11 posts tagged “miscellaneous blog tips”

Today’s task in the Rediscover Your Blogging Groove project is to tell a story.

One of the more helpful books that I’ve written in the last couple of years is The Story Factor by Annette Simmons. In it she talks about six different types of stories and how they can each be important in influencing people.

These six types of stories are:

1. “Who I Am” Stories
2. “Why I Am Here” Stories
3. “The Vision” Story
4. “Teaching” Stories
5. “Values-in-Action” Stories
6. “I Know What You Are Thinking” Stories

I’m looking to write a series of posts on these types of stories in the future so won’t go into great depth about each one except to say that stories are incredibly powerful ways of communicating for bloggers.

Stories are effective because they:

• engage the imagination of readers
• go beyond facts and theories
• reveal something about yourself as a blogger
• trigger emotions and the senses
• provide hooks for readers to latch onto in your blogging
• are relatable to readers
• illustrate your points in ways that can be much more convincing (and convicting) than other types of information

The key with stories on blogs is making them tie into the rest of your blog - ie make them relevant and ensure that they have some point to them that is useful to your readers on some level. While telling the story of how your dog dug up your vegetable patch might interest you, the readers of your blog about (insert your blog’s topic here) may not be quite as fascinated - unless you use the story to illustrate something about your topic.

So what type of stories could you tell on your blog?

Here’s a few starting points:

• Personal Discovery Stories - tell how you discovered a lesson. These stories show your readers how similar you are to them.
• Stories as Analogies and Illustrations - tell a story that on the surface has nothing to do with your topic but which illustrates a principle that is very relevant
• Success Stories - tell how you achieved something. These stories can be inspirational and motivating for your readers.
• Failure Stories - I find that these stories are incredibly powerful - particularly if you are able to show some lessons learnt through a failure
• Tell Someone Else’s Story - sharing the journey of someone else and how/what they learned can be effective
• How I did it Stories - these practical stories can be effective because they talk your readers through a process in a relatable way
• Picture Stories - using images or video can be another great way of communicating a story because it engages the senses in a way that text can’t (similarly - audio posts/podcasts can do this too).

I’m sure there are plenty of other types of stories to tell. Feel free to suggest your own in comments below.

Homework - Tell a Story

It’s time to write your story post. Post it on your blog and then come back to the comments section below to share it with us so we can see how your approached it.

Examples of Story Posts

If you’re looking for some examples on story posts - here are a few stories that I’ve written here at ProBlogger.

• Becoming a ProBlogger - A Story in Many Parts - the story of how I grew my blogging
• Blogging Stories - How Blogs Change Lives - the story of a reader
• Lessons from an Umbrella Salesman - one of my many ‘tangent’ posts
• Blogging in Formation - Lessons from a Goose - another tangent post
• Weddings, Blogging, Intentionality and One Whopping Big Tangent - one more tangent post
• A Day in the life of a ProBlogger - another story that has been very popular

Read the rest of the Rediscover Your Blogging Groove Project

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Today’s task in the Rediscover Your Blogging Groove project is to ask your readers a question.

The ‘question post’ idea comes directly from one of my own weekend strategies for posting . I like question posts for a number of reasons:

• It gives readers a sense of Community and Participation
• It increases Blog Stickiness
• These posts don’t take a whole lot of effort to write (although can take some moderation)
• They are great for helping you to gauge where your readers are at on certain topics and can even give you ideas for future posts.
• They open up opportunities for followup posts as you summarize the answers, pick up conversations and even answer the question yourself etc.
• They can be great for generating incoming links to your blog as other bloggers pick up the conversation on their own blogs.

Of course some readers resist these types of posts because they are scared that nobody will answer the question. This can be a little disheartening - but if you construct the post well and include your own answer to the question then at least there is something there of value even if the conversation doesn’t emerge.

Remember that only around 1% of blog readers tend to leave comments - so if you don’t get a lot of responses it doesn’t mean that no one is reading - keep trying.

