Written on September 15th, 2007 at 12:09 am by Darren Rowse
Building Blog Readership by Monitoring What Other Bloggers are Writing
Today I want to share a technique that I used when I started my first money making blog to find new readers. It’s one of those tips that probably won’t bring you thousands of new visitors to your blog all at once - but it definitely did help me to grow traffic levels in the early days.
Before I share the tip - let me start with a short illustrative tangent
Regular readers will know that we recently put our house on the market (and sold it). One week after we first began the marketing campaign to sell our house (we advertised in newspapers and online) we began to find that our mail box was filled with letters from a variety of companies including moving services, mortgage brokers and house cleaning services.
Obviously these companies were watching who was advertising in different real estate websites and newspapers and gathering the addresses of advertised properties to send their own marketing material to. In this way they were targeting prospects who were more than likely to be in need of those types of services.
While I found these letters somewhat annoying - they actually did work. We booked a window cleaner through one of them and my wife’s collected all of the removalist companies for when we move home in December.
What does this have to do with promoting a blog?
While checking our mail box this morning and finding another moving company letter I was reminded of something that I used to do when I was starting up one of my early blogs.
The blog was on digital cameras and photography and as most new bloggers do - I was struggling to find readers for it.
One day when I was pondering my lack of readership I went to Technorati and typed the words ‘digital camera’ into the search field there. I was actually looking to see if there were any new cameras being released - but what I found instead were 15 or so blog posts written mainly by personal bloggers talking about different aspects of their use of cameras.
One was complaining about his camera being a piece of junk, another was boasting about her new camera, another was asking for advice on which camera they should buy, another wanted to know how to use their camera better…. etc
I spent half an hour that day leaving helpful and relevant comments on each of those blogs - making suggestions for new cameras, giving tips on how to use them etc. In each case I left the URL of my camera blog in the URL field so that they could find my blog - and in a couple of the posts I even left links in the comments pointing to useful pages on my blog to help the blogger find more information.
What I found was that around half of those that I left these comments for responded to me either with follow up comments or emails. In each case they said they’d check out my blog. Not only did they do this - but I found that many that I helped with comments actually linked up to my blog in days and weeks following me making contact.
As a blogger with just a handful of regular readers I decided that this technique could be quite powerful and I began to monitor a variety of keywords on Technorati with the goal of interacting with other bloggers when they brought up a topic that I was writing about.
Tools for Monitoring Keywords that Bloggers Use
These days there are a variety of tools that you can use to help you to monitor keywords that other bloggers are using in their posts. these include:
- Technorati Watchlists - you can use these to monitor keywords and/or URLs. You can set them up to report any blog that uses those words.
- Google Blog Search Blog Alerts - in the same way Google’s Blog Search allows you to track keywords and have them emailed to you either as it happens, daily or weekly.
There are other tools available for this type of monitoring - but I find between these two that you are pretty comprehensive. Feel free to suggest any of your favorite monitoring tools that you use.
Be Useful and Generous
The key with this technique is to not only find when people are talking about topics that relate to your blogs - but to respond to what they’re saying in a genuine and helpful way. Don’t spam their comments with your links but answer questions, make suggestions, share your experience etc. The more useful and generous your comment is the more likely you are to have someone check out who you are and what else you might have to say that is useful.
Building Your Blog One Reader at a Time
I’ve shared this technique with a number of people and around 50% of the time that I have done so I’ve had people write it off as all too hard and not worthwhile. Some bloggers are only interested in building traffic to their blog quickly and any technique that doesn’t have the potential to bring in hundreds and thousands of new readers is ignored.
My own experience is that techniques like this one that build your blog’s readership one reader at a time can be very worthwhile. One new reader who comes back on a daily basis over a number of years because they’ve been genuinely helped by you can have a significant impact upon your blog not only in terms of their own visits and comments - but when they’re a blogger the potential for them to bring their readership with them can be significant.
Image based on one by practicalowl
Written on September 14th, 2007 at 10:09 pm by Darren Rowse
Check How Many Google Subscribers You Have
I’m not sure when this happened but King Nomar just let me know that Google have added a tool to their Webmaster Tools that allows you to check how many subscribers your RSS feeds have in Google’s feed readers (iGoogle, Google Reader, Orkut).
The numbers reported only count Google subscribers - but it’s interesting that Google are now tracking this information (makes me wonder how long it’ll be before subscriber numbers are used in their search algorithms (if they’re not already).
