Successful Blog

10 Reasons Your Blog Could Be Bleeding Readers

by

how to blog

by
Tara Hornor

Is Your Blog Bleeding Readers?

If you run a blog, then you probably struggle with the age-old issue of bleeding readers. It’s tough to keep folks coming back for more! But there are things you can do to make sure that your readers stay tuned to your blog.

At the end of the day, your blog should be about producing quality content that is relevant to your readers. If you’re giving them what they want, they’ll come back. But sometimes other elements of your blog can be causing frustration as well.

10 Reasons Your Blog Could Be Bleeding Readers

If your content is strong and you are still losing readers, you may want to analyze some of the following aspects of your blog site.

Awkward Layout

Your blog is your virtual home. So, like you would with your real home, make sure that it is warm and presentable for visitors. In other words, your layout should be both aesthetically pleasing and organized. If it looks as though you threw your blog layout together within two minutes (as in, it looks sloppy and haphazard), then your followers won’t want to look at it long.

Do you have too many ads? Are there too many things going on? Is it difficult to find your navigation menus? Consider simplifying your layout so readers focus on the content.

Overkill

While it is important to remain consistent with your blogging, avoid posting more than 5 or 6 times a week. No more than one post on a day, either. Posting more than this can make your followers feel as though you’re blasting them with too much content. Of course, this is very dependent upon the type of blog you’re running. News blogs, of course, will far surpass these limitations. The point here is to remember that too much content can be frustrating. If readers are following your blog and getting updates, you may be flat out annoying them with too many.

Unreadable

Choose fonts that are clear. Don’t make your readers work too hard to read what you’ve written. Additionally, don’t put your font in a color that is difficult to see. Legibility is a key factor in a pleasant reading experience.

Consider balancing white space as well. If your paragraphs are too long, you can cause readers to lose interest. This goes for content that is too wide as well. Therefore, balance your white space (the blank space in between text and graphics) by creating more readable width.

Offensive

If your posts are, on average, overly slanderous and offensive, then you will more than likely see a higher rate of no-returns. It is okay to be opinionated, but there is a way to word your opinions in a respectful manner.

We all like a strong voice that makes us think, smile, laugh, or generally incites an emotional response. But too much negativity just frustrates. So if you have a strong voice and find yourself losing readership, consider toning it down a bit.

Ignorance is Not Bliss

If you are an opinionated writer, make sure you know what you’re writing about. As a silly example, imagine you are ultra-anti-Twilight series. You write all kinds of posts bashing on various aspects of the movies and books. However, if you have not read the books or seen the movies, then you are an uninformed reader and will be viewed as such. While others may agree with your general view, your lack of expertise will eventually result in lost readers.

Length

Keep a balance in the length of your blogs. If they are all over 1,000 words, then you have a problem. You will overwhelm your followers. Occasional long blogs are okay, but make sure to separate them into paragraphs.

Various studies show various results. But generally speaking, posts over 1,000 words will take too long for readers to get through. Look at your metrics and see if you can find a trend in longer vs. shorter posts and adjust accordingly.

No images

People want to read blogs for entertainment, so entertain them. It is not necessary to post an image on every post, but an occasional shot of your post’s subject is appropriate and will add interest to your post. Images also help with search engine optimization, especially if you title your images with the main keyword of your article title.

Grammarly Misuse

See what I did there? Raise your hand if you cringed a little bit. So will your readers. If you are a person who struggles with grammar and spelling, then write your blog drafts in Microsoft Word or other word processing systems that will check grammar and spelling for you. Sites with poor writing and grammar are likely to be unfollowed.

Too touchy feely

We do not need to hear the nitty-gritty details of your life. A blog is not your diary, and it should not be treated as such. Of course, there are exceptions, but balance personal drama with valuable content. A good story requires some personal backstory so we can all relate to it. But keep the personal stuff focused on the point you’re trying to drive home.

Unemotional

Yes, this feels antithetical to the previous reason, but it is not. There should be a balance between personalizing your posts and gushing your deep, dark secrets. If readers wanted to read straight-up dry information, they would read the newspaper. So don’t write like a robot; give your blog a flavor of your personality and life.

Eliminate these 10 frustrations and your quality content will have even more power to keep readers coming back to your blog.

How do you keep your blog from bleeding readers?

Author’s Bio:
Tara Hornor writes about marketing, advertising, branding, web and graphic design, and desktop publishing for PrintPlace.com a company that offers online printing for print marketing media. Find her on Twitter as @TaraHornor .