What question should you ask?

Really anything goes - however a few ideas come to mind to help you formulate effective questions:

• Keep the question relevant to Your Blog’s Topic
• You might like to try asking a question that builds on a previous post
• Ask questions that are answerable (and not ones that are to hard answer)
• Ask questions that readers will want to know the answer to
• Suggest to your readers some possible answers
• Sometimes either/or questions (where there are only two answers to choose from) can be great for generating a debate - they are easy to answer and a great way to help train your readers to comment
• You may like to try using a Poll tool to give your readers a way to vote on a number of options
• Controversial questions can be a great way to get a conversation going - but be aware readers could get fired up.
• Be willing to share your own answer - but if you’re confident you’ll get people responding you might want to consider holding off on your own answer and do it in a follow up post (this means 2 posts instead of 1 but also means you won’t skew your reader’s answers)
• Do you have a frequently asked question that you don’t know how to answer? Ask your readers for their opinion - you might learn something.
• Sometimes more personal (yet on topic) questions can be worth asking. Ask your readers how they do something or what tools they use. For example a while back I asked readers to tell me what their favorite lens was at DPS and followed it up with a summary of popular DSLR lenses. The response from these two posts was fantastic as many readers not only had a say on a topic but enjoyed reading what others were doing.

Having all that in mind - your homework for today is to go back to your blog/s and ask a question. Once you’ve done that, come back to this post and share the link with us so we can check it out and see how you’ve approached it.

note: while your previous question posts might be interesting - I’d prefer it if you only posted links to new posts below - after all, this series is about helping you to improve your blog NOW rather than looking back - thanks.

Read the rest of the Rediscover Your Blogging Groove project.

PS: Thanks to Mark for the inspiration on a new logo for this series.

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Today’s task in the Rediscover Your Blogging Groove project is to write a ‘Tip’ Post.

I know today’s task will be easier for some of you than others because your topic is more suited to writing ‘how to’ or ‘tip’ posts - however I’m sure that if you put your mind to it and get a little creative you can do it!

The idea behind today’s task is simply to help your readers in some way. What do you know that they might not? How can you teach them what you know?

9 Tips on How to write a Tips Post:

1. Present the Need - Most people will not read your tip post if they don’t feel they need to know what you’re teaching. Right at the top of your post (and even in the title) you need to show people why reading your tips is important. Tell them what problem you’re overcoming, what need you are trying to meet or what they’ll learn and how it will enhance their lives. Do this and you’ll increase the chances of them reading through your full post.

2. Base it On Your Own Experience - One of the best ways to write these posts is to base them on something that you have either done or something that you do. Perhaps it’s some process or workflow that you take for granted that will give someone insight into something they’d not considered before.

3. Base it on Someone Else’s Experience - Another technique is to base your tip on what someone else does. This might be someone you know well and that you’ve observed do something - or it could be a total stranger (How Donald Trump Gets His Hair to Comb Over….).

4. Choose Something Basic to Teach - sometimes it is the most simple and basic tips that people appreciate the most. Go back to beginner type instruction and you might find you connect with a lot of readers that advance posts wouldn’t hit the mark with.

5. Break it down into Steps - if there’s one thing that I’ve learned about teaching people via the web it is that you need to learn how to communicate in bite sized and achievable steps. Use well formatted points, bring in pictures, screenshots and examples to show processes and give live examples where possible. Numbering your steps can be a great way to keep people on track if your tip is sequential or a workflow.

6. Link to Previous Posts - never assume that your readers have read everything you’ve previously written. When you’re referring to something that you’ve previously taught - link back to it so that new readers can catch up.

7. Consider a Series for Complex Tips - if what you’re teaching is a more complex or longer process it might be worth breaking it down into separate posts over a series. You’ll need to carefully consider the cost and benefits of doing this as it can break your momentum and cause reader frustration if not done well.

8. Anticipate Questions - while you’re writing your tips post make note of any questions that you can imagine readers asking as they read it. Incorporate the answers to these questions either in the post itself or at the end in a little section dedicated to reader questions.