What I’m not sure is how this treats subscribers through feedburner feeds if you don’t have a feed on your domain. From what i can see the number in Webmaster tools is significantly less for me than what Feedburner reports my Google subscribers as (Google reports it at less than half what Feedburner does for Google subscriber numbers).
Via King Nomar
Written on September 14th, 2007 at 06:09 am by Darren Rowse
Driving Traffic to Your New Blog
While there are no easy answers for finding readers I think it’s a topic well worth coming back to again and again.
Greg writes:
“I’ve recently started a blog (August) and I’m trying to figure out the best way to drive quality traffic to my site. I’ve been writing at least a post a day if not every other day. I began commenting on 9rules and a few other sites that I enjoy visiting. I was wondering if you could provide some insight for a beginning blogger on getting that initial readers base. Do I just continue commenting on sites I read or digg articles, what can I do to get this jump started.”
OK - there are many answers to this question and I’ve written many posts on the topic of finding readers for a blog (I’ll share a link with loads of resources at the bottom of this post). However let me put forward a few thoughts that come to mind:
1. You’ve Made a Good Start - you’ve already stumbled on one key factor in promoting your blog - interacting on other people’s turf. Keep leaving those comments, getting to know other bloggers and contributing to what others are doing on their blogs. This does have an impact. It may not bring thousands of readers in - it’s more of a ‘one reader at a time’ type strategy - however you never know when that ‘one reader’ will be someone influential.
2. Take it Up a Notch - so you’ve discovered the principle of interacting on other people’s turf - so how about taking it up a notch and doing something more than leaving comments? How about attempting to get a few guest posting spots on key blogs in the niche that you’re trying to make a mark in? I’ve seen a number of bloggers who’ve really built a name for themselves by doing this. Of course your guest posts need to be of a high standard - but if they are you can really make an impression on a blogger and their readers.
3. Communicate What Your Blog Is About - I hope you don’t mind - but I’ve taken a look at your blog Greg (toonice4TV). A few questions that I asked myself when I first arrived at your blog (questions that most readers of a new blog would ask when they first arrive) ‘what’s it about?’, ‘what’s in it for me on this blog?’ In the same way that you’d be unlikely to pick up and buy a magazine that you didn’t know the topic of - readers are not likely to stick around on a blog for long that doesn’t communicate strongly what it is about and how people will benefit from it. There are lots of techniques for getting people to a blog - but the key is to have something that communicates strongly to them when they get there.
4. What Makes You Different? - Another key question that potential readers will ask is ‘what’s different about this blog?’. What’s your blog’s unique selling proposition to a prospective reader? What sets it apart from the other millions of blogs out there (many of which are writing on a similar topic). You need to communicate this clearly - in the design, branding and content. New blogs need to work hard on this.
5. Make it Easy to Connect - another quick observation having taken a quick look at your blog - perhaps make subscribing to your blog via RSS a little easier. While I can see your feed in the URL field in Firefox using auto discovery - it might be worth promoting your feed a little more prominently on the blog in some way. You might use an RSS button or icon of some kind - or even just an ‘RSS’ Text Link. I find that the more prominently you do this the more people will use it and the more likely you are to convert a one off visitor into a loyal one.
6. Content - ultimately it is the content that you write that will be key in growing your readership - unique content that engages with and enhances the lives of people over the long term.
Further Reading
A lot more could be said on the topic of building readership on a blog let me point you to some links instead of regurgitating it all here.
You can find them on my How to Find Readers for Your Blog page which compiles some of my most popular posts on how to build readership and how to leverage it once you’ve got it.
Written on September 14th, 2007 at 12:09 am by Darren Rowse
How to Position Yourself for Seasonal Search Engine Traffic and Not Put Your Readers Offside
Leon followed up my recent video post where I talked about anticipating what people will be searching for as a technique for growing your blog’s readership with a question:
“How do you anticipate searches without sacrificing the quality of your posts?”
Good question Leon - I’ve seen a number of bloggers recently who I think this could be relevant for.
Recap - In my video post I spoke about how I discovered the power of anticipating what people are searching for by accident one day when I wrote a post titled ‘Australian Idol Winner?’ on a personal blog that I was writing at the time. Of course in the days before Australian Idol announced it’s winner this post attracted quite a bit of search traffic.
Stay Relevant to Your Blog’s Niche
The key with this type of strategy is really to keep things as relevant to your blog and as useful to your reader as possible.
The technique worked well for me in the example above because I was writing a personal blog that covered a lot of different topics. My original post ‘Australian Idol Winner?’ was a post asking readers who they thought would win and sharing some of my own predictions. It was a topic I’d written about before and something that my readers responded to.
