If there’s a new blog born every half second, how will yours get noticed?
The average blog reader views 77% more pages than an average user, and believe it or not, those blog readers are 11% more likely to have an average income of $75,000 or more, according to Clickz. Well that sounds like a great target audience, but with over 50 million blogs out there, how do you get your blog to stand out of the woodwork and get noticed? Well we’ve been doing some research of our own in an effort to redesign the new Mequoda Daily 2.0 and here’s some fun stuff that research has shown us.
1. Get Involved: The best way to get your blog viewed and subscribed to is to join the community.
- Go to other people’s blogs, comment, and link back to your own blog.
- Get yourself very familiar with Trackback and make sure your blog has the functionality to support it.
- Track and interact with your loyal users using the site/widget MyBlogLog, which creates a community of users based on which sites they frequent.
- Participate in Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn Answers and drop a link to your blog
2. Choose Frequency: First of all, make sure all of your entries are dated. Next, pick a frequency and stick to it. It’s simple: the more you update, the more frequently your users will visit. But don’t sacrifice quality for frequency. After all, the reader should trust that you posted something worth their time. Also, subscribe to a service like Pingomatic to make sure your fresh content is always up for the world to see. According to Technorati, the most popular times of day for English language bloggers to post is between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. PST, with another spike at 5 p.m. Pacific Standard Time.
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3. Select Topics: If you’ve got five or more topics, it’s very likely that your users aren’t interested in all of them. Blog readers tend to skim looking for keywords. If you write on a variety of topics, it could be very beneficial to the reader to include a list of topics in your navigation. However, you should max out your topic list between 10 and 20.
4. Sharing is Caring: You’ve got some great things to say, so go ahead and encourage them to spread the word. Add the most popular blog buttons from popular sites such as digg, del.icio.us, and Technorati to the bottom of your post, but also be sure to include an “Email this post” as well as providing bloggers with a permalink to each and every one of your stories. RSS readers will also love an RSS link.
5. Personalize it: When people want to hear news, they go to a news site, when they want a personal opinion or view, they visit blogs. Just like in the real world, when someone can relate with you or feels like they can be open enough with you to discuss something, they’re likely to invest in you, or your product.
The two most important parts of personalization (next to your writing of course) are going to be these:
Bio: Unless this is “Cheers”, where everybody knows your name, you need a bio, as do any other writers in your blog. It lets people know you’re credible and gives them a background sample of where you’re coming from and what your experience is in the industry.
Photo: Since people remember faces better than names, you and any other writers in your blog should have an author photo somewhere on your blog page. If you have multiple writers in your blog, each post should be anchored with a photo of the writer. And even better, according to Designing Websites to Maximize Press Relations by the Nielsen Norman Group, for PR reasons, its best to include a link to a high-res version of your photo, probably in that fancy bio you just made.
6. Promote, Promote, Promote: The best way to promote your blog is to make friends with other bloggers. The best way to do this is to find the top 10 blogs in your niche, contact their authors, make friends, and write about each and every one of them. Another way to get your stuff out there is to submit to sites like ezinearticles.com, blogg-buzz.com, digg.com, and blogcarnival.com.
7. Easy Reading: If you have a high amount of older readers, you may consider implementing what we so affectionately call the “Geezer Feature”. This is the option to let people increase the text size on your website, (see the top of our site for an example). Another “Easy Reading” tip that may be good for international companies is to install a language translator into your blog. According to Technorati, 39% of blog readers read English, but 31% read Japanese and 12% read Chinese.
8. Attract Comments: It should be very easy for your users to leave a comment. After all it’s a great way to see how your blog is doing and an even better way to connect with your audience. At the very least, there should be a comment button at the bottom, and below that, a list of previous comments with a way to respond in a threadlike way to each of them.
According to Jacob Nielson, 90% of online community users are lurkers (read or observe without contributing) with only 9% of users contributing ‘a little’ and 1% actively contributing. So how do you attract comments?
Ask: People love to give their opinions, so just ask and ye shall recieve.
Respond: Let them know you care, respond to their comments and provoke further communication.
Feedback: Providing the user with an “Email me responses to this thread” link is a fabulous way to get people to come back to your site and stay interested.
Rewards: Add a ranking feature that allows users to rank comments by helpfulness, or, if you have some seriously devoted users, rank users by number of comments posted.
Was this helpful to you? Share your thoughts below on designing 2.0 blogs!