9. Update Your Posts - The great thing about ‘tips’ posts is that they can often have quite a long life in terms of relevance. My post on How to Hold a Digital Camera is still as relevant today as it was the day I wrote it. However I would suggest you revisit these posts from time to time to see how you can update them and keep them relevant. This is important if you’re in a fast moving niche - but is also important because if you’re anything like me you’ll learn more about your topic over time and when you go back to older posts you might find things that you now know more about or would change. While some would say updating posts isn’t the done thing in blogging I don’t have an issue to it if the updates make the post more useful to readers.

Homework - so now it’s time for you to go and write a tip post of some kind. Like I said above, this might be easier for some of you than others depending upon your topic, but don’t feel that the tip needs to be a long essay - it could be something quite simple and quick. Or you might even try writing something a little humorous.

If you’re looking for a little inspiration, check out the ‘How To…’ group writing project submissions where there’s a list of hundreds of tips and how to posts.

Once you’ve written your post come back here and share the link in comments below.

Today’s task in the Rediscover Your Blogging Groove project is to write a Link Post.

How has blogging grown from something that a relatively small number of people do into the massive medium that it has become? There are many reasons for the growth of blogging but one of them is that they are traditionally a very outward looking and linking type of website.

When I first got into blogging many blogging blog platforms didn’t even have a comments feature built into them and the linking was even more prolific than it is today. One blogger would see something written on another blog and would add to the conversation by linking up. Another blogger would spot the conversation and would link to both the previous blogs and the web of links would mount up until the story went quite viral. Including outbound links in your posts were seen as normal and a healthy way of blogging with numerous benefits.

These days the link is still an important part of blogging, but with on site comments and with some bloggers quite purposely avoiding outgoing links as a strategy to keep readers onsite I sometimes wonder if the outbound link is less a feature of modern day blogs than it used to be.

Of course there are plenty of blogs out there that do nothing but ‘link posts’ and that simply regurgitate what everyone else is writing (saying nothing original) - but perhaps somewhere between the blog that never links and the one that does nothing but link is probably a happy medium.

Tips for Writing Link Posts

So how do you get the balance right between healthy outbound link posts and poor ones? Here are a few thoughts on how to write a good link post:

• Keep it relevant - the key is to keep the posts that you do relevant to your blog’s overall topic.
• Link to quality - in the same way that you do your best to write quality original content, ensure that the posts that you link to are of a good standard also. Step one for this is to actually read them! Before linking up ask yourself - will this link be useful to my reader or not?
• Add something of value - purely linking without adding anything of your own can do your readers a service (in that it helps them find good stories else where) but adding something of yourself (an opinion, comment, review, suggestion etc) will help your reader to know how to interpret and apply what’s been written in the other site that you link to. I find that readers appreciate even just the smallest comment to help them decide whether to visit the link and how to interpret it when they get there.

Types of link posts:

I tend to write a number of different types of link posts on my blogs:

1. Speedlinking - I’m still not sure who came up with this term but it’s something I obviously do every few days here at ProBlogger. For me it’s simply a collection of a handful of good posts on my topic from my day’s surfing. Sometimes I theme them around one topic, but generally they are from the wider spectrum of ProBlogger type topics. These posts are a list of links with a very brief comment on each one.

2. Quote and Link - these posts are predominantly a quote (or two) from another blog/site, with a link back to the source. Some bloggers simply make the post the quote and link - but they become more valuable to your readers if you add a few of your own thoughts and comments.

3. Compilation Link and Quote Posts - I’ve not done many of these for a while but another technique that some bloggers use quite successfully is to pick a topic and then go hunting for a variety of quotes on that topic. In a sense this is a combination of ‘Speedlinking’ and ‘Quote and Link’ strategies but the quotes are often a little less recent in terms of when they were written.