The post worked for me on that blog both in connecting with readers and positioning itself for search engine traffic - however if I were to write the same post on my other blogs (for example enternetusers or one of my Photography blogs) it would fall flat on it’s face and probably cause a reader backlash.
Perhaps in my video post I should have qualified my comments on this technique by encouraging readers to stick within their niche if they’re trying this topic.
So instead of just thinking in general terms about what the wider population will be searching for in a few weeks - think about the question in terms of your niche. This of course makes things harder for some blogs than others.
Don’t Compromise on Content Quality
The other thing that is worth considering on this topic is the quality of posts. I’ve seen a few bloggers take this idea and write posts that are stuffed with relevant keywords for a topic but which are of no use to their regular readers at all. The key is to create a post that is both well optimized for SEO but which more importantly is useful to readers by providing them with content that means something.
If you sacrifice on quality you’ll not only frustrate your current readers - but you’ll hurt your potential relationship with new ones when they search for information and then arrive at your blog post only to find rubbish. Provide them with great information and they’ll stick around and become loyal readers!
Want some examples?
Let me share a few of my own posts which will hopefully illustrate the point. These photography related posts all provide readers with something of worth - but are also reasonably well optimized for the keywords that search engine users search for at different times of the year. Together these four posts have brought in hundreds of thousands of search engine visitors over the past couple of years.
- 16 Photography Tips for Christmas
- How to Photograph Fireworks
- Halloween Photography Tips
- Digital Camera Christmas Gift Ideas
The key is to anticipate search traffic - but not to compromise on your reader experience.
Written on September 13th, 2007 at 09:09 am by Darren Rowse
Speedlinking - 13 September 2007
There have been some great posts written in the last few days around the blogging about blogging space. Here are a few that caught my eye:
- Shoemoney answers a reader question - How to make money from a blog with $100 promotional budget. His response draws on some nifty Google Analytics analysis.
- Wishful Thinking shares 6 tips for Dealing with Feedback on your Creative Work which I think applies to bloggers who constantly put themselves into a position to be critiqued (something we all struggle with at one point or another).
- Yaro puts some great thought into his post - The 4 Ways of Building Traffic to a Blog and Why Most Bloggers Pick the Wrong Method.
- Wendy has taken her one blog and launched it into a whole Magazine of different blogs around the one topic in her new eMomsatHome Internet Home Business Magazine. A good strategy for blogs who have some traction already - to leverage it and launch others off the back of them.
update - just saw this one - someone’s making a blogging movie and want to know whether you’d want to see enternetusers in it :-) I thought they’d get someone in like Brad Pitt to play my part….
Written on September 13th, 2007 at 12:09 am by Darren Rowse
Getting to 1000 Visitors a Day, When to Go Pro,.Net or.Com and Lonely Bloggers - Reader Questions Answered
Today’s video is me tackling four questions from readers:
1. How long did it take to get to 1000 visitors a day (and how did I do it)? - submitted by Jason from atomicguitarist.com. Read a little more on anticipating what people will be searching for in my post Seasonal Traffic and How to Capture it for Your Blog.
2. How and When did I go ‘Pro’? - submitted by Brennan from bpmonaco.com. Read more about my journey of Becoming a enternetusers.
3. Why do I use enternetusers.net not enternetusers.com? - submitted by Vincent from theworldofmodernmen.com. Read more about the process of me buying enternetusers.com.
4. Can Blogging full time get Lonely? - submitted by Adam from adamok.net. Read more about blogging and relationships at Blogging in Formation - Lessons from a Goose and How to Improve Your Blog by Partnering Up.
Apologies for the lower quality video this week. I recorded it on my laptop’s built in webcam which isn’t as great as my normal camcorder.
Got a question you’d like me to answer - Ask it Here
Written on September 12th, 2007 at 09:09 pm by Darren Rowse
Leaked Video Reveals Google Reader Developments
A leaked video from Google on Google Reader reveals some fascinating hints at where the reader is headed according to Blog Scoped. Some of the highlights:
- Google will work on a standard for feed publishers to tell aggegrators about changes in the feed
- The Reader team is going to integrate more social features
- Google is interested in allowing users to comment on items they share
- Very soon, Reader will recommend feeds to the user, based on previous subscriptions and other Google activity.
- Reader might be more directly monetized in the future, but Google wants to watch out showing ads next to other people’s content. This is a problem with Google News too. They might do something like they did with the non-free Opera: show the content owners’ ads in the interface when they’re AdSense publishers.
