Written on December 10th, 2005 at 10:12 am by Darren Rowse

Ethics for Science and Health Bloggers

Miscellaneous Blog Tips 32 comments

Our Second post in the b5media 12 Days of Christmas series is by Hsien-Hsien Lei. I’ll let her introduce herself and tell us about the topic of - a topic that might well be worth thinking through for all types of bloggers but which is particularly relevant for some in a field like Hsien-Hsien Lei.

Hi. I’m Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei and I write the Genetics and Public Health Blog. Unlike most of the other blog tips you‚ll be reading about in this series, mine will be geared towards science and health bloggers who, I think, have greater responsibilities to their readership. We’re not just blogging about the next generation of iPods or the latest celebrity to make a fool of himself. We’re blogging about life and death.

So maybe I’m being a little over-dramatic. But it’s true that science and health bloggers need to fully disclose any information that may mislead readers. For instance, I am a doctor, but I’m not that kind of doctor; I hold a PhD, not an MD. That makes a huge difference in how I understand and interpret the latest science and health news.

From the start of the Genetics and Public Health Blog, I made it clear that I wasn’t beholden to any advertisers or sponsors. While ads may appear on my blog, they do not influence my writing in any way. Everything I write is my own opinion. No one tells me what to write.

I encourage all science and health bloggers to write a post answering the following 10 questions posed by The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health:

1. Who runs this site?
2. Who pays for the site?
3. What is the purpose of the site?
4. Where does the information come from?
5. What is the basis of the information?
6. How is the information selected?
7. How current is the information?
8. How does the site choose links to other sites?
9. What information about you does the site collect, and why?
10. How does the site manage interactions with visitors?

My answers are posted at the Genetics and Public Health Blog. If you choose to answer these questions too, leave me a comment!

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Written on December 9th, 2005 at 12:12 pm by Darren Rowse

Writing Gooder

Writing Content 34 comments

The first submission in the b5media 12 (or so) days of Christmas series is from Rhys Alexander one of b5’s many bloggers with more blogs than she really knows what to do with. She’s the blogger behind Screamstress (a horror blog) and Literally Blogging at b5. And has other personal blogs that include: Proud White Trash, Online Universities, TV Envy, and Universities. Rhys is also a college professor who teaches writing and literature and has more energy and ideas than I’ve seen bundled in one person for a long time! I hope you enjoy her post on Writing Gooder - she certainly seems qualified for it.

Do you have dreams of striking it rich through blogging? Want to sell your own products, or make revenue off a company’s products? Want to be the king or queen of blogging networks, an online ad expert, an Internet force? Great. But before you can accomplish any of this, before you can even begin to have a hope of success, you must possess one crucial skill. And it has nothing to do with business savvy. It’s good writing.

As a blogger, writing is your main product. It’s the only way your reader or potential consumer has to know you and to gauge what you’re selling, whether it’s a physical product or simply your thoughts. Your writing is what a car is to the car sales person, what the colorful consoles and games are to Nintendo, what the rousing beat and catchy lyrics are to a musician. In blogging, your writing is you.

Unlike stories and novels, where the reader has the luxury of flipping through pages to get to the ‘good part,’ you must capture the reader’s attention immediately. Because something else is always a click away. There’s a reason they’re called ‘hyper links.’

I teach writing and literature courses at the university level, and regardless of the class, we always spend the first three weeks discussing the three crucial elements of all good writing. We don’t have three weeks here, of course, but we’ll cover the important highlights.

All good writing can be reduced to three essential parts:

Diction

Detail

Grammar

The first element is diction. Diction is simply word choice. What could reveal more about you as a writer than the words you choose?

The biggest mistake writers make here is diluting their writing with unnecessary words, perhaps trying to sounds more ‘important’ or ‘intelligent.’ Don’t deaden your words that way. You want your writing to crackle with life and energy. One word is always better than two.

In his book On Writing, Stephen King addresses this wonderfully:

“One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.

“Make yourself a solemn promise right now that you’ll never use “emolument” when you mean “tip” and you’ll never say John stopped long enough to perform an act of excretion when you mean John stopped long enough to take a s***. If you believe “take a s***” would be considered offensive or inappropriate for your audience, feel free to say John stopped long enough to move his bowels... I am not trying to get you to talk dirty, only plain and direct.