Who Are You to Do Something Like That?

by

how to happiness

Who Are You to Do Something Like That?

cooltext443809437_relationships

I leave Wednesday for Portland and SOBCon NW 2012. It’s our 10th event since the first. I’ve been thinking about that first event.

The week before the first SOBCon in 2007. I was filled with the excitement and doubts that come from taking on a huge endeavor such as I’d never taken on before.

It wasn’t like doing something for school or for the place where I worked. Doing things for them always had certain people who defined what we would do. Papers were written to the standards of the teachers. Reports and projects fit the expectation of the manager assigning them.

This was something we — our team — were doing ourselves for the people who would come.

Whose approval and applause was I looking for now? I was comfortable with what we had built and still, I had this doubt. It took a while for me to identify what was lingering there to hold me back.

It was the kids in my 3rd grade class saying something like “Who are you to do something like that?”

Why was a bunch of 8-year-olds from my past still getting real estate in my head?
Why should I care about their approval now? It didn’t make sense.

I’m the One Doing It!

Once I admitted a bunch of kids were the doubters I feared, I could let them know that I’d outgrown their shouting. They couldn’t knock me over with their disapproval now. I have more skills than I did when I knew them at 8 years old. Their power isn’t nearly so big now that I’m grown. So I moved those doubters and shouters out of my head. I’m not sure why they had power then.

I was afraid of childhood events. They doubters and shouters were barely memories at best.
So the next time I thought, “Who are you to do something like that?”
I said out loud, “I’m the one doing it!” and I got on with doing it.

Half the battle is knowing who are the doubters and shouters you’re letting undermine success.
The other half is telling them they don’t count.

Being big enough to tell the doubters and shouters to go doubt themselves is irresistible.

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Guest Blogging Tips for Attracting More Traffic to Your Site

by

by
Subodh

cooltext443809602_strategy

Guest blogging is a great way to attract people to your website. By guest blogging, you can link your products, services or ideas to new audiences via other websites. Those links also provide more credibility for your own website, which makes it easier for you to improve your chances of getting a better ranking on a search engine.

Effective Guest Blogging Tips to Attract More Traffic

Whether you guest blog for yourself or use a service to help, here are some effective guest blogging tips you might pursue. Use them sensibly to get the best possible results.

Work with Blogs on Your Niche

You need to make sure that your links are of the best possible quality. This includes finding links that are relevant to your site. You must make sure that any guest blog posts you write are on blogs that relate in some way to the site that you run.

This is needed for the best search engine results. You can get better SEO results if the links to your site are relevant to it.

Express Your Knowledge

Another of the guest blogging tips to use is to demonstrate your knowledge of something. You need to express your knowledge so you can show people that you have an interest in whatever it is you are writing about. People are more likely to take your site seriously if they see that you know about your topic.

Avoid Going Big

Start small when trying to get your work onto more blogs. A good tip would be to start off with smaller blogs instead of using the larger ones when you start out. This might help you out because you will have an easier chance of potentially getting more traffic onto your site.

In fact, you are more likely to get exposure on a smaller blog than if you were on a larger one. A smaller blog will be easier to communicate to people in because you’ll have more of a focus on your own post. A larger blog might be cluttered with too many people who are trying to get their ideas out all at the same time.

Keep Links Under Control

You need to make sure all links on your guest posts are controlled well. A good idea is to use them in your resource box or author information box. This is often found at the end of a post.

Of course, you could use links within the body of what you are writing. This works provided that the links are not blatant advertisements and that they directly relate to what you are writing about.

Use these guest blogging tips if you want to get your website more power on search engines. These should not only make it easier for you to get more links on your site but to also express your knowledge of items to a greater audience. It makes it easier for you to get the most out of your site.

Author’s Bio:

Subodh is a SEO expert with over 6 years of experience under her belt. He provide guest posting service at www.seocreations.com

Pay Attention to the Questions

by

by
Rosemary O’Neill

Answer Questions, Build Relationships with your Prospects

In the classic movie Diner, Eddie subjects his fiancee to a 140-question quiz on Baltimore Colts football trivia in order to go through with the wedding. He loves Elyse, but is compelled to make sure she shares his passion for the Colts before getting hitched.

Have you noticed that your customers are constantly quizzing you, prodding, poking, trying to determine if you are a correct “fit” with their needs and mission? That you share their passion?

