away. I know if macosxhints covered iPhone, iTV, iPods too much I would unsubscribe. Your focus builds your identity.

The benefits of a focused blog are many but here are the ones that stand out for me:

• Exponential Linkage - Once your blog is synonymous with a niche the link attraction becomes self-reinforcing. More people link to you, so your blog gets more attention, which attracts more links. This gives you top billing in search engines which further reinforces your position on.
• Fame and Authority - Who would you interview if you had to write a piece on Flash Photography? Or copywriting for blogs? Not a generic blogger that is for sure.
• Credibility Leverage - With authority comes leverage. You have to be known as an expert. It worked for Lifehacker so well they got a book deal. It helps to be a specialist if you want to sell products, get a book deal, speaking gigs, consulting leads …

When a visitor arrives at your blog could they describe what and who it is for? Do you blog about “stuff” or could you articulate your blogs purpose in a compelling sentence or so? Most blogs could benefit from a tightening of focus, I know mine could.

Do you know of any other focused niche blogs? Let us know in the comments.

Read more from Chris Garret at his blog chrisg.com.

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Written on April 2nd, 2007 at 03:04 pm by Lorelle VanFossen

Blogging Is About Writing

Writing Content 115 comments

By Lorelle VanFossen of Lorelle on WordPress

When you visit Google, do you click a picture to begin your search? Do you face a screen full of images like in a grocery store self-checkout? Click fruits, then apples, then scroll through pictures of apples before you find the Jonagold Apples you want to buy, and select those?

Of course not.

The web is about words. No matter how visual and audible it becomes, it continues to be about the words.

Blogging is about writing. Many claim that content is king. If content is king, then the army that protects and defends the king is the written word.

Here are some things to think about next time to put your army to work on your blog.