“Remember that the basic rule of vocabulary is use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful. If you hesitate and cogitate, you will come up with another word — of course you will, there’s always another word — but it probably won’t be as good as your first one, or as close to what you really mean.”

Writers’ sentences are often full of unnecessary, clunky words. Our lexicon is full of overdone expressions like “9pm at night,” “very unique,” “in my opinion,” and so on. Take a look at these two sentences and their revisions:

“In the border closer to the image, there is a crease which runs through the border about one inch..” Ug. Instead, how about “Closer to the image, a one-inch crease runs through the border.”

“One of the important chapters of the book that I find interesting is the one about the language of chimpanzees,” can be streamlined to “The important chapter on chimpanzee language interests me.” Which would you rather read?

As a teacher, I like to give assignments. So if diction is a problem for you, try this: A popular writing genre is ‘short shorts’ in which a writer writes a complete story in less than 300 words. That means you have characters, a setting, a beginning, middle, and end, and conflict…all in less than a page of writing.

An example: ( Daydream by Roberta Allen)

“My half sister is shrieking in the front seat of the car while her husband–a gambler like our father–races through the mountains at top speed. This trip feels like a roller-coaster ride. My half sister’s husband can’t wait to reach Las Vegas and lose his wife’s money. Their son and daughter hold each other tight in the backseat where i sit too. My half sister’s daughter–older than me!–is also shrieking. i keep my nose pressed against the window glass. I am not afraid.”

You learn so much in such a short space. You can practice this with fiction or non-fiction. There’s no better exercise to force you to choose the ‘best word.’

The next must-have is detail.

Detail makes the difference between boring and terrific writing. It’s the difference between a pencil sketch and a lush oil painting. As a writer, words are your paint. Use all the colors.

All detail is rooted in the five sense, as these are the only way we can possibly experience the world. The five senses are sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. Can you guess which one is the most overused?

Yup: sight. Even the worst writing will describe what something looks like. One sense is missing in more than 90% of writing: smell. Which is unfortunate, as smell is the sense most closely tied to memory, and the one that affects us most strongly. If you see a picture of an ex boyfriend or girlfriend, for example, memories will arise. But imagine how strongly you’ll be affected if you catch a whiff of the perfume or cologne they used to wear.

Oh come on, you may be thinking, I blog about car reviews. People just want the facts.

Yes. But would they rather get those facts in a dry, boring paragraph, or would they rather feel like they’re there with you in the car, the smell of new leather tickling their nostrils, the vibration of the engine beneath their feet, the butter-smooth leather against their fingertips? Guess which article would make the reader want to buy the car.

In her novel The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver is a master of sensory detail. Here is the first paragraph from her book:

“Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened. First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A glide of snake belly on branch. A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. This forest eats itself and lives forever.”

Beautiful and affecting, but even she forgot to include smell.

Here is the assignment I use to help my students improve their sense of detail. It forces you away from the hackneyed sense of sight, and to consider the senses most writers overlook:

Describe your favorite color to a blind person who has never seen it.

You obviously can’t explain what green ‘looks’ like. But how does it smell, what would it feel like, what sound does it make? This ends up being most of my students’ favorite assignment.

Now on to the dreaded, but necessary, evil: grammar. You must have expertise in this area or you will never be taken seriously as a writer. Grammar is the foundation your house of writing is built on, and without it, your structure will crumble.

Nothing is worse than being interested in a piece of writing, only to encounter bad grammar. Nothing pulls a reader out of the illusion faster than this lack of skill. It’s like seeing a beautiful woman across the room, only to have her smile at you and reveal rotting teeth. Ruins the effect, doesn’t it?

There are several blogs that contain interesting premises and original thought, but I can’t stand to read them because the writers have not bothered to perfect a basic grasp on language rules.

Now, typos and misspellings are not that big of a deal…spell checkers will pretty much catch those. (There may well be typos in this very article…but there’s a difference between making a minor mistake, and not knowing what you’re doing.)

The most common, and worst, errors are context errors. Basically, it’s using a wrong version of a word.

The most common is probably the infernal switching of ‘your’ and ‘you’re.’ If nothing else, please know the difference between these two. And of course, there’s their/there/they’re, it/it’s, accept/except, affect/effect, and many, many more main offenders. A great exercise is to practice sentences containing all variations of the word, to force your brain into seeing where each version belongs. For instance, to practice their/they’re/there: “Those dogs over ___are wagging ___tails. ___ cute.”