There’s heaps more - but the above interested me most. I think that the idea that they’d allow publishers who show AdSense to have their ads show in the feed is an interesting possibility that might help publishers monetize their feeds.
Also that they’ll be recommending feeds to readers is something that I think will advantage some bloggers - the question will be - how does one get on the list of recommended feeds? What sort of algorithm will determine who gets recommended? I know that some of the very biggest blogs with massive feed subscriber numbers have really benefited from being a default feed in feed readers - so this could really launch some lucky blogs!
Written on September 12th, 2007 at 10:09 am by Darren Rowse
The ‘Best’ Example of Linkbait (This Week)
Leo has created a great example of linkbait in his post NxE’s Fifty Most Influential Bloggers.
While the validity of the list itself will create debate (and already has in comments) these sorts of lists tend to work well for a number of reasons.
- They appeal to the egos of those included - I’ve already seen a number of those in the list linking up
- They create controversy - even if this were a 100 person list there would be some who would be left out - at least in the minds of many. The result is an increase in comments and linkups
- Lists have Link Appeal - the list is a powerful way to generate traffic - particularly through social media sites (which is where I saw this list (Digg and Delicious).
Creating your own top 50 influential bloggers list is not likely to get the traction that Leo’s gained from his (at least not for a few months until people forget this one) but there’s nothing to stop bloggers creating their own that relate to their own niches.
The 20 Most Influential Pet Blogs - The Definitive list of Top Financial Bloggers…. etc
A word of warning - creating any sort of definitive list that claims to present the ‘most’, ‘best’ or ‘greatest’ of anything will cause debate and often some sort of backlash. This controversy is part of what makes these lists go viral - however it can take a toll on your as a blogger also.
Written on September 12th, 2007 at 01:09 am by Darren Rowse
Full Or Partial RSS Feeds - The Great Feed Debate
This week I want to try something a little different and attempt a debate here at enternetusers. The idea is simple - I’ve chosen two people who I think have experience around a debated blogging topic to argue the case for either side of it. These two opinions will act as the first speaker for each side and then I (as the moderator) will hand it over to you the enternetusers readership to act as the 2nd and 3rd speakers for each side.
The idea isn’t to have a bun fight over the topic but to flesh it out and engage in some good conversation and learning.
The Topic
The topic for this debate is ‘Full or Partial RSS Feeds?’ - it’s a topic I get asked about a lot and which I know there are good arguments for on both sides.
The Speakers
I’ve chosen two speakers for this debate that I think will get a good conversation going. They are:
Arguing for Partial Feeds is Gina Trapani - editor of the famous Lifehacker blog.
Arguing for Full Feeds is Rick Klau - former VP, Publisher Services at FeedBurner and currently in Strategic Partner Development at Google.
I should say before we start that I put Gina in a position of having to argue for something that she isn’t convinced of herself. She generously agree to participate however.
So without further ado - here’s some thoughts from Gina and Rick to get our discussion going. Feel free to chime in with your thoughts in comments below - no matter what they might be.
The Argument for Partial Feeds
Gina Trapani - editor at Lifehacker
At Lifehacker.com we offer a choice of either a full-post feed (with ads) or partial feeds (no ads.) While giving the reader a choice is a good thing (at the expense of adding an extra step to the subscription process), I can see why a publisher or a reader might prefer less-popular partial feeds.
As a publisher, providing a pull quote in your feed instead of the full post gives you the advantage of seeing which stories your readers are interested enough to click on. A lot of people assume that publishers use partial feeds just for extra on-page ad views, and that may be true in some cases. But back when I published a personal site - and advertisement-free site - I used partial feeds for editorial purposes. The necessary clicks from feed items served as instant reader feedback. You simply can’t do the kind of traffic tracking with full feeds than you can do with partial ones.
As a reader, I prefer partial feeds in some cases, especially from news sources who can summarize the point of the article in one sentence. Skimming CNET’s partial post feed, which just includes the story lead, is a lot easier and more efficient than including the entire article.
The Argument for Full Feeds
Rick Klau - former VP, Publisher Services at FeedBurner and currently in Strategic Partner Development at Google.
More than half a million publishers have burned nearly 900,000 feeds over at www.feedburner.com , so it should come as no surprise how often we are asked which is better: full-text or partial feeds? While there is no single, “right” answer that covers all situations, there are a number of often overlooked angles to consider.
