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4 Tips For Improving The Conversation On Your Blog

Blogging is a one-to-many medium, but smart bloggers know who to turn it into an active group conversation between the readers and themselves. This requires the ability to communicate effectively – and it’s something that us bloggers can train ourselves to do better.

Here are four simple tips to help you improve your communication skills – this will not only help you in blogging but also in your networking efforts and life in general.

1. Simplify Your Message

Quite often what you say gets drowned out in how you say it. This happens because we tend to add extra, unnecessary information to our message.

Forget about impressing people with big words or complex sentences. They can make you look smart for a while but at the end of the day if you’re not getting the results (as a blogger this could be subscriptions, comments, product sales, etc), then all your efforts are meaningless.

Omit needless words. Keep things simple and focus on one thing at a time. Each blog post of yours has a particular purpose (that could be search engine traffic, comments, subscriptions, links, etc). Keep that purpose in mind and write accordingly.

Getting your message across means that you have to make what you’re saying absolutely clear to the other person. Don’t attach your feelings, second thoughts or justifications to your message – just be clear, be clear, be clear.

2. Talk To The Person

As bloggers we tend to have this annoying tendency to ramble on – it’s as if we like hearing ourselves talk (or reading our own words). The trouble with this approach is that when you write like this you have the wrong audience in mind. Who is your audience – your own ego or the guy sitting at home on a Thursday night looking for the banned Alicia Silverstone ad?

It is super-important to get the right picture in your mind about your intended audience BEFORE you start writing. Ask yourself who your audience is, what their needs are, how you can fulfill them and how much time you have to do this (time can be limited by a number of factors – attention span (can’t write too long a post), competition (be first with the news), etc.).

When blogging, remember that you’re talking to your audience and they have specific needs, motivations and preferences. If you don’t respect that, they won’t respect you.

3. Be Credible

People won’t believe you / trust what you say if they doubt your credibility.

There are two ways to convey credibility to your audience: First, show conviction – if you are confident and believe in what you say, it shows through your writing and attracts readers to you.

Second, back up what you say with your actions. If you are preaching a certain SEO technique or are giving weight loss tips, it makes a world of difference if your audience can see that you follow what you preach. For each blogger it will be a different story – celebrity bloggers can’t practice what they’re preaching (primarily because there’s not much preaching going on)- but in many cases you’ll have situations where you can boost your credibility and if you get the chance, make it count.

4. Seek a Response

As you blog, remember that the goal of all your blog posts is action. If you dump a bunch of information on people without leading them to the next step, you’re not doing your job. Every time you blog, give your audience something to feel (the need to improve their blogging skills), something to remember (how to be a better communicator) and something to do (the formula to become a better communicator).

If you’re successful in doing that, your blogging will improve and your audience will become more responsive to what you are asking them to do.

Takeaway

If you want to engage your readers and improve the conversation on your blog, you have to a) be clear, b) refocus your attention towards the audience and c) become credible.

Anyone can ask their readers for action (although it’s surprising how many people forget to do so) – but no one is going to listen to your subtle or obvious suggestions unless they have a reason to do so. And unless your audience understands and can relate to your message, they won’t feel inclined to respond.

If you liked this article, please consider Stumbling it / saving on Delicious using the social bookmarking links below – thanks!

How Do You Cope With Blogger Burn Out?

This morning someone asked about coping with ‘Burn Out’. As bloggers we don’t just suffer from blogger burnout but also burnout from working on 20 different things at the same time and from matters other than blogging.

Everyone has a time when they ‘crash’ – the trick isn’t to avoid such instances but to know the best way to get back up. Look at ‘burnouts’ as your mind telling you that something is going wrong, that you’re offtrack. If you have a system to make course corrections, you’ll be able to get back to your feet with little downtime.

Here are 5 things to consider when you’re faced with a burnout – you are also welcome to provide your own suggestions in the comments in case you think I’ve missed out on something:

5 Steps To Coping With Burn Out

  1. Say No: Start saying no to people for 2 weeks – just say no to everything the first time. give yourself more time.

  2. Delegate: Delegate like you’re going on a long trip tomorrow and need people to ‘manage’ your business for you. Do it NOW – no, seriously, go and do it now and then come back.

  3. Vary Your Routine: I don’t have a single day that goes like the last one, and while it DOES have a negative impact on my income it’s also wonderful for keeping me sane. You can have somewhat the same times for waking up, sleeping and perhaps 2-3 hours of your most important work. But beyond that, keep things flexible.