1. Don’t Just Show, Show and Tell: It’s time to get back to show and tell. Blogs offer amazing ways to present multimedia information, but you still have to tell us about it. You must show and tell in order for your point to be fully understood. Words may not do it alone, but a picture is not worth a thousand words when fed through feeds and search engines. You must have the words.
2. Keywords, Keywords, Keywords: With the recent public release of the Google Patent for Blog PageRank, your keywords are more important than ever as the algorithm applies multiple content matching, content relevancy, search relevancy, and link-to-content relevancy tests to determine if the keywords match the content. Learn how to write keyword-rich content to increase your page ranking. More importantly, write with keywords to help your reader know exactly what you are writing about.
3. Write Clickable Titles: The keywords you use in your post titles tell potential visitors what your post is about. If they don’t get it, they won’t click it. If they do click, and the content doesn’t match, they won’t be back.
4. Make Your Point in the First 200 Words: You have less than a second to capture your reader’s attention. If the user on your site, feed, or search engine summary doesn’t “get the point” in the first two or three sentences, you’ve lost them.
5. Blog Writing Is About Editing: A great idea does not translate automatically into good writing. It’s the editing that clarifies your writing so the idea comes through. It’s as much about the words you add as the words you take away to increase the post’s clarity and power.
6. Make Your Words Timeless: Blog writing isn’t like words you throw out into the air and expect them to vanish. The words you fill your blog with tend to last. Make sure the words you use and the things you say are worth reading twenty years from now.
7. Don’t Waste Words: A powerfully titled article drew me from my feed reader and I was greeted with this first sentence: “I still have to take a shower, and I’m late for work, but I wanted to tell you about this because I think it’s important, so I’ll just rush this off before I jump in the shower and head to work.” Don’t waste words. Don’t tell your readers things they really don’t want to know. Get to the point and stop wasting your time and theirs.
8. Explain Jargon: We get so caught up in our little world of acronyms and industry jargon, we forget few outside our clubhouse know what we are talking about. Stop once in a while and explain to us what these terms and letters mean. It doesn’t have to be a paragraph, just a few words. Don’t assume we know what you are talking about.
9. Use Descriptions in Images and Links: Blog writing isn’t limited to just the words. If you aren’t using titles in links and alt in images, you are missing out on a very valuable use of keywords and content building. You are also not in compliance with web standards.
10. Use Descriptions for Flash, Podcasts, Videocasts, and Screencasts: If you are using any audio or visual multimedia on your blog, help us understand what we are going to see and hear. Convince us to click to play. A picture may speak for itself, but you have to do the writing for it.
11. Present a Problem, The Solution, and The Results: Don’t present a solution before the reader understands there is a problem. Present the problem, give us the solution, and then lead us through the results and the benefits of the results. When readers follow along with the process, they better understand how it works and why it works for themselves.
12. Just the Facts, Ma’am: Everyone has an opinion. What makes your opinion different from other opinions is that yours is based upon the facts. Wild accusations, suggestions, and analogies do not build trust and respect. Make your opinions be based upon valid facts and identifiable references and citations. Be prepared to back your word up with the truth.
13. If You Have 100 Top Priorities, You Have No Priorities At All: If there are 40 topics you want to cover in one blog post, all unrelated, what are you writing about? As a guide, write on three points, all related, and publish that. Want to write about 40 different unrelated topics? Don’t stuff them all into one post. Publish one for each topic.
14. Originality Will Always Win: Original content will always win over redundant, blockquoting, and echo chamber content. Even if you can’t write well, the attempt to say it in your words is always appreciated and welcome.
15. Move The Reader Through the Story: A blog post or article has something to say. It begins, has a middle, and ends. Move the reader through the content, as well as into it. Let each word lead to the next word and the next. Make each sentence lead the reader to the next sentence, and each paragraph draws them into the next. They want to “turn the page” and consume the words as they read along. Make them want to scroll down for more.
16. Blog Paragraphs Are Short: Blog writing lends itself to shorter sentences and paragraphs for easier reading on a web page. Web readers want information fast and in small digestible chunks. Huge bulky paragraphs make reading online very difficult, however single sentence paragraphs can make the reader uncomfortable.
17. Use Command Verbs to Teach: If you have something to share, a lesson to teach, advice, or guidance, use command verbs to energize your “how to” words. Words, like “make”, “do”, “write”, “take”, and “build” are Active instruction verbs. When people are searching, they like to be told “what to do”. Tell them.
18. No Wishy-Washy Passive Voice: Avoid wishy-washy passive voice instructions like “If you would like to maybe you should think about checking the spelling of your post before you think about publishing it because…” Write with authority, like you know what you are talking about: “Check the spelling before you publish your post.”
19. Use Nouns and Synonyms: When you are writing about it, you can add some of this to it to help it along. Huh? What’s “it”? If you are going to name something, name “it” what it is. Call it by its name. Use nouns and synonyms to help the reader know what you are writing about and increase the keywords in your content.
20. Comments Are Content: Make sure comments speak well for your post, your blog, you, and your readers. Edit comments for misspelled words and obvious flubs. Your commenters will appreciate it. Clean out trash and inappropriate comments, and definitely get rid of comment spam.
21. Visualize Who You Are Writing To: Writing to the “air” is fine for some, but most people need to know “who” they are writing to, and for, in order to begin. Visualize a person or small group and write as if you are talking directly to them. If that’s too formal or uncomfortable, imagine you are writing to a friend.
22. Clean Up Old Posts: As your blog writing improves, go back over your old posts and clean them up. The fresh perspective will help you edit and improve the content. You might find new life in your old posts and direct more traffic their way.
23. Write Kinda Like You Talk: It’s important to write in a conversational style because your readers will relate to you, the person behind the blog. Your writing should give the illusion you are speaking directly to the reader without including all of the stutters, “ums”, and “likes” we hear in every day conversation. Don’t write like you have a dictionary or thesaurus sitting next to you. Match the writing style with the content.
24. Mind Reading Writing: Do you have a friend or co-worker who starts a sentence in the middle of a paragraph? Don’t leave your reader wondering why she is on this page. Make your point early. Make your point obvious. Back it up with the details.
25. Avoid Screaming: Writing with CAPITALIZED LETTERS INDICATES SCREAMING, so don’t do it for the length of an entire post. Learn the basic rules of capitalization. The beginning of sentences and proper names are capitalized. Just because you Like a Word doesn’t MEAN you have to capitalize Every Important Word. That went out of fashion a couple hundred years ago. and writing all in lower case may look cute for a young girl’s diary or personal blog, but it is old. out of fashion. people think you are a girl under 16. stop it. now.
26. Punctuate Properly: Use commas, quotes, and apostrophes in line with the grammar rules of your language. In English, there is no space at the end of a sentence before the period or question mark. Learn the difference between “its” and “it’s”, and while you are at it, learn “their”, “there”, and “they’re”, along with “your” and “you’re”. People will condemn writing for less. Don’t give them a chance with careless grammar mistakes.
27. Blog Writing Isn’t About Smiley Faces: Write emotions, not emoticons. ;-) Too many :D smileys are :\ annoying and :) distracting.
28. Teach Your Readers: Share with us your thoughts, feelings, experiences, and knowledge. Teach us, oh, great blogger, how to live and function in this crazy world.
29. Make Me Think: If you make your readers think, you’ve succeeded in interacting with them. If you make them write, you’ve succeeded twice over.
30. Write With Conviction and Passion: Even if you write badly, if you write with conviction and passion, then we will read you.