First, I’d like to clear up a few points of confusion. Clickthroughs alone are an imperfect (if not altogether inaccurate) measure of a reader’s interest in a story. Partial feeds often make it harder, not easier, for a reader to know whether they’re interested in a story at all. If you just include a sentence or two of a post in a feed, you’re asking the reader to click through to read the rest of the post - when the actual substance of the post is not at all obvious from those first few sentences.
Regarding Gina’s statement that “you simply can’t do the kind of traffic tracking with full feeds that you can do with partial ones” - I respectfully disagree. Publishers who use FeedBurner’s feed management services can measure both feed item views ( i.e., posts which are read in the aggregator) as well as clickthroughs - giving them an accurate view of both clickthroughs, and more importantly, the clickthrough rate. This is true for both full feeds and partial feeds… and is often the best way to measure how engaged your audience is with your content. It should be noted that in feeds who’ve compared full and partial feeds, we’ve seen no hard evidence suggesting that partial feeds alone increase the clickthrough rate.
Now for some reasons why full feeds are in a publisher’s (and a reader’s) best interest. I think Mike Masnick at TechDirt hit the nail on the head earlier this week when he posted about this question:
[F]ull text feeds actually … lead to more page views… Full text feeds makes the reading process much easier. It means it’s that much more likely that someone reads the full piece and actually understands what’s being said — which makes it much, much, much more likely that they’ll then forward it on to someone else, or blog about it themselves, or post it to Digg or Reddit or Slashdot or Fark or any other such thing — and that generates more traffic and interest and page views from new readers, who we hope subscribe to the RSS feed and become regular readers as well. The whole idea is that by making it easier and easier for anyone to read and fully grasp our content, the more likely they are to spread it via word of mouth, and that tends to lead to much greater adoption than by limiting what we give to our readers and begging them to come to our site if they want to read more than a sentence or two.
As I wrote earlier this year on our corporate blog, full posts also contain far richer information within the posts - hyperlinks - that can be exploited by services like TechMeme, Technorati, and other RSS-aware services. Those links are valuable indicators of the relationships between posts - which can yield tremendous context for readers who want to discover related content. Partial posts rob readers (and automated services) of that context, as the hyperlinks themselves aren’t included in the partial posts.
Commercial publishers who distribute feeds often worry about the lack of revenue - they make money on their site and are understandably concerned that they are “giving away” their content through the feed. But it’s possible to monetize your feed directly (through FeedBurner’s feed and blog ad network, among other options) - and if you buy Masnick’s argument above, traffic to your site will actually increase thanks to the fuller feed (which means your site revenue will increase as well!).
Readers clearly prefer full feeds over partial feeds; one need only see the outcry from Freakonomics readers (read the comments) last week when they switched from a full feed to a partial feed to understand that readers value the delivery of information in its entirety, to an environment (their newsreader) they prefer. Certainly there are occasions when a partial feed is required: many commercial publishers have licensing issues that prevent them from including full text in the feed, and in those cases, some content’s better than no content. But when it’s better for the readers (who get what they want, where they want it), better for the publishers (who can drive more revenue and satisfy their users), and better for the ecosystem (which get more information, which allows them to add more value to their users), it’s my opinion that full feeds are simply better.
Have Your Say
OK - Rick and Gina have kicked the conversation off - it’s time to have your say!
Do you use Full Feeds, Partial Feeds - or both? Why?
Written on September 11th, 2007 at 09:09 pm by Darren Rowse
Prize Update
A quick update on the Call for Prizes that I put out earlier today.
- There have been quite a few offer to donate prizes already - thank you to those of you who have already submitted something.
- I will continue to accept ideas until Friday so you’re welcome to submit something until then
- Prizes so far have been pretty cool - but I won’t make decisions on them until the weekend so if you’ve sent in a submission you won’t hear anything back for a few days yet
- We don’t need any more ‘keyboards’ or ‘mouses’ donated
- We don’t need any more hosting packages, setting up of blogs/design
Interestingly prizes are coming in from a large range of people and companies ranging from individual bloggers wanting to get some extra attention to more established small companies.
While the prizes donated so far are great and I will definitely be able to use many of them - I’m particularly looking now for a few premium prizes that will really get people’s mouths watering. In return these premium sponsors will get some extra special attention through the project.
To submit a prize - see the Call for Prizes for the process to follow.
Lastly - if you can’t donate a prize - fee free to suggest some prizes that you’d like the chance to win in comments below. A few potential sponsors have been asking for ideas! What is your wishlist?
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