Pay attention to the questions


Flickr: Questions count

We’ve started using a gadget that allows visitors to ask questions via live chat on our corporate website. The results have been startling.

By offering a conduit for communication before the sale is made, we have learned what prospects are wondering, what content is missing from our website, how people are finding us, and where they might be confused about the product. In the live chat, they can quiz us with buying questions as well as relationship questions.

We save the transcripts from the chats and use them for sales training, content planning, website updates, and even technical support.

Find ways to bond in case you fail the quiz
Some buyers approach you with a detailed checklist of questions, often prepared by a committee. Many times these checklists include everything from “pie in the sky” dreams to absolute must-have items. It’s your job to help them sort out what’s important, and along the way, start building trust (Steven Covey on trust building: http://www.leadershipnow.com/CoveyOnTrust.html).

Along the path of sorting out the customer’s true needs, find nuggets of common ground to start building on. Train your mind to actively seek out points of connection. It could be with humor, common experiences, or commiserating over something. That’s the foundation of a real human relationship, which is essential for long-term customer retention.

Key takeaways for today:

  • Start building trust with prospects from the first impression
  • Provide a way to listen to and engage with questions
  • Be honest about what you can or can’t do
  • Share lessons-learned and common questions across your business
  • Build a strong enough human relationship that you can survive the “checklist”

Oh, and Elyse did fail the sports quiz by two points. He married her anyway.

Are you building relationships with your prospects so that they’ll marry you anyway?

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Thank you, Rosemary!

You’re irresistible!

ME “Liz” Strauss

Is Success on Your Mental Playlist?

by

by Sean Glaze

cooltext443809602_strategy

You Control the iPod in Your Head

Your self-talk has a huge impact on your performance, and inside your mind is a mental playlist of phrases and thoughts that will either help ensure your success or sabotage your every effort.

Each of us has an internal iPod, and it is the mental playlist that we choose to replay to ourselves over and over throughout each day that influences our actions and ultimately the outcomes and results we experience. Many of us have simply carried around these sayings, assumptions, and phrases since early childhood. This self-talk has a tremendous power over our performance.

The truth is that people walk around listening to negative messages that keep them from achieving the success they desire.
Sometimes it is parents who shared criticism or negative comment.
Sometimes it is peers.

But the criticism and comments keep replaying on our mental playlists. If you think defeat and expect failure, if you are constantly reminding yourself of past mistakes, your mental playlist may actually be more responsible for your poor performance than your opponent or circumstances.

As Norman Vincent Peale writes, “Change your thoughts, and you change your world.”

Recognize that YOU control what gets added, what gets deleted, and what gets played when you listen to the voices and ideas inside your mind. By replacing those negative messages with positive affirmations and reminders of your successes, you greatly increase your chances of future success!

One of the best examples of how self talk has influenced performance can be found in the Hall of Fame career of pitcher Gaylord Perry.

Gaylord Perry began his Major League career in 1962, and soon became successful 9and famous) for his “spitball.” He was a five-time all-star, and played a total of 22 years – recording over 3500 strike outs over that time period and finished with a lifetime era of 3.11. But as strong as his pitching performances were, he was often dejected about his hitting.

Just over a year into his career, in 1963, he reportedly told a teammate “They’ll put a man on the moon before I hit a home run.” Not surprisingly, in 1969 he had compiled a horrible .141 career batting average. And his self talk proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

On the evening of July 20, 1969, a few hours after Neil Armstrong first stepped foot onto the surface of the moon, Gaylord Perry hit the first home run of his career.

He finished with six before he retired, but the impact of his self talk – the story he told himself internally and the mental playlist of assumptions about his own abilities – cannot be over emphasized. What he said is what happened.

What you say to yourself — and what you say to others — has a profound influence on their perceptions and performances.

Is Success On Your Mental Playlist?

Team development begins with individual improvement … and the most important conversations you have in life are with yourself. Are you talking to yourself about failure or success? Confidence cannot be bought. It is built – by replaying your past performances and filling up your mental playlist with positive affirmations.

So, what is on your mental playlist? Is your self talk positive and contributing to your success. Or are you allowing negative thoughts and expectations of failure sabotaging your attempts?

To be a better team builder, replace those negative messages on your mental playlist with positive thoughts and reminders of past success. Build and improve your own and your team’s confidence, self-perception, and performance by changing how you think.

