Create a Normal Posts
While killer articles are paramount to attracting new visitors and establishing the authority of your blog (in the eyes of both people and search engines), normal posts are the ones that will build a community around the blog, because they allow you to talk directly with the readers and to engage
them. Moreover, normal posts will make the content flow more smoothly in your blog. Publishing killer articles every day would consume a huge amount of time, and even if you could do that you would probably be overloading your readers with more information that they could absorb.
Here are some types of normal posts that you can use in your blog:
Headlines
Most copywriters defend that you need to spend as much time working on the headline as you do on the rest of the copy. This principle applies to blogs too, where you need to make sure that your post titles are as good as they can be. Why is the headline so important? Because it is the
first thing a person sees, and unless you craft it smartly, it will also be the last one. The headline, in fact, will affect both the people who are about to visit your blog and the ones who are already visiting it. Suppose that one of your posts was submitted to Digg. com. a social bookmarking
site. If it has a poor title, people will not click on the link to visit your blog (let alone vote on it). Similarly, even if someone is already inside your blog, he might decide to leave if the titles of your posts don't grab his attention and encourage him to read the rest of those articles.
A good headline has two main factors. First of all its wording is aligned with the mindset of target visitors. This is important because it will communicate to web users that your content matches exactly what they are looking for. If you want to discover how your target visitors word their needs and wants, use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. It is a free service, and once you input
a certain keyword, it will create a list with 150 related terms, including their respective search
volume in the Google search engine.
Suppose that you just wrote a killer article with 20 tips to clean a house efficiently. Your first idea for a title is 20 Tips to Clean Your House. Upon using the AdWords Keyword Tool, however, you would discover that tips to clean house is a term searched only 28 times per month. A much more popular term is house cleaning tips, searched 4,400 times per month. So you would probably get better results with the title 20 House Cleaning Tips. The second factor that makes a good headline is an emotional hook. The headline should be crafted in a way that will trigger a certain emotion in the reader, encouraging him to click on the link (in the case of someone outside your blog) or proceed to read the rest of the article (in the case of someone already inside your blog).
Here are some examples of headlines that work:
- 24 Car Chases That Will Give You Skid Marks
- Do You Make These 7 Mistakes When You Write?
- How To: Backup And Search All Your Friends'Tweets In Google Reader
- 5 Incredibly Impractical Sexual Fetishes
- What Does the NFL Have in Common With Iran's Clerics?
- Quick Way to Make Real 3D Image Flipping Effect
- 75 (Really) Useful JavaScript Techniques
- Do You Know the Japanese Food Secrets for Beautiful Skin?
- Top 10 Most Ridiculous Band Names in Rock
- Warning: People are Ignoring Advertising. But They do Read News.
- 17 Images You Won't Believe Aren't Photoshopped
- What You Should Know About Home Equity Lines of Credit
- The 9 Most Badass Bible Verses
- 39 Creative Flash Designs
Content Ideas
Sooner or later most bloggers struggle to come up with ideas for new posts. The first step to combat this problem is to develop the habit of writing your ideas down. Whenever you come across something that could lead to a blog post, write it down. Use pen and paper, a white-board, or even a text processor in your computer. Just make sure to have a place where you can store and organize your ideas. Another tactic that you could use is to leave many post drafts ready to go. Once you are sure that one of your ideas could indeed be a good post, go to your blogging software and write the draft for that post. Include the headline as well as the main points. Then whenever you feel like writing on that topic, open the draft and finish it. If despite using the methods above you are still lacking ideas for new posts, here are some tricks that you can use. The first one is the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Simply go there and input some keywords related to your niche. If you have a video game blog, for instance, run the tool for keywords like video games , playstation , xbox and the like. After that you will just need to check the long tail of results to identify topics that you could write about. You can also use social bookmarking sites to find what is hot around the web and get ideas for new posts.
Here is list with some popular ones that you can use:
- Digg. com
- StumbleUpon. com
- Reddit. com
- Delicious. com
Finally, take a look on external places and try to identify ideas that could be adapted inside your own niche. This include mainstream websites, blogs on other niches, newspapers, print magazines, television programs and the like.
Posting Frequency
When people start blogging, they often wonder if there is an ideal posting frequency. The answer is no. There are popular blogs out there where the author only posts once a week, while others get updated several times per day. If you need to choose between quality and quantity,
therefore, go with quality. In other words, only publish a post if you believe that it will add value to your blog and audience. A bad post is worse than no post at all, because it might damage the image of your blog and make you lose readers. That being said, if you want to make significant
money with your blog, you will need to have both quality and quantity. It is no coincidence that
most blogs on the Technorati Top 100 list publish new content every day.
If you can't publish daily posts, at least make sure that you have a regular schedule. For example, post two times per week and stick with it. It would also be a good idea if you could post on the same days every week, and even at the same hour of the day. This regularity would give your readers the confidence that they will always find some freshcontent on your blog.
Design and Usability
In the early days of your blog you will inevitably need to spend some time working on the design and usability aspects. In this second chapter I will share with you some tips and tricks that you can use on your blog.
Free Resources
If you are just starting out, there is no need to spend money on your design. WordPress users have a wide range of free and beautiful themes to choose from. Your first destination should be the official Themes Directory. On top of that you also have many sites and blogs that compile lists with the best themes around.
Here are some of them:
WordPress themes are also very easy to customize, making it possible to add a unique touch to your site even if you are using a free theme.
I also recommend that you learn the basics of HTML and CSS, as this will be useful for the rest of your online career. The w3Schools. com website has a structured lesson plan for both of these topics. Another site that has an excellent teaching material for web design is HTML. net.
The Logo
When you get some money available to invest in your blog, spend it on a logo. Why? Because a logo can be attached to any template or design, and it will give a unique look to your blog and
reinforce your brand. By far the best website to purchase a logo from is 99designs. com.
You basically create a contest for your logo, specifying a prize, and their community of designers
will submit entries. You will be able to interact with the designers, and after one week or so you will choose the winning entry. I have seen awesome logos being submitted for prizes as low as $150 (which is the minimum amount).
Priorities
There are literally hundreds of things that you could want visitors of your blog to do. Examples include:
- read at least one post, read as many posts as possible,
- read your most popular posts, subscribe to the RSS feed, subscribe to the email newsletter, click on affiliate links and make a purchase, click on ads, submit a post to a social bookmarking site, check your profile on social networks, check the blogs on your Blogroll, leave a comment, bookmark your website on the browser, email one of your posts to a friend, download your ebook, and purchase your product.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to design a blog in a way that all of those things will be encouraged. Some people try, but the result is a lot of clutter that only confuses visitors