This is just the tip of the grammar iceberg, but as 85% of errors writers make here are context errors, it’s worth the time. It will be painful at first, but soon it will come naturally.

Here’s a maddening, yet fun exercise I use each semester. The following poem, if put through a spell checker, will come out as perfect with no errors. That’s because spell checkers don’t catch context errors. Take a look:

“I have a spelling checker -
It came with my PC
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss steaks aye can knot sea

Eye ran this poem threw it,
Your sure reel glad two no.
Its vary polished in it’s weigh -
My checker tolled me sew.

A checker is a bless sing.
It freeze yew lodes of thyme.
It helps me awl stiles two reed,
And aides me when aye rime.

To rite with care is quite a feet
Of witch won should be proud.
And wee mussed dew the best wee can,
Sew flaws are knot aloud.

And now bee cause my spelling
Is checked with such grate flare,
Their are know faults with in my cite;
Of non eye am a wear.

Each frays come posed up on my screen
Eye trussed to be a joule.
The checker poured o’er every word
To cheque sum spelling rule.

That’s why aye brake in two averse
By righting wants too pleas.
Sow now ewe sea why aye dew prays
Such soft wear for pea seas!”

Read out loud, it makes sense. But it will twist your brain will you try to read it. For the ultimate exercise in overcoming context errors, rewrite this correctly.

This concludes our brief exercise in Writing Gooder.

Everyone can become a better writer, and it’s your most valuable asset as a blogger. Once you have the mad writing skillz, nothing will stand in your way of taking over the blogosphere.

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Written on December 9th, 2005 at 12:12 pm by Darren Rowse

b5 media’s 12 Days of Christmas

enternetusers Site News 11 comments

As I mentioned in my last post - while I take a little break here at enternetusers (just for a few days) I’m going to be running a series of posts written by some of the bloggers over at internetusers. I’m hoping for it to run over the next 12 days as a 12 days of Christmas type series.

Whether there ends up being 12 of them I’m not sure (I think I’ve only got 10 of them).

The point of the series? It’s twofold really.

Firstly I think the bloggers at b5 have a wealth of experience between them and I wanted to get them sharing with each other more on what they know about blogging. This is one of the benefits of being in a blognetwork - people quite naturally help each other out as we have a group with all kinds of expertise. Our internal communications are a fascinating read as different people share what they know. I’m hoping we can raise the level of this sharing of knowledge within the network in 2006.

Secondly I figured it’d be a good opportunity to put some other names on the face of b5media than it’s directors. While there’s been some negative press recently about b5media’s directors recently our bloggers have selflessly blogged on and produced some excellent content. Hopefully this will give a little something back to them and raise the profile of the work that they do. Each post will have links back to their blogs.

Keep in mind our bloggers are all at different levels of experience and are blogging about very diverse niches - some of their tips will be very helpful to some of you and others will not be as relevant for you depending upon your own blogging focus and experience. Some will seem basic, others irrelevant - but I’m sure all will find some readers that they resonate with.

Without further ado - let me bid you farewell for the weekend and get this new series under way.

update: Here are the posts in the series so far:

Day 1 - Writing Gooder
Day 2 - Ethics for Science and Health Bloggers
Day 3 - It’s all about the Lifestyle
Day 4 - Fund Your Love of Blogging
Day 5 - Get a Little Bit Personal
Day 6 - Tips for Writing Hardworking Posts - Part A
Day 7 - How Pictures can Sell Your Post (and Your Product)
Day 8 - Niche Blogging Benefits.
Day 9 - Tips for Hardworking Posts II
Day 10 - Overcoming Intimidation Over English Skills in Blogging
Day 11

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Written on December 9th, 2005 at 12:12 pm by Darren Rowse

I’m Hybernating for the Weekend

enternetusers Site News 12 comments

Just a quick post to say that I’ll be scarce here over the weekend for a number of reasons. It’s partly that I have more weddings this weekend than you can poke a stick at and partly that I’ve been advised from people that are helping me work through a ’situation’ to have a few quieter posting days. That will sound very vague but unfortunately it needs to be. Hopefully one day I’ll be able to share the story with you - a story of the underbelly of blogging.

Thanks to the many people who’ve sent kind emails over the past day or two and to those contacted me to alert me to some comments that needed dealing with here. All I’ll say is that they were deleted and that despite their nature they were very helpful comments.