4. Links in Posts - I guess the other type of link post is when links are used within posts as a way of giving an illustration or example of what you’re talking about. In these posts the links become a little secondary or supportive in their nature while the content takes the primary focus.

Homework - Write a Link Post

Your homework today is to write a link post on your blog. Go surfing through other blogs and sites in your niche and find something that you’d like to highlight to your readers. Link up!

Feel free to head back to this post to show us how you did it so we can all learn from what you’re doing. Please only include links to new posts when you do this.

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North x East has a helpful post titled Why Guest Blogging is a Powerful Way to Gain Exposure for Your Blog which makes a good companion piece to some of my own posts from a few months back on Guest blogging:

• Why Guest Bloggers are Great for a Blog
• How to Find a Guest Blogger for Your Blog
• How to Get Guest Blogging Jobs
• How to Be a Good Guest Blogger

Have you been a guest blogger? How did you find the experience? Have you had guest bloggers on your blog? What were the benefits and costs?

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Today’s task in the Rediscover Your Blogging Groove project is to write a review of some kind.

There are many successful blogs and websites that have built themselves on the back of writing reviews. They are able to do so because so many people use the web to research purchases and make decisions about products and services.

Review posts require some knowledge of the thing you’re reviewing and they can take a little time to write (because you need to think carefully about what you write as your readers may base decisions upon your opinion) but they can be a highly effective post to include on a blog from time to time as they express an opinion rather than just write what everyone else is writing in your niche.

Some of the benefits of reviews that I’ve seen include:

• incoming links - some of my most linked to posts are reviews.
• conversation - stating an opinion about something can be the starting point for wonderful conversations, debates and exchanges of ideas.
• relationships - I’m amazed by how many of the reviews that I’ve written have been the thing that has actually put me into contact with the creators of the products or services that I review.
• search engine traffic - I quite often see traffic from SE’s coming from terms like ‘xxxx review’. ‘Review’ is a hot word.
• reviews can work well with affiliate programs - one of the best places to put an affiliate link inside a well written and balanced review of a product. Warning - don’t fall for the temptation of talking up bad products just to get an affiliate commission, all you’ll do is put readers offside. Give pros and cons of products that you’ve actually used and you’ll find readers respect that and will make more informed purchases.

More reading on how to write reviews - 10 Ways to Maximize the Value of a Product Review

Homework - Now it’s time to go write your review post. This might be easier for some of you than others as some of you have actual products or services that directly relate to your niche - however you don’t need to just review products.

Here are a few ideas for what to review:

• Review a related website or blog to yours
• Review a book about your topic
• Review the last few months of your own writing on your blog (highlighting some of your best posts)
• Review a movie, play, TV show, song, restaurant

Once you’ve written your review come back to this post and share the link to it so we can all be a little inspired by what you’ve written.

note: while your previously written review posts might be interesting - I’d prefer it if you only posted links to new posts in comments below - after all, this series is about helping you to improve your blog NOW rather than looking back - thanks for understanding.

PS: I wrote a review today of my own of the Canon EOS 5D DSLR

Today’s task in the Rediscover Your Blogging Groove project is to answer a reader’s question.

One of the simplest ways to find something to write about that connects with readers is to answer one of their questions. Today, if you’re taking part in the project, I’d like to encourage you to give it a go. If you’re not participating you still might find the post helpful - so lets read on…

Even in the early days of my blogging I remember getting comments and emails from readers asking for information, opinion or insight on the topics that I was covering. Sometimes the questions were quite to the point and bite sized, other times they were more open ended.

At first I would answer these questions in the medium that they were asked (in the comment thread or by replying to email) however I very quickly realized that I was being asked the same questions repeatedly and that the answers might be relevant for a wider audience than just the person asking them.

The result of this realization is that I regularly post answers to questions as posts.

I have a folder on my computer’s desktop called ‘reader questions’ that I place some of the questions that I’m asked into (as they hit my inbox or comments section). By no means do I answer them all but they do provide a treasure trove of inspiration on those slow days when I’ve run out of things to write about.