  4. Deal With Outside Stress: Are you sure it’s work that’s burning you out? Other stuff can bring you down more than you think. Find out what you’re worried about during the day, what sticks at the back of your mind, and deal with it. Habits and Problems can weigh our morale down a lot and suck the energy out of you like a thousand leeches.

  5. Refocus Your Priorities: Sometimes I get burned out when I lose sight of what I want to do in the long run and get stuck in dead ends trying to meet short-term objectives. It helps to follow #1 and get my priorities back in order.

You shouldn’t be getting burned out if you do things right – it’s a sign that something is wrong, and usually it has to do with your mind shutting down because it isn’t being allowed to focus on what you want to do. It your mind’s subconscious way of saying that you’re messing up, and you need to fix things.

So what do you guys do to deal with (and to avoid) burn outs?

Blogger Health: What do you do to stay healthy?

A lot of people are going to skip over this series of posts because it doesn’t address 50 Ways To Make 4 Figures Per Day From AdSense – instead, it focuses on a topic that most bloggers ignore. A topic of vital importance. Not only because it affects the very core of your being, but because it actually has a fairly direct correlation with productivity, and to be honest, monetization. So let me suggest to those of you who have made it thus far: pay attention. This might be the most important series of posts that I make at Performancing.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to be doing a series of posts on Blogger Health. Quite simply, it is the most overlooked issue in blogging and needs to be addressed. Money, afterall, is no good if you’re unhappy, sick, depressed or dead.

But enough of the scare tactics. Your health is directly correlated to your blogging success. Over the last year, by paying close attention to my body’s needs, I have been able to increase my overall daily productivity in both quantifiable (measurably better ideas, faster execution, etc.) and qualitative (enjoy my work, less depression, etc.) ways.

As probloggers, we have the advantage of working out of our homes and on flexible hours. We should take advantage of that fact and take time out of the day to fine-tune our bodies. Unfortunately, many full time internet people don’t leave their homes more than once or twice a week. We should aim to change that.

But before I start writing this series, I want to invite Performancing readers to do a gut check. What’s the state of your health? How seriously do you take your health? Do you think about your health on an hourly, daily, monthly, quarterly basis? Or did you wake up one day like me faced with the seeming Catch-22 that not only had you grown a beer gut but that it’s also hard as hell to stop work in the middle of the day to pump some iron?

Committing to Your Blog’s Goals

Today I’d like to ask you two questions:

One – What is your most important goal for your blog?

Two – How committed are you to that goal?

The thing is, we make a lot of promises – but it’s the easiest thing in the world to say something, and the hardest to make it happen.

I think it’s important to establish what you want to achieve, and what you’re willing to do to achieve it, from the start. Sometimes your actions won’t match your words, so you may talk about wanting to do one thing (write linkbait) and end up doing the other (write about your cat). By taking out time to analyse your own words and actions, you can understand:

a) what you’re doing
b) why you’re doing it
c) whether your commitments are realistic or even desirable
d) what you really want to do

The first time you’ll do this, it should cause a major paradigm shift in your blogging focus. When I talked about character yesterday I mentioned that part of your blog’s character was staying true to your purpose and being in it for the long haul instead of short-term distractions.

It’s strong commitment to your blog’s purpose that helps you maintain that part of its personality, its character.

When it comes to commitment, there are really only four types of people:

  1. Cop-outs – People who have no goals and do not commit.

  2. Holdouts – People who don’t know if they can reach their goals, so they’re afraid to commit.

  3. Dropouts – People who start towards a goal but quit when the going gets tough.

  4. All-outs – People who set goals, commit to them, and pay the price to reach them.

At some point in my life I’ve been each of these four people – and I can tell you without a doubt that going all-out after something is freakin’ scary, tough to hold on to and when you start off, it seems like the price you have to pay is very heavy. However, once you’re on the other side, you don’t want to stop, and the sacrifices (in time, or money, or by giving up certain habits) you’ve made seem trivial in comparison to the rewards you’ve reaped.

It’s not the rewards the motivate you when you’re down though – it’s your internal commitment to yourself. Commitment means different things to different people:

  • To a blogger it could be writing another post after the first 25 haven’t received any comments.

  • To a copywriter it could be crafting another headline after you’ve written 40, just so you can make it as good as possible.