Anyway - enough vagueness. While I’m not here this weekend I’m going to be running some blog tips that some of the bloggers over at b5media have kindly written for me. It’s a series I’m calling ‘the b5media’s 12 days of Christmas’. I’ll explain it in the next post.

Have a good weekend.

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Written on December 8th, 2005 at 12:12 pm by Darren Rowse

Blogging for Money and Tax

Miscellaneous Blog Tips 19 comments

There’s a useful post by Bill over at BaseBlogging about Accounting for Bloggers where Bill interviews an accountant, Brian Borawski from Tigerblog, about tax implications and financial structures for bloggers. It’s probably more useful for US bloggers but might give those of us from other countries a few hints at the type of questions we should be asking our financial advisers.

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Written on December 8th, 2005 at 09:12 am by Darren Rowse

Squidoo Goes Public Beta

Pro Blogging News 35 comments

Also in my emails this morning was a number of emails from people telling me that Squidoo had come out of it’s private beta test.

I’ve not had a chance for a good look around it yet but have heard some good things from it so far.

Have you played with it yet? Have you created a lens? If so feel free to leave the URL for it in comments below. I’d love to see what you’ve been experimenting with.

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Written on December 8th, 2005 at 08:12 am by Darren Rowse

Blogging Rhythms - Clearing the Inbox

Miscellaneous Blog Tips 28 comments

Every morning when I get up there is a all manner of things waiting for me in my inbox. This morning there were 251 emails (it was about 6 hours between checking them - this number doesn’t include the 200+ emails that came in telling me about deleted comment spam). The morning inbox clearing process is taking an increasing amount of time. It has this strange way of setting the agenda and tone of the day. I always approach it with a mixture of apprehension and excitement at the unknown things it might contain.

In the inbox this morning was:

• 100 or so comments from my blogs (a few of them spam that got through the spam killer plugins that needed my attention)
• a couple of blogging opportunities to follow up (I’m always amazed at the array of interesting projects people are working on)
• two requests for interviews (one podcast one, another via email)
• a load of b5 correspondence from b5 bloggers and directors
• 80 or so news alerts and press releases on different keywords that I follow in Google News and Topix (yeah I know they do RSS, but there are a few words I like to follow via email as well)
• one or two hate emails (unfortunately a daily thing these days)
• a couple of encouraging emails (I try to focus more on these than the previous category of emails)
• 15 ‘can you check out my blog/new product’ emails (emails that I find it hard to keep up with these days)
• a number of suggestions from blog readers on how I might improve my blog or topics they’d like to see me cover
• quite a few questions from my different blog’s readers (I get a lot of these on my digital camera blog)
• a few suggestions of links I might like to check out.

Here’s three of the links suggested today from enternetusers readers:

• Zach suggested I check out Why You Should Consider Budgeting a Site Redesign for Firefox 1.5 Now
• Greg suggested I look at Wordsmits hail podcast success
• Terry recommends Big Brains Mean ‘Tiny Testes’ (Not blogging related but it made me think of one or two bloggers who must have massive testes!)

It was a pretty typical array of email to deal with. In fact it was probably a bit lighter than normal, although since daylight savings came in I find that the first couple of hours of the day tend to bring in the biggest numbers of emails each day.

Dealing with email can be a pretty overwhelming experience so I’m attempting to develop systems for dealing with it. I’ve slowed down the frequency that my email is checked, but also have a triage type system which I’m trying to use to help me deal with it. As it comes in I have three categories.

1. Junk - some email goes straight in the Trash. This includes spam, the majority of comments on blogs that don’t need following up but which I read to keep my finger on the pulse and a few other miscellaneous emails. I ‘junk’ around 30% of my email.

2. Respond Now - if I can deal with the email in less than 3 minutes I try to do so immediately. This includes answering simple questions, responding to comments threads that need my attention etc. This makes up about 40% of my email. The more of this that I can do in the moment the clearer my day is.

3. Later - These are emails that will take longer to respond to. They fall into two subcategories really.

a. Firstly there is ‘later today’ - these are the urgent emails that will take a bit of thought, a phone call or an IM conversation to sort out. I try to schedule these into my daily to do lists. It also includes emails that result in posts on my blog (ie when someone asks a question that I want to turn into a post, where someone suggests a topic or a link etc).

b. Secondly there are those ‘much later’ emails which could get done today if I get time but will probably have to wait a few days, weeks… and even months. These include some interview requests, bigger questions from readers etc. While I’d love to respond to every request sometimes it’s just impossible. I quite often clear these much later type emails all at once every few weeks when I take my laptop down to a local cafe where I can be offline and churn through them.