A few suggestions on answering questions:

• Pick Relevant Questions - not every question that you are asked will be appropriate for answering on your blog. Keep on topic and don’t keep answering the same question over and over.
• Ask for Permission or Keep Anonymity - before I post answer someone’s question I attempt to seek their permission to do so. I’m not sure on the legalities of answering someone’s question in public and using their name as the questioner - but I think it is polite and helps to show that you value your readers. If you can’t get permission (either you don’t have email details or they won’t reply) then I would change the question slightly to protect the questioner.
• Credit the Questioner - if they give you permission, give the person asking the question credit with their name and a link if they have one.

The beauty of using reader questions is that you end up with a post to point people to when you’re next asked the question. This will save you a lot of time in future.

The other great thing about answering questions is that they can be a very effective way of bringing in search engine traffic. Many of the searches done on Google are done in a ‘question’ format and smart bloggers who incorporate questions into their posts position themselves well for this traffic. Check out Ask Dave Taylor for an example of a blogger who has based his whole blog on answering questions.

“What if no one asks me questions?”

I can hear some of you thinking this already. Well let me answer your question with a few suggestions….

• Ask for questions - on numerous occasions I’ve solicited questions from my readers in blog posts and on each occasion the response was quite amazing with questions being asked that I’d never have considered writing posts on. Don’t promise to answer them all in your post or you could set yourself up for a bit of a disaster.
• Trawl for questions - if you don’t have enough readers yet on your blog to get many questions then perhaps you need to go on a question hunt on other sites. Look in the comments sections of other blogs and check out forums on your topics. Forums are a particularly good place for beginner questions.
• Find a Beginner - one of the best readers to identify is someone just starting out on the topic that you’re writing about. I did this a year back here at ProBlogger by approaching a couple of random readers who I knew were new bloggers via email and asking them if they had any questions that I could answer publicly. The bloggers were over the moon and I ended up with 15-20 posts based on the needs of beginner bloggers.
• Ask yourself a question - still can’t find a reader question? Don’t give up - ask yourself one! I’ve written many posts like this over the years. They start off with a question that I could imagine a reader asking (they don’t claim to be real questions) and they then go onto me answering the question. These posts are particularly good in the early days of a blog because they show your willingness to answer questions even if it wasn’t a reader that they originated from.
• Remember your previous questions - a little extension on the ‘ask yourself a question’ technique is simply to remember back to the early days of your own learning about your topic. What did you not know that you now know? What did you ask the people who taught you? If you asked these questions - someone else is sure to be also.

Homework - it’s time to go and write your question post. Don’t let it get too complex - imagine you’re talking to the reader who asked the question and simply write it up as you’d answer it in person.

Once you’ve answered the question in a post come back here and share the link to it so that we can all read it and learn from how you’ve done it.

note: while your previous question answering posts might be interesting - I’d prefer it if you only posted links to new posts in comments below - after all, this series is about helping you to improve your blog NOW rather than looking back - thanks for understanding.

update - thanks to Brody for reminding me of a technique to help you find questions to answer - check your blog’s search engine referral statistics to see what keywords people are using to find your blog. You’ll find that many times it is questions that bring them in - and that they’re questions that are ready made topics to write about. I’ve written about how I do this using the 103bees metrics tool previously.

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Today’s task in the Rediscover Your Blogging Groove project is to write a list post.

I find that one of the easiest ways to write a blog post is to write a list.

1. Lists are Scannable
2. Lists keep Posts succinct
3. Lists look ‘neat’
4. Lists area easy to link to
5. Lists can be a comprehensive to tackle a topic
6. Lists can be persuasive
7. Lists add to the ease of writing
8. Lists can start memes and go viral

The above reasons for writing lists was taken from - 8 Reasons why Lists are Good for Getting Traffic to your blog

There are a few different types of ‘list posts’.