  • To a web designer it could be fixing that minor error in the site’s design that 99% of the people visiting it would miss even if they wanted to find it.

  • To a public speaker it could be pushing through self-doubt, nervousness and negative feedback in order to improve himself and become better.

In simple terms: right now, someone else who is just as smart as you is working hard to get their blog to the top. They’re committed to the vision they’ve set for their blog, and they’re doing whatever it takes to make it a reality.

The big question is, why aren’t you?

Find that one target for your blog that you are willing to work the most for, and then get busy doing it.

Building A Better Blog? Work On Your Blog’s Character

Your blog has its own personality, regardless of whether you actively cultivate it or allow it to develop haphazardly. Your readers are attracted to your blog for a reason, and its personality plays a pivotal role in attracting visitors and converting them into regular readers.

When your blog slowly converts passerbys into regular readers, a relationship of trust develops between your blog and them. It is this trust that forms the basis of how your blog deals with its readers and as such the blogger (you) must do what it takes to establish and maintain that trust.

This is where your blog’s character comes in.

Let’s discuss for a minute what I DON’T mean by character:

  • I’m not talking about being morally right (immoral content goes, as long as that’s what the blog is designed for).

  • I’m not talking about reporting only the facts (rumours work, as long as that’s what…you get the idea).

  • This has nothing to do with the blogger (well, maybe a bit) – quite often the blog takes on a completely different personality from the blogger, and if that sells, that’s fine too. You don’t HAVE to be your blog, and your blog doesn’t HAVE to be you.

So what am I talking about?

Character in a blog means:

  • Delivering on what you promise (integrity and reliability are cornerstones for building trust).

  • Doing what you do to the best of your ability (effort and quality will be your secret weapons for converting visitors).

  • Staying true to your purpose in face of adversity or success (don’t allow short-term results to distract you from long-term objectives).

You may not have the most popular blog, or the best looking, or the most profitable. All those things are important, and we’ve talked about how to achieve all these things at Performancing. You don’t build a successful blog by copying the top bloggers on what they’re doing right now – you look at what they did at the start, what type of ‘foundational work’ they did to reach this level.

Getting the foundations of your blog and removing the cracks in it should be your first and foremost responsibility – everything else flows from that.

Does Your Blog Have Charisma?

How can you have charisma? Be more concerned about making others feel good about themselves than you are making them feel good about you – Dan Reliand

Most people think of charisma as something mystical, almost undefinable. They think it’s a quality that comes at birth or not at all. But that’s not true. Charisma, plainly stated, is the ability to draw people to you. And like other character traits, it can be developed.

And as I’ve discussed earlier, your blog (and you) have a certain personality, a brand that can be nurtured, cultivated and molded into anything that you want it to be. Because the personality of a blogger can be one of the biggest ‘crowd-pullers’ for the blog, it’s important that you get it right.

To create a blog that attracts others, you need to integrate the following points into your blog’s philosophy:

1. Be Passionate and Positive

Who would you rather spend time with – someone who is grumpy, bitter and depressed, or someone that is cheerful, positive and passionate?

Blogs are the same – most people get turned off from whiners and are attracted to those who have a positive approach towards life (I wouldn’t say optimistic – there’s a difference in having self-belief and in distorting reality). Or, as they say, when you set yourself on fire (passion), people love to come and watch you burn.

Being positive is more than just avoiding the urge to criticise – it’s a conscious attempt to focus on how things can be made better instead of focusing on what’s wrong, it’s the drive to focus on the good rather than on the bad. You cannot be blind to a fault or a mistake, but you can choose what you spend your time on – pointing out what’s wrong or showing people how to fix it.

And just about every successful blogger I know speaks with passion and conviction – it’s not an add-on trait, this is perhaps the single-most important ingredient to blogging success (and success in life).

2. Expect the Best of People

How do you react when you first meet someone or as us bloggers are likely to do, meet them online? Do you judge them on their name, on their past, on their reputation? Or do you start off by thinking of the other person as a “10”, expect the best from them and give them all your attention?

How we interact with others directly influences what they think of us. If you treat them as perfect 10’s, they’ll remember you as someone who makes them feel good about themselves – and that’s what you need to get them to come back.

With blogging and bloggers, this works on two angles. First is your approach to networking – how you interact with fellow bloggers, readers, journalists, sales reps, etc. Second is through your blog and how you treat your readers – whether you appreciate them and encourage them to do better, or whether you talk down to them, insult their intelligence and expect them to fail.