How do you deal with email? Got any productivity tips for the rest of us?

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Written on December 7th, 2005 at 09:12 pm by Darren Rowse

YPN adds 1000 beta testers

Yahoo Publishing Network 18 comments

YPN has added another 1000 beta testers to their system today and takes another step towards going live. As far as I can see they are still only adding US publishers.

Luckily b5media has a US postal address and is registered there and qualifies to be included in the beta test and Duncan and Jeremy have begun the experiment of swapping a few of our blogs over onto it to see what the results are like.

Duncan is writing up his findings as he goes at Yahoo! Publishing Network reviewed.

I’m in the midst of a crazy week of speaking engagements so I’m yet to peak into the admin area of YPN through our account but am definately looking forward to taking it for a run on the b5blogs and might even give it a go here at enternetusers.

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Written on December 7th, 2005 at 01:12 pm by Darren Rowse

Blog Design and Ad Conversion

Advertising, Blog Design 16 comments

Peter’s posted an interesting post over at The Blog Studio on blog design and Ad CTR. Peter’s done a few blog designs lately and has found that in designing blogs to incorporate ads that the blogs have seen significant boosts in conversion.

‘What neither client expected though was that their click-through percentage jumped – dramatically. Not only were more people coming to their sites, but more (many more) were clicking on their ads. We’re talking about significant, sustained double digit growth. One client recouped the cost of his redesign investment in a single week.’

This sounds a little like Peter’s selling himself here (and I’m sure to some extent he is) but I know of one of the bloggers that Peter is referring to and they’ve also told me about their increased conversion since the redesign also.

In chatting with Peter this afternoon via Skype about what he’s found I’m fascinated and pleased by his.

I’m fascinated (or maybe it’s a bit of surprise) because one of the things that often comes up when I talk with bloggers is that it’s often their ugliest blogs that have the best CTR. Slapping ads front and centre on a blog without much thought to design can certainly get them attention and as a result clicks - but at what expense?

I’m also pleased by what Peter’s found because surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.is a year where I’m going to be working on new designs for my blog. I’ve already penciled in some time with Peter himself to get some work done with him on one of my blogs and am eager to find out what impact it will have, not only on ad performance but more importantly to me reader loyalty.

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Written on December 7th, 2005 at 01:12 am by Darren Rowse

11 Techniques to Increase Page Views on Your Blog

Blog Promotion 73 comments

Yesterday my brief study into page view statistics revealed that the average blog reader views around 1.7 pages every time they visit a blog.

I finished the post by indicating that I’d post more on how to increase your blog’s page views.

Of course more page views may or may not be what you want from your blog. At least one commenter on the previous post noted that they are happy with a low page view count because it could mean people are leaving their blog by clicking on an advertisement and thereby earning them money. While there could be some truth in this observation and I’m not adverse to this happening on my blogs - I’m also interested in building blogs that people find interesting and useful and one of the many measures of this can be page views. Of course to get back to the money thing again - those of you running impression based ads will be interested in increased page views also.

Having said that - IF you’re interested in increasing the number of pages that your average reader reads, here are a few suggestions that might help:

1. Highlight Related Posts - one of the more common practices of bloggers to encourage readers to read multiple pages on their blogs is to to highlight related posts at the end of your article. You’ll notice that i presently have a list of 5 posts at the end of each individual page that suggests other posts that readers might find useful This list is generated by a WordPress PlugIn. Those of you using other blog platforms might find similar plugins for your own system or might like to manually suggest related articles at the end of your posts.

2. Interlink within Posts - a similar but perhaps more effective technique is to highlight relevant posts within the content of your posts. If you’re writing a post that mentions something similar to what you’ve written before simply link to your previous post from within your article. For example I’ve written about this technique previously in a post on increasing the longevity of key posts.

3. Highlight Key Posts and Categories in your Blog’s Hotspots - I’ve often mentioned that the hottest posts on this blog are those highlighted in my top three menus. Specifically it is those in the top left hand box at the top of this page that are always at the top of my most read post statistics. Depending upon the goals of your blog - you may wish to fill your blog’s hotspots with ads or affiliate programs - or you may want to highlight key posts that are central to your blog and which will hook readers into what your blog is about (thereby increasing page views). Highlighting your category pages is also another similarly useful technique to encourage your readers to find more posts on the same topic. To explicitly name what your category is can also be useful. ie rather than just having the category name at the end of the post - try something like ‘read more posts like this in our ((insert category name)) category’ or ‘filed under ((insert category name))’ etc.

4. Compilation Pages - Extending the previous idea about highlighting key posts you may wish to use posts in these positions that sneeze readers not just to one post on your blog but many. The best example of this on enternetusers is my Top 20 Posts at enternetusers post which is in my top left hand menu. This post, as the name suggests, suggests 20 posts on my blog that readers might like to read. I know that this is a post with immense power on this blog and that many first time readers use it to bounce into all corners of my blog. One or two new readers have fed back to me that this page and the pages that it linked to was the reason that they became hooked on enternetusers. Every post they read added to the chances that they would become loyal readers.

5. Series - While you need to be a bit careful with writing series of posts over periods of time, they are a great way to keep readers coming back and once they are complete to have them surf through multiple pages on your blog. The most popular series on this blog is my Adsense for Bloggers series which leads readers through 8 posts. I know many readers progress through this series because I occasionally get a series of comments from a reader who is obviously progressing through it - 8 comments over 30 minutes or so as they comment on each post. Don’t just do a series for the sake of increasing page views of course - this can really frustrate readers but use them on longer posts or when you’re genuinely wanting to interact with a larger topic over time.

6. Excerpts on Front Pages - I know there are a segment of enternetusers readers that detest seeing excerpts (extended entry feature) on blog front pages and are very cynical that it’s just a ploy to get more page views. While I personally like using excerpts on front pages it is not about page views for me (although I guess it is a side benefit of it). Personally using excerpts in this way is more about keeping my front page manageable and highlighting multiple posts on the front page. ie if a reader can come to my blog and see not only the last post but the title of the second and maybe even the third post then they are more likely to explore more than just the last thing you’ve written. I tend to only use the extended entry feature on longer articles and allow shorter ones of a paragraph or two go up on the main page - unless I either forget or see the post as an important one.

7. Excerpts in RSS - Once again there is always debate over this topic of full or partial RSS feeds. I know some bloggers main purpose in partial feeds is to get bloggers directly onto their blog - thereby increasing their impression/page view count. While this is certainly a benefit of partial feeds it is not my own reason for using them. Rather I use them for copyright protection and to stop people scraping my full content onto their site’s via RSS. Whatever reason you choose to use partial/excerpt feeds - you should also realize that doing so will cause some readers to unsubscribe to your blog completely. I know in going only with partial feeds that there are some other bloggers who refuse to visit my blog - this is a cost/benefit scenario that individual bloggers need to weigh up.

8. Enable links in RSS Feeds - Another way that I know a couple of bloggers use to get RSS readers to actually surf to their blogs is to enable the ability to post html/links in their RSS and then using links to previous posts in their blog, especially in the first paragraph or two of their posts. This is not a technique I’ve tried but I know of one blogger who swears by it and says it significantly impacted the number of visitors to his blog from RSS as well as the number of pages that they viewed.

9. Search Function - most blog blog platforms have the ability to use a search feature on your blog which enables users to search your blog for keywords. This feature obviously helps your readers to locate other posts on your site and as a result increases the potential for a multiple page view visit.

10. Build an InterActive Blog - one way to get readers coming back to your blog many times over a day is to have a blog that people want to interact with. I know some enternetusers readers visit this site at least 10 times per day just so that they can engage in the conversation that happens in comments. Since I added the ’subscribe to comments’ feature on this blog I’ve noticed some readers coming even more than normal - this can only be increasing page view levels as people return throughout the day. I’ve written (some time ago now) a few ideas on interActive blogging here and here.

11. Quality Content -This should go without saying but needs to be reinforced. Obviously if you write quality content your readers will want more of the same. Useful, original and interesting content should leave your readers hungering for more. Work on the quality of your blog and you’ll find that things like traffic levels and the numbers of pages being read should look after themselves and be on the rise.

There are no doubt other techniques for increasing page views. I’ve heard bloggers who swear by writing loads of posts per day to encourage readers to come back numerous times per day as one such technique - but I’d love to hear your experiences in comments below.

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