There are two ways to hold your reader’s interest. Show them something they’ve never seen before, or show them something in a way they’ve never seen it before.

Blogging that gets noticed and linked to is all about seeing things in a new light. A university advertising professor once told me there are “no new ideas, only new ways of presenting old ideas”. Present information from a unique perspective and writing with a fresh angle and you will attract attention.

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Written on April 2nd, 2007 at 01:04 am by Darren Rowse

A Strategy for Relationship Linking

Blog Promotion 31 comments

The following post has been contributed by Liz Strauss from Successful Blog.

Blogging is more than writing and sharing information with the masses. Publishing a post only starts the heartbeat of growing blog. Yaro Starak says Don’t Be An Insular Blogger, never linking to or talking about other bloggers. Mike Sansone can be heard repeating “Link out at least once in every post.” It’s number 4 on his Blog Posting Mantra.

Linking out is a great strategy for attracting incoming links and traffic. Even more it’s a great way to establish quality relationships that grow as your blog does. Use this strategy to find bloggers that you will have long-lasting linking relationships with.

• Define your brand values. Know what your blog is about and have values. Every established brand has values. That’s what draws us and keeps coming to a brands that we love. Figure out the key values of your blog and identify blogs that share the same values as yours. You’ll have a lot in common. as people.
• Have a standard of quality. Write down the traits you hold as a standard and look for them before you link. If you’re want a long-term relationship, go for quality and relevance before traffic. A quality blog that’s a friend for months or years has lasting value after a spike in traffic is long forgotten.
• Look for bloggers who have differentiated their blogs. High-quality, one-of-kind blogs have huge growth potential and the bloggers who run them usually have plenty of marketing savvy to share.
• Keep current with relationships you already have. Visit and link to the blogs that have been your friends all along.

Relationships make for stronger, more relevant links. It’s relationships that will see you through when other links break or fall off. Linking for traffic or for incoming links is a short-term strategy. “It’s called link love,” Phil Gerbyshak just said to me. “Link because you love the blog, the information, the post, the ideas that are being shared.”

I couldn’t agree more.

I want relationship not a one-link stand.

Read more of Liz’s work at Successful Blog.

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Written on April 1st, 2007 at 01:04 am by Darren Rowse

Long Posts vs Series of Posts

Writing Content 32 comments

Ah Pek asks - ‘I have started a new blog, and I will be doing a series of articles that are quite lengthy. I have divided it into a few parts. Is it advisable to post it as a regular entry with titles that says XXX Part 1 and so on or would it be better to put all the parts in a single page with a dedicated title? Which option will be better from a SEO point of view?’

Let me attempt to outline some of the advantages and disadvantages of Long Posts vs Series of Posts.

The Pros and Cons of Long Posts

As you suggest - one of the options at your disposal is to simply write one long post. The beauty of doing this is that your readers get all the information on a topic in one uninterrupted post that they don’t need to keep coming back to over time. For reader satisfaction alone a long post can be great.

The problem with long posts is that unless you’re an incredibly gifted writer - many of your readers won’t get to the end of a long post. Studies into how people read online have shown that they respond better to short sharp pieces (although I do find readers respond well when I write long pieces too).

Another problem with long comprehensive posts is that they can actually drain you of ideas that could sustain your blog for a longer period of time. For example instead of writing one long post with 30 tips in it you alternatively could have written 30 shorter posts with 1 tip in each over a full month. I’ve seen a few bloggers launch with incredibly comprehensive posts that cover almost every aspect of their niche. Those posts can do very well with readers an on sites like Digg - but the next day the blogger can often be left wondering if there’s anything on their topic left to write.

The Pros and Cons of a Series

The advantages of a series of posts include:

• more posts to sustain you over time (see the 1 post with 30 tips or 30 posts with 1 tip example above)
• more focused posts help SEO (search engines are better able to accurately assess what a post is about when they have one topic instead of many)
• interlinked posts help SEO (search engines like an interlinked website)
• frequent posting helps SEO (if you have the choice between one post a month or 30 from an SEO perspective I’d go for 30 as search engines like a frequently updated site)
• a series can build momentum (regular posts that build on one another on a daily basis can create anticipation among readers)
• a series can build page impressions (if you’re interested in monetizing a blog with CPM ads then a series can be good as reader will click from one post to the next)
• a series can help motivate a blogger write a longer piece of work (the idea of writing a 30 point post can be pretty daunting - but setting yourself the goal to write a short post each day for a month (or shorter period) can be much more achievable).

Of course the downside of a series is that some of your readers will simply prefer to read all your content in one place at one time and could become frustrated with a ‘bitsy’ series.

Another negative of a series is that it can sidetrack your whole blog. For example - stopping normal posting just to write upon one smaller aspect of your topic for a month could disillusion readers who want you to cover a wider array of topics.

Another Option - do Both

Why make it a choice between a series and a longer post? How about doing both?

One of the approaches that I’ve experimented with a number of times is running a series and then combining all the parts into one post. For example when I wrote my Search Engine Optimization tips for bloggers I wrote it as a series initially but then combined it together into one longer post which I now link to from my top menus.

I find that some readers really appreciated this.

Some might worry that this causes duplicate content problems on your blog - but I don’t think you’d be penalized for it if it was an occasional thing and if you wrote a new introduction for the post (you’d probably also delete some of the connecting introductions to each individual post which would change it too).

For more information on how I generally construct a series of posts on a blog check out 10 Steps to Writing a Successful Series on Your Blog.

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Written on March 31st, 2007 at 07:03 am by Darren Rowse

NYC enternetusers Meetup Prizes

enternetusers Site News 13 comments

As I mentioned in my last post - last night didn’t quite work out to be an appropriate place for a prize draw - so I’ve just drawn six winners.

If you’ve won I’ll need to get a postal address from you - if you could shoot me an email via my contact form with your name and address I’ll try to get the prizes off into the mail for you.

Six Figure Blogging - worth $325

The three winners of the Six Figure Blogging course are:

• Glen Yonemitsu
• Valeria Maltoni
• Lara Kulpa

Best of enternetusers - price to be announced

This is a soon to be released product that I’ve been working on with Chris Garrett. We still need to do a little work on some aspects of it’s marketing but as a result of a lot of emails from readers asking for a condensed version of this blog we’ve been putting this together and are hoping to release it in the coming month. These three lucky winners get a sneak peak of a beta version.

• Ed Miller
• Ian McAfee
• Tyler Colman

As I say - I need to get postal addresses of the above winners and will attempt to get the prizes to you this coming week.

Thanks again to everyone who came along last night. Hopefully at the next meet up there will be more prizes to give away too!

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Written on March 31st, 2007 at 07:03 am by Glen

The Importance of Letting A Good Post Wait

Writing Content, General 28 comments

This article was written by Glen Stansberry of LifeDev (feed). Check out LifeDev if you want more ways to be creative and efficient with your writing.

Growing a readership is something that takes hard work and a little luck. Sure, sites like Digg and Reddit can greatly expand your readership overnight, but it’s really the way you craft your posts that will help the most with growing your blog. A bangin’ post is worth 10 mediocre ones any day. But unfortunately for most of us, in order to write a great post you have to be a… decent writer.

Becoming a better writer should be every blogger’s goal. Better writers can craft posts in a way that a) get their point across quicker and b) connect with the audience more effectively. No matter what your content, your audience will always benefit from better writing. And if your audience is happy, you’ll be happy too.

The darndest thing about blog content is that you can have the most amazing post in the world, but if you can’t create mildly decent sentences with proper spelling and grammar, nobody’s going to listen to you.

If you’re going to write like a drunk kindergartener, you can kiss your subscription rate goodbye.

[Disclaimer: The author does not even pretend to be any authority on “proper writing”. As a matter of fact, he fell asleep frequently in English classes throughout his youth.]

If you’re not a great writer yet, don’t stress. Improving your writing skills comes mostly from practice and reading other great writers. But I’ve found that the most effective way to improving my blogging has been to just let my posts sit. If I sleep on a post, odds are it will be much better than had I just hit “Publish”. You see, most of the blogging mojo comes after the writing is done.

Once you’ve stopped typing you’ve only just begun the writing process. Read it through, at least a couple times. Odds are each time you read it through, you’ll pick up on stuff that could be worded better, or explained more, or even taken out completely. Don’t be afraid to let something sit overnight, or even longer. Think of your post as like a cheese that just gets better with age.

I’ve found that some of my best posts were crafted over the course of days. Yet it paid off in the end. The social sites went to town on that content, and now I’ve got backlinks galore from those posts.

You don’t want to let your posts sit too long though. At this point your fine cheese has turned a little too green. I wouldn’t recommend letting your posts “percolate” more than a week. Some people can pull it off, but for me I lose interest in the original topic too quickly, and most of my original ideas are gone.

So when you start to craft your next post, let it sit for a bit and see what happens. I guarantee your quality of writing will increase. And if your blog’s quality increases, so will your readership.

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