If you appreciate others, encourage them, and help them reach their potential (both through your blog and through your networking efforts), they will love you for it.

3. Give People Hope

Are you all doom and gloom or are you confident that despite hardships, it’s within your hands to achieve results? Hope does not mean optimism, it’s the confidence in your own ability (and that of others) to do what is necessary to overcome obstacles – and it is this confidence (or lack of it) that will shine through and either inspire your readers or turn them away from you.

One theme you must have noticed here is that of confidence – the kind you have in yourself and your beliefs and the kind you show in others. To be honest, because we’re online and protected by relative anonymity and our blogs, this kind of self-confidence can be faked for some time, so fake it until you yourself believe it to be true.

Take a hard look at your blog and see whether it inspires hope or instills misery – unless the answer is firmly in the corner of ‘hope’, you’ve got work to do.

4. Share Yourself

Make yourself available to your readers – whether it is in terms of replying to comments, to email, sharing your IM details on your blog or just giving more of yourself in terms of personal experiences and resources. In a recent article titled “27 Tips for Building a Kick-Ass Blog”, I talked about how important it was to ‘give first’ and ask later. Sharing yourself is all about giving in terms of your personal time and attention.

In networking, this means helping out people you meet in solving their problems – trust me on this, if you just go out and help the next person who asks you, without asking or expecting anything in return, the rewards are tremendous. And you don’t just have to do this in person, you can do it on your blog as well. If you readers want something, give it to them, even if it means you having to spend extra time on your blog to make it happen.

Examples

A lot of the more ‘popular’ bloggers are well-known not only for being charismatic but also because they excel in their fields. However, to show you how sheer charisma can turn someone into a superstar, take the example of Edward Harrison.

Ed is a 60-something retired IBM employee, who started a blog about the football club Newcastle United in April 2007. Within a couple of weeks, his blog was gaining traction and in 2 months one could safely say that it was a roaring success. In the 5 months since the blog has been live, we’ve received over a hundred emails from readers and thousands of comments on the blog telling Ed that his blog is the first thing they check in the morning.

For me, that type of loyalty and appreciation cannot be bought, it has to be earned. Ed did not win over his readers by being the best writer, or the most knowledgeable, or the most insightful. Instead, he did it by doing 4 things right:

  • He’s a passionate Newcastle United fan, and it shows in the hard work he puts in the blog (anywhere between 5-8 posts per day) and in everything he writes. He’s also positive about his team – it shines through in his writing, is infectious and his readers love him for it.

  • He’s built a close rapport with his readers by trusting them to police themselves on the blog. Where you might see snarkiness run rampant on sports blogs, Ed’s blog is usually clean – and if there’s a troublemaker, it’s not Ed who has to speak up, it’s the readers. The community keeps the house clean.

  • He gives his readers hope by seeing the positives in his club and constantly thinking of how the team can go forward (as opposed to constantly criticising them). If you follow a sport, you’ll know the value of hope – and Ed gives that to his readers in spades.

  • Ed shares himself – responding to each email personally, taking the time to answer comments (which in my estimate takes him an hour a day) and has given his readers what they want by going the extra mile to fulfill reader requests for things like team stats and adding a forum, which takes up even more of his personal time.

When it comes to talking about something he loves, Ed is incredibly charismatic. He’s been my benchmark for a while now, and he’s the perfect example of how a blogger can become #1 in his niche by sharing his passion and enthusiasm for a subject with others.

Barriers to being Charismatic

  • Pride – Do you think you’re better than everyone else? How many arrogant, pompous, self-important bloggers do you know who are well-liked (and popular, for that matter)?

  • Insecurity – If you’re not comfortable with who you are and lack confidence in yourself, how can you make others feel comfortable and confident about you?

  • Moodiness – You may accept being nice one minute and snarky the other as perfectly acceptable behavior for yourself, but put it the other way around – how would you treat a person who behaved like this with you? Not with too much confidence and trust, I imagine.

  • Perfectionism – Like it or not, no one’s perfect. A perfectionist zeal can cause to focus on the small stuff – the 20% of the problems that aren’t important. You may love to nitpick (I’m a sucker for it) but resist it the first time.

  • Cynicism – Do you shoot down the ideas and opinions of others or do you encourage them to chase their dreams?