Take a moment to review what you have on your mental playlist – and consider replacing those negative messages and thoughts with the positive videos and affirmations that will help everyone perform at their best!

Don’t wait. Start now.
Think one positive thought about yourself or your team’s performance.
Write it in the comment box right now.

Author’s Bio:
Sean Glaze is a Team Building Speaker who writes about teamwork and leadership at his Team Building Blog. He is also author of Fistitude. You can find him on Twitter as @leadyourteam.

Values Drive Value — Always Did

by

You Don’t Have to Wait for a Response to Know, Do You?

cooltext443809602_strategy

In a conversation on Twitter on Sunday, I asked what I thought was a simple question.

How do you know when you’re tweeting value?

I asked it because a new guy on Twitter wanted to know the answer. I thought I might see what ways other folks had for managing the value of their Tweet stream — keeping the signal higher than the noise, not drifting over into in to useless chatter.

Many people started with the idea that they know they have tweeted value by the response — the retweets, reactions, engagement, and new followers that come from what they tweeted. So many answers basically said, “Other people tell me whether I offer value.”

I was thrown by the sheer number of responses that came back like that.
Being a teacher and a business person, my first thought was “Is this how our schools and our businesses have undermined us? They teach us to defer to other people’s opinion of value?

Isn’t putting something out there and then deciding it’s value by how people respond what network television does?

Value Is Worth


BigStock: Value is worth.

Imagine a contractor saying he would decide what a house he built was worth by tracking how many people talked about it? Wouldn’t you hope that the contractor might have a sense of quality and value before he picked his materials and assembled them?

Our reasons for sharing and responding or not doing so are often unrelated to value. Sometimes we share to get attention, without discrimination, or just to fill up the silence. Sometimes we don’t share because we’re busy, bored, tired of the noise, or uncaring.

If you offer something of value and no one responds does it mean that it has no value? If no one visits Tiffany, or Cartier for a week, will that mean that the diamonds they sell will no longer we of value?

Value is not what provokes a response — we swat mosquitoes when they bite us, but we don’t value the experience of a mosquito bite. Value is worth — what people find worth thinking about, worth using, worth discussing, worth time and attention. Value is what people keep and remember — we remember it because of how it changes or adds to our lives.

Values Drive Value — Always Did

Values drive value. We stop and notice what we value. Value resonates. Value influences. Value moves us to act on it because we want to incorporate it or add it our lives and our businesses. Finding value is its own reward. Sharing value is a generosity.

If you want to find what resonates with, influences, and moves other people, start with what resonates with you. influences, and moves you. If you want to know what other people will value, start with what you value first. If you don’t know where to start, here are three universal values you might use to offer irresistible value in what you write, build and choose to share.

  1. Value simplifies. Simple is elegant. Fewer clicks, fewer buttons, fewer steps in a to complete a task means less less to learn and less chance of introducing error. Simpler can move us past building to using. We do less hunting and gathering, less collecting data, art, photos, words, music, books, videos, and more enjoying, participating, reading, reviewing, listening, analyzing and sharing what we’ve collected. Anything that simplifies the navigation or the process of collecting gets us more quickly to discussing, learning, interacting, and connecting with the people about what we’ve found.
  2. Value saves time, energy, and resources. Who wouldn’t value something that offered more time, more energy or more resources? We need all three to process information and to make connections to people. Information and people help us remove problems, disarm obstacles, or lighten burdens. Connecting us to people who and you free our attention and time for what we want even more of in our businesses and our lives.
  3. Value adds meaning. Meaning, passion, purpose is what keeps us moving forward and gives us something to look forward to. Meaning is how we define ourselves and what connects us to other human beings. Meaning helps us explain why we’re here, who we care about, and how we’ll invest our time, energy and resources. Friends, family, fortune, fame, fun, faith and so many others are meaningful to people. Share what’s meaningful to you.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that we stop listening for a response. Listening is a value in itself. It adds meaning to the relationships we’re building. Values attract people who value what you do. Serve them. Sharing values builds trust and trust simplifies, saves time, and adds meaning to a relationship.

Don’t build a life or a business around people who don’t share your values. They won’t value you. They won’t value your work. Why would you want to share what you value with people who don’t value it too?

Share what you know to be of value with people who value what you do. Then listen to their responses. Identify those who value you what you do and use what they say to serve them better, to think about what they might need next of value that will simplify, save time, and add meaning to their lives.

How do you know when you’re offering value?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss