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Blogging With Purpose

One of the most important things you can do as a blogger is blog with purpose. In other words, you need to know what you hope to accomplish with your blog. Do you want to make money? Do you want to land a job? These questions control what actions you should take when blogging.

It’s also important to have a specific point that you want to make with each of your blog posts. Before you publish your next post, make it a point to read through it and make sure that the post makes a clear and concise point. This main point is often referred to as your thesis when writing papers, articles, or documents.

I personally think a lot of people struggle to find purpose, especially when just beginning. When I first started my personal blog, it did not have a specific purpose other than giving me the ability to write out my thoughts and adventures. This made it rather difficult for me because it was hard to monetize it since it did not have any specific goal.

Once I realized that, I knew how important it is to create a goal from the start. This makes it much easier to make a plan of attack since you know where you are trying to get to. So the best advice I can give a new blogger is make sure to sit down and think about your purpose. Figure out exactly what you want to do with your blog and you will make the road ahead much easier for yourself.

How Well Do You Know Your Readers?

If you have a blog, you most likely have at least a few readers that love to check out your new content. You might even have a few thousand devoted daily readers. Regardless of the number, my question to you is how well do you know your readers?

Have you ever set some time aside to scan through and read all of your comments? What about visiting the blogs of your fellow commentators? By doing this, you can get a really good idea of WHO your readers are and what they are about.

Another great tool is analytics software. You can see where your readers are from, how they found your blog, and how long they typically spend there. This is a ton of useful information that can really help understand your readers.

Why Is This Important?

The main reason why it’s important to know your readers is because they are the people that benefit from your blog. These are the people that use your content in some way, shape, or form. If you know who they are, then you can target your content directly at them.

If you plan to monetize your blog, knowing who your readers are is crucial. Not only will you know your demographics for potential advertisers, but you will also know what type of products and services would benefit your readers. That way you can target your advertising directly at your readers.

This works way better than pasting some random ads into your sidebar or below your blog posts.

So take the time to get to know your readers. It will not only make your blog better, but they will appreciate the fact that you took the time to do so.

Blogging More Efficiently by Doing What Works

I often meet bloggers that think that blogging is about doing certain things. They’ve read a couple blogs about blogging and find out that there are many different blogging activities they can do. So they create a checklist and methodically try to complete every activity on the checklist. These activities may include:

Twitter marketing
Guest posting
Blog commenting
Submitting to article directories
Creating list posts
Doing interviews
Writing humorous posts

The problem with the checklist approach is that different activities will yield different results. Guest posting may send more traffic than blog commenting. Or list posts may attract more links than interviews.

As you manage and promote your blog, if you’re watchful, you’ll see that certain activities will be more successful than others.

Once you’ve made that realization, you should move more time and effort to those successful activities.

Sometimes the first thing you do provides very good results, so there’s not much reason to spend a lot of time on the other activities.

The 80/20 Approach

Instead of the checklist approach, I suggest the 80/20 approach.

With this approach, you spend 80% of your time on activities that have worked well for your blog. If being active on Twitter has brough a sizable increase on your RSS subscriber base, then you spend a lot of time of Twitter. If funny posts have been well received by your audience, then you set aside much of your time to create those posts.

With the rest of the time, you use it to try out new things or the activities you like that don’t provide the best results.

The 20% is there so you don’t get bored. It seems to be human nature to try new things. Plus, by trying out new things, you could find an activity that works even better than your current best activities.

Different Activities for Different Blogs

One thing to note is that certain activities work well for some blogs but not for others. Just because article marketing works for your pet blog doesn’t mean it will work as well for your travel blog.

This means you should spend time testing different activities to see which ones work for each blog.

For example, I used to do a lot of article marketing but I found that it didn’t work that well for many blogs. For many niches, article marketing is very saturated and overdone. Your articles don’t really get much traffic because there are so many competing articles.

But I submitted some test articles for a new blog in the gaming industry. These articles did well since surprisingly the gaming industry is not active on the article directories. Therefore, I spend most of my marketing time doing article marketing for the gaming blog.

To recap, through testing figure out which activities work well and then spend the bulk of your time and effort on those activities. This strategy will improve your blog as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Performancing offers an authority builder service to help you discover which activities provide the best results for your site.

Performancing Jobs Now Online

Briefcases The Performancing team is proud to announce that the Jobs board is now back.

Since the migration of Performancign from Drupal to WordPress, we’ve had to momentarily drop a few things that were heavily reliant on Drupal, such as the forums and the job board (which is actually a thread in the forum), among other things. Just recently, we’ve installed a plugin that can support job listings from right within WordPress.

Do check it out at performancing.com/jobs.

Submissions are free, and each entry will stay online for seven days. For better visibility, though, you can subscribe to a premium listing for $20, which will be displayed at the top of the list for 30 days.

The job board supports listings for jobs and offers for writing, blogging and related services.

If you have an opening for a writing or blogging job, please feel free to add it to the list. Same goes for freelancers who want to offer blogging services for a fee. Be sure to include your contact information and even links to your existing portfolio, to make application easier. The plugin usually asks for a location, but we understand that most blogging jobs are probably virtual office or freelance in nature. Still, some blog networks or employers might want to hire writers or bloggers as in-house staff, so this is still applicable.

Good luck with finding the ideal job, or the ideal blogger, as the case may be.

Image credit: flickr/foreverphoto

3 Reasons to Blog About Your Personal Experiences

A couple months ago, I was losing motivation for one of my blogs. I was running into writer’s block on a regular basis and I just couldn’t think of compelling topics. I talked to another blogger and asked him for advice. He gave me one of the best insights I’ve ever heard for bloggers. He told me to write about my personal experiences.

I took his advice and it really helped. Since that time, I’ve enjoyed blogging more. My posts per month has gone up. My traffic has gone up. I’m getting more comments.

So today, I sat back and thought, “Why is blogging about personal experiences so effective?” Here are three reasons I came up with.

1. It lets you write faster.

One of the things that would frustrate me is my speed in producing content. Or I should say, my lack of speed. It used to take me over two hours just to create a 500 word post.

But when I started basing my posts on personal experiences, I found that the words would naturally flow. Now I can complete a post in 45 minutes to an hour and a half.

Also, this strategy helps me write longer, more comprehensive posts since there is a wealth of knowledge from my personal experiences.

Think of it this way. Let’s say you have a gadget blog. You can give your opinion on the latest gadget. Or you can actually buy the gadget and try it out. Or least go to the store to demo it. You’ll definitely have more to say if you use the gadget yourself. And you’ll write more efficiently because you have the experience to draw upon.

2. It builds trust.

Trust is one of those things that can be tricky to measure. Especially online, it’s difficult to tell how much trust you’re building with your audience. However, we can look at our friendships and see that self disclosure is one of the foundations to building close, trustworthy friendships.

Consider your best friends. Other than your family, aren’t your best friends the people you know the most? Everytime we share something about ourselves, we

By the way, I think sharing our experinces has to include our times of difficultly.

No one has a perfect life. If you blog as though you’ve got everything together and haven’t experienced hard times, you look like a fake.

Look at the big names in the internet marketing niche. They have shared their struggles.

Darren Rowse, the problogger himself, wrote about his early days when he lost much of his traffic when Google changed their algorithm. Shoemoney is a classic example. He wrote about his projects that flopped and being fat. Aaron Wall from SEO Book consistently writes about his personal experiences including his frustration from dealing with overbearing readers and his struggle with low self esteem.

3. It helps people remember you.

Let’s face it. To succeed in blogging today, you have to be memorable. The blogosphere is a lot of more crowded than in years past. There’s more competition and it’s only increasing.

One of the ways to help people remember you is to share your personal experiences.

Our human minds remember stories much better raw facts. We can recall the plots in the movies we’ve seen and the novels we’ve read, but we have a hard time remembering the facts from our college textbooks.

In their best selling business book, Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath say that telling stories is one of the best ways to help people remember you. They give a great example of Jared Fogle, the famous formerly obese college student who lost over 200 pounds by eating at Subway every day.

Subway could’ve gone the typical route and advertised their food as having less fat and less calories, but most people would not have paid much thought. By highlighting a story, Subway increased their sales and became part of a celebrity phenomenon.

Performancing offers marketing services to promote your personal experiences.

Do Your Post Titles Attract Readers?

It’s no secret that great content can make or break your blog. A few solid pillar articles can drive traffic to your blog for months, even years. But one thing that is often overlooked is the title of blog posts. People spend a lot of time putting together a great post, then throw in a generic sounding title and hit the publish button.

This is a big mistake and something that we all do. I’ve done it many times without even thinking about it. But the truth is, a great title can get a few people to read just about anything. A bad title however, can make people skip over your article that’s actually full of great stuff.

What Makes A Good Title?

So you’re probably wondering what makes a good post title. For me, anything that attracts people to your posts is a good title. A lot of people are attracted to short and precise titles, while others are attracted to titles that include numbers. The main reason list style titles attract people is because they know exactly what they are getting and how much of it.

Just take a look at these two titles and think in your head which one you would most likely click on:

A Few Blog Tips For Traffic
7 Killer Tips To Explode Your Blog Traffic

Which one is more attractive? If you’re like me, the second one is far more impressive. It’s a unique title that differs just enough from what I’m used to seeing that I would be tempted to click on it. The number 7 lets me know right way what I can expect in terms of length and content.

It doesn’t matter if the actual content of the two articles above are exactly the same, it’s just a matter of getting as many eyes on it as possible. From there, you can use the body of your post to keep the readers attention. If they like what they see, they’ll most likely check out some more of your posts.

What type of titles are you attracted to?

9rules opens its doors to nominations once more

Back in 2003, 9rules established itself as a premiere collection of blogs highlighted by great content and a passionate community. The codex of the 200 and so blogs were summarized by the “9 Rules:”

1. Love what you do.
2. Never stop learning.
3. Form works with function.
4. Simple is beautiful.
5. Work hard, play hard.
6. You get what you pay for.
7. When you talk, we listen.
8. Must constantly improve.
9. Respect your inspiration.

Today 9rules has just opened up a new round of submissions and the door will be open for 24 hours. The submission form can be found here. If you think your blogging philosophy fits the nine rules, then by all means, submit.

9rules is part of Splashpress Media, of which Performancing is a member.

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