Self-Analysis

Self-analysis is a bitch – it makes you feel like hell and as a result most people resist the occasion to find flaws in themselves (you can’t be too self-critical though). I admit, I have all the traits I listed above, and for me it’s a conscious effort every day to not succumb to being cynical or snarky, and it’s quite tough at times to find the self-confidence to move forward with conviction.

However, I think that once you believe in something for long enough, it starts being your reality. In terms of habits, this is doubly true.

So take a good hard look at your blog and your own blogging habits. Chances are, you’re not doing everything as well as you thought you were. Chances are that you could use a gut-check and increase your blog’s charismatic appeal.

And to make it happen, there is just one thing you really need to remember:

When it comes to being charismatic, the bottom line is othermindedness.

27 Tips for Building a Kick-Ass Blog

If you’ve been blogging for a while, you probably have certain blogging ‘habits’ and tips that you swear by. This article is a collection of such tips, designed to help you build a better blog.

Warning! You may have read some of these before – heck, all of these will be familiar to you. There’s a very good reason – they work extremely well for the bloggers who swear by them and while it’s hard to get bloggers to agree on what the important tip of them all is, they will agree that IF you take out XX days and implement each of these tips ONE day at a time, your blog will be be kicking ass in your niche, in your blogging community and in the search engine results by the end of it.

So let’s get started.

1. Mine your search engine referrals

Your search logs are a gold mine. They tell you what people are looking for. And since you most probably maintain a blog with the intention of growing an audience, your search logs give you a priceless view of what your audience wants. Your task is to feed your audience what they want.

Spend at least twenty minutes each day analyzing your search logs for new and exciting topics that you haven’t thought of before. Your search results allow you to reverse engineer the thoughts of your target audience.

2. Duplicate other people’s success

Start paying attention to the successful blogs (and not just those in your niche). Read the premier blogs and look at their headlines, their posting frequency, their tendency to post easy-to-digest lists, article series, exhaustive how-to guides – in short, observe and figure out what type of content succeeds, and then adapt it to your own blog.

3. Duplicate your own success

As you blog, you’ll discover your strengths and your weaknesses. Capitalize on your success by finding your voice and sticking to it.

There’s a temptation to feel like you’ve always got to do something new and original. Most of the great things in life are variations on pre-existing themes. There’s nothing wrong with sticking with what works. The important thing here is to not run away from you own success – instead, learn from it and repeat with variations as necessary.

4. Learn how to Position your Blog

More and more blogs are competing for attention. Most are instantly forgettable, simply echos of every other blog in their niche. One or two stand out and stick in your mind. Great content is one reason, necessary as great content is it might still be not enough. People have only so much time and attention to share, if they already have three excellent gadget blogs on their OPML why should they add yours?

Learn how to differentiate your blog and make your content unique.

5. Outsource Your Blogging Chores

As your blog grows you’ll find that you are short of time and that you can’t do everything that you want to by yourself. Short of cloning yourself, the right thing to do at this point is to outsource certain aspects of your blog. What you decide to outsource (blogging, design, promotion, administration, etc) depends on you – the key is to help you free up more time you can scale your blog and make it more successful.

And you don’t always have to pay for this – it’s possible to get your readers (the community you’ve built around your blog) to help out in many things from article contributions to design upgrades to administrative tasks.

6. Learn how to Make your Blog Sticky

Getting visitors isn’t enough – otherwise the nice buzz your blog traffic got on the first day from the $30 you spent on BlogExplosion would have made a lot of difference to your blog’s success. You want your visitors to stick. If your blog is the beneficiary of a massive traffic surge (say through hot current issue for which you rank well in the search engines or a post of yours that got Stumbled or Dugg by a lot of people), you need to be able to convert a good percentage of those visitors into regular readers.

So learn how to make your blog sticky – and these two articles will tell you everything you need to know about blog stickiness:

10 Ways to Make Your Blog Sticky
Convert One-off Visitors into Regular Readers

7. Master the Art of Linkbaiting

There’s a reason why bloggers evetually turn to linkbaiting (the art of writing content that generates links) – when done right (and promoted right) this is the most time-effective method to:

a) promote your blog
b) create good content
c) establish blog authority
d) gain new readers

Read the pioneering article on linkbaiting, and make a commitment to write at least one linkbait for your blog this week.

8. Start Guest Blogging

The one blog promotion strategy that I’ve always seen under-used is guest blogging.

There are no downsides to it – guest blogging can, off the top of my head, help you build links, attract new readers to your blog, position you as an expert in your niche, acquire consulting gigs and help build close relationships with fellow bloggers.

Usually we hold back from guest blogging either because we’re lazy or because we’re hung up on our own egos to go anywhere else and write. In some cases the later can be a good thing in a person who is talented and motivated enough to build a #1 blog, but usually it’s a case of limiting your blog promotion options and being too pig-headed to take advantage of what’s on offer.

9. Sweat the Details

Many bloggers have become successful by getting 80% things right and ignoring or not worrying about the other 20%. That’s not what I’m talking about. The same bloggers, when they’re doing the important 80%, put their 120% in it. They work hard at it, they go the extra mile and their efforts speak to you when you read their articles or visit their blogs.

Sweat the details – there’s no harm in spending time perfecting what you’re doing right – it will only improve your blog’s brand and give people more reasons to come back and even to link to you.

10. Establish a Blogging Rhythm

If you take time out to analyse what the successful blogs and bloggers are doing online, one thing that will stand out is the various blog posting rhythms that you will find.

And yes, the posting rhythm actually means something – it’s a clear indication of how the blog relates to its audience. If you can understand what different posting rhythms accomplish, you can match the right posting frequency with your blog objectives and write accordingly.

Overall, it’s a good idea to set your posting frequency before you start your blog and stick to it unless there is a drastic change in plans.

11. Develop a Blog Exit Strategy

Where do you see yourself and your blog in 2 years?

This isn’t about setting goals for yourself – it’s about knowing what you want to achieve with your blog, and planning for your exit if circumstances require you to do so.

Your reasons for leaving / ending a blog could be positive or negative – the idea is to be prepared so when the time arrives, you are prepared to hand the blog over to someone else, sell it off or further ‘automate’ it so that it takes less of your time.

Done right, you could stand to make good money from your blog in a couple of years. This doesn’t mean you should plan to ‘quit’ from the start – however, the beauty of preparing for exit is that once it focuses you to develop a business model that is efficient, has optimal monetization and is capable of running without you being involved in day-to-day decisions

12. Be Technically Efficient

You don’t need to be a CSS / PHP guru, and you don’t need to know SEO like the back of your hand. You should, however, know the basics of everything from blog design to image editing to blog promotion to using traffic analysis tools – it’s a job requirement for being a competent pro blogger.

Later on (or even from the start) you can outsource sections of your blog management – but you still need to be able to understand what’s going on in order to improve / manage your blog.

13. Create Intelligent Blog Ads

Two of the most under-rated articles in Performancing history are Chris G’s 2-part series on creating intelligent blog ads.

The basic idea is this – you should treat different visitors differently, and therefore you should be treating first-time readers, visitors hitting old posts in your archives through search engines, regular readers, visitors from Digg, registered users and visitors from other websites differently (well, you may not have that many divisions, but you get the point).

Once you extend this to advertising, a lot of things change. Regular readers don’t click on your AdSense, so why waste impressions on them? Search engine users hitting your archives are the most likely candidates for clicking on your AdSense, so why not optimise things so that they say more AdSense than usual?

In addition, you should also be able to treat visitors differently (in terms of what ads to show them) based on their geographical location and the time of the year (different ads around Christmas than in June, for example).

It’s possible to automate most of this using cookies, search referrer strings and detecting the geographical location of your visitors.

Learn more about creating intelligent articles here:

How To: Create Intelligent Blog Ads
How To: Create Intelligent Blog Ads – Part 2

14. Crush Your Own Expectations

Usually when I tell people to ‘lower’ their expectations from blogging, they call it conservatism and still go on expecting to be an overnight success. It doesn’t work like that – it’s bloody hard work, and even then the only thing you know is that it won’t be quite what you had imagined.

It takes a lot of patience, it won’t happen overnight and you certainly won’t help yourself by throwing your laptop out of your window when no one comments on your articles after the first week of blogging (although you should probably look again at what you’re doing to promote your articles).

If you’re a beginner blogger, it would pay to read Deb’s article titled: Before you Begin Blogging.

15. Learn How to Write Magnetic Headlines

Headlines are the most important aspect of blogging both from a reader standpoint and an SEO standpoint. Brian Clark has written the authoritative guide to headline writing, and if you haven’t read it yet, let me just say that you should easily be able to double your readership and search traffic just by following his suggestions.

16. Learn to Write Scannable Content

This is perhaps the one article that will make the biggest immediate difference. Visual display is to blogging like curb-appeal is to real estate. Bloggers should be constantly thinking about the curb-appeal of each article. It really makes a difference.

Writing for the Internet is far different to what we’re used to in college or in the offline world – you have to keep things simple, understand that people will ‘scan’ most of the time so you also have to break up your content into easily digestable chunks (visually as well as structurally) and provide plenty of visual cues to guide readers from start to finish.

Make sure you read Darren’s article on scannable content and implement this TODAY in your blogging practices.

17. Establish Yourself as an Expert

Developing your personal brand as that of an expert will give not only give your blog legitimacy in the eyes of many readers but it will also help you get much closer to being #1 in your niche. If you’re starting out, adopt a long-term vision for becoming an expert blogger. If you’ve been blogging for a while, rejig your efforts and focus on being recognised as an authority.

How to do this?

Better bloggers have already written about this – make sure you read the following two articles and then implement their advice in your blogging.

How Can 10 Simple Articles Change Your Life?
Be Recognized as an Expert

18. When Stuck, Change Your Context

If you’re stuck (with blogger’s block, for example), or if you just find that you lack the motivation to start work, change things around. Move to a different location (get out of your study and work somewhere else for a couple of hours), take a break, or start working on something else. Sometimes changing your location works, sometimes you just need to work on something lighter to get your creative juices flowing.

19. Always have a Backup Plan

You should always have a backup plan – whether it’s for a project, an income source, a writer, an idea….have more than just one thing lined up.

A corollary of this would be to ‘be prepared’, but you don’t always have to prepared for everything (especially for times when you can just ‘wing it’).

As I wrote extensively in “Will the Google Bashers Please Shut Up?”, things will always go wrong. Google will dump your site. Someone will hack your blog. AdSense could ban you. Your $10k check could never arrive.

Whatever it is, don’t risk everything – be prepared and cover your ass.

20. Fire, Aim, Deal

The usual quote is ‘Ready, Fire, Aim’, meaning that you should get out of the blocks quickly and not worry too much about getting things right.

However, I think we tend to take too much time in the ‘ready’ phase. Online, news spreads almost instantaneously. It is a far more viral medium than, say, spreading ideas person to person (unless you’re a rock star performing in front of a million people, in which case send me a couple of tickets, will ya?) and you need to move very fast.

An idea adequately executed today is better than a plan perfectly executed tomorrow. Being first, and being first in people’s minds, is crucial if you want to capture mindshare.

So shoot first, make course corrections later, and don’t worry too much about whether you’re prepared or not – as long as you know what you’re talking about, you’re liable to improve as you go along.

It’s likely that there will be times when things will go wrong – however, we tend to worry too much when there is very little under our own control. So stop worrying, learn to move fast and deal with the problems that crop up as they happen, IF they’re worth dealing with.

In any case, most people won’t notice if you screw up and if they do notice (and it’s a big boo-boo), you can fix it on the way. This approach will take care of 90% of the times you hesitate because of the fear of things not working or making a mistake.

21. Make Yourself Big

Some bloggers suffer from a lack of self-confidence when they start out and it shows in their blogging. They’re not sure of themselves, they’re not confident in what they say and the readers pick up on it and automatically assume that this person doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Make yourself big – exude confidence in your words and your blog design (that’s all your readers will see most of the time, so you need to make it count). Fake it if you have to, but do not portray a picture of self-doubt and uncertainty through your blog.

Humility has its place and I believe that to be successful you have to be humble, but there’s a difference between being arrogant and being confident. For a live lesson in being confident without being brash (assuming you don’t want the rock star personality, because that takes a bit of arrogance), read Chris Garrett.

22. Record All Your Ideas

Always keep a notebook handy to jot down ideas as they come to you. You never know when inspiration will strike, and in most cases you’ll lose that great idea if you don’t write it down immediately.

It doesn’t matter if you key in the ideas in your cellphone, write them in a notepad file on your PC, carry a pen and pad with you at all times or use a voice recorder to gather your thoughts for end-of-day processing – whatever you do, make sure every idea that comes to your mind gets noted.

23. Give Before You Get

Most people don’t understand the natural value of this ‘law’ (it works wonders if you adopt it as a law in your daily life), so let’s look at it from the perspective of how people ‘tick’.