1. Simple Lists - the above post (8 Reasons Why Lists are Good….) is a fairly simple list post.

• There’s a small introduction to the topic (A couple of sentences)
• There’s a short summary at the end (a paragraph).
• The points are all short and quite succinct
• The list makes up the majority of the post and really speaks for itself.

Simple lists are often shorter, sharper and to the point. They can be quite powerful and make a real impact.

2. Longer List Posts - the majority of list posts that I write are slightly more complex lists. I like to introduce a topic, explore a need, give some examples and then launch into a list.

Once I start the list itself I then like to expand upon each point along the way. This suits my style which is a little more long winded.

A few examples of my own include Wedding Photography - 21 Tips for Amateur Wedding Photographers and How to Take Great Group Photos.

In actual fact these sorts of posts border on being more essay like - but are broken up and formatted with headings for each point to make them a little more digestible and scannable to readers.

3. Lists as Parts of Posts - lists can also be used within posts quite effectively.

These lists might help to make one of numerous points along the way or there may even be multiples lists within the whole post (like this one).

Be a little careful not to overwhelm readers with too many lists and sublists (lists within lists can be confusing). But don’t feel that a list needs to be the only thing within your post. If you’re looking at an example of this type of post - you’re reading one. This post has numerous small lists in it with other commentary between them.

OK - so enough theorizing about list posts - it’s time to go and write one. The hardest part is probably going to be picking a topic to write your list about. A few ideas (and another list):

• 10 Ways to Use a….
• The most common mistakes….
• How to be an effective….
• The most popular 17…..
• Reasons why I love (or hate)….
• The most beautiful (ugly, fascinating, crazy)….
• 5 Steps to achieving….

If you want more examples of list posts check out the Lists Group Writing Project which has over 300 examples of list posts.

Go write a list. Post it and come back here to share a link to it in comments below so we can see what you came up with.

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Are you finding it hard to sustain your blogging inspiration at the moment? This week I’d like to help you get your blogging moving again.

Have you lost your blogging groove?

If you have - you’re not alone. Last week I chatted with a lot of bloggers who are either feeling disillusioned, uninspired, uncreative or just plain bored with their blogs. The result was that their blogs were suffering.

Perhaps it is the time of year (many in the northern hemisphere have all the distractions of summer while those of us in the south are feeling the winter blues) or perhaps it’s something else - but I’m sensing that many bloggers could need a little bit of a boost right now.

So this week I’d like to invite you to participate with me in a little project called the ‘Rediscover Your Blogging Groove‘ project.

Each day over the next week I’m going to announce a new type of post that I’ll invite you to write on your blog.

I’ll attempt to make them general enough to for most types of blogs (some of you might need to get a little creative) and will write a few ideas and thoughts on how to approach the type of post that I’m writing about. I’ll also try to give a few good examples from around the blogosphere of each type of post.

The object is simply to take the post type and write something on your blog that bounces off what I write.

• There’s no need to link back here (this isn’t about me, it’s about you getting your blog groove back).
• There’s no prizes (this isn’t an official ProBlogger group writing project, hopefully the reward is simply feeling a little inspiration to write some good content)
• I’m not going to create a big list of posts that you all write (although you’re welcome to show off your posts in the comments announcing each day’s post type so we can see how you approached it).
• There are no ‘rules’. Take my suggested post types in any direction you’d like, tweak the, change them, ignore them, do it over a longer period if you can’t manage 7 posts in a week - do whatever you like - but have fun with it.

I’ll post Day 1’s task shortly.

The Daily Tasks

Day 1 - Write a List Post
Day 2 - Answer a Question
Day 3 - Write a Review
Day 4 - Write a Link Post
Day 5 - Write a Tip Post
Day 6 - Ask a Question

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So I told you the search term that brings ProBlogger the most traffic from Google….

What search term brings you more traffic than any other term?

Check out your stats and see what’s bringing in the most visitors for you and tell us in comments below.

Bonus Question - What’s the funniest search term that brings you traffic?

Advertisement: Revenue Sharing Program AdSense revenue from that tutorial with the author 50/50.