If you’ve read “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini” (highly recommended), you’ll know that ‘Reciprocity’ is one of the six key ways to influence people (the others are: Commitment / Consistency, Social Proof, Liking, Authority and Scarcity). When you give first, you create a subconscious debt on the other person’s conscience which they will feel the need to repay or risk suffering from guilt. It’s how we are socially wired.

How do we use this in blogging? By giving first (providing value to your readers) and giving a lot (don’t assume that you can ‘ask’ them for something after just one week’s of good blogging). And what are you ‘asking them’? Their trust, their loyalty and their support. You won’t ask for it explicitly, but once you’ve given a lot to your readers you will notice that your readers will start giving back – in terms of comments, praise, feedback, mentions on other blogs and forums, respect, and if you’re selling something, money too.

24. Backup

Backup, backup, backup. If you’re making any decent money at all (heck – even if you aren’t), you MUST have a plan to backup your data.

Imagine what would happen if you were to lose your blog’s database (and the hundreds of images you’ve uploaded to it) right now? Chances are you don’t have a decent backup solution to fall back on.

You can use WordPress to email you daily backups of your database and you can configure your webhost to make daily backups of all your files in case something goes wrong. I believe in plenty of redundancy, so have a 3rd-party solution doing the backups as well as yourself and your webhost.

The backup policy applies to all your login / password information as well as any offline information that you need to keep handy. Putting them all together will make for easy access so I would definitely recommend that and you can protect yourself against a major screw up by backing everything up and storing it in a safe place.

25. Manage Your Time

Time mismanagement is perhaps the biggest thing holding bloggers back. Checking your email, stats, blog comments, feeds – all the time, throughout the day – is not only a waste of time at that moment (you’ll still make the same money whether you check it 5 times a day or once a day) but it also distracts you from the work you could be doing at that time (blogging, promoting, managing, etc).

Have you ever had a day when at the end of it, you realise that all of it was spent reading and replying to emails, dealing with blog comments, reading news in the feed reader and checking stats?

Don’t get stuck in wasteful habits and time loops – do whatever you have to in order to wean yourself from stats (uninstalling that AdSense Notifier plugin for Firefox), from email (Do you have your inbox open 24/7? Sticky a note on your laptop / monitor to ‘close’ the window whenever you see that note) and from feed reading (I ditched feed reading completely and now just visit the sites themselves).

26. Remix Old Content

There comes a time when you run out of new ideas (new for your blog, that is) to talk about in your niche – this happens to everyone sooner or later and is nothing to worry about. What’s far more important is what you do afterwards. Some bloggers get distracted and branch out to parallel topics, which is sometimes a good idea but can also dilute your readership who are still coming to you for news about subject A.

My preference is to take the same ideas and remix them according to specific situations (or new developments). For example, if you’ve written about how to get comments to your blog, in the second iteration you could give more tips, or you could dicuss new plugins that make it easier for readers to comment, or you could take a specific niche, discuss it’s problems and give specific advice on how to attract comments in that niche, OR you could discuss the different levels of a success for a blog and share how ‘comment attraction’ works on these levels.

As long as you’re adding a unique angle, it doesn’t matter if the idea is old or new.

27. Get help

Blogging may sound like a solo flight, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Learn to get help (like we discussed above, you’ll have to ‘give’ first) – whether you ask your community to help with growing your blog or you’re asking your fellow bloggers to help promote your new project OR you’re just asking friends for ideas and advice.

It always helps to get a fresh perspective on things, even if at the end of the day you’re going to do things your way

Bonus: 28. Separate Writing from Editing

Writing and Editing are 2 different beasts. Writing involves a creative process and requires you to take everything you have inside your head and funnel it out into words. Editing on the other hands requires you to be critical, to prune, to cut down.

The two are fundamentally opposing tasks, so don’t do them at the same time. Write first, then let your article / blog post be (unless it’s breaking news and you have to break it, like, right now) and come back to it a while later to edit.

Your blog posts will be more professional, your writing will be more polished and your readers will appreciate the time you put into the blog for them.

Bonus: Further Reading

While compiling this list, I came across several excellent articles that deserve a mention – and every single one of them will help you improve your blog.

Credits:

Many thanks to Brian, David, Deborah, Randa, Ryan, Raj, Hart, Chris, Dee and Charlene for their contributions to this list – couldn’t have done it without you guys.

Your Contributions

This list is by no means complete. Hopefully you can add a blogging tip or trick of your own to supplement – in that case, fire away in the comments. I’ll be upgrading the best tips from the comments into this list and linking out to the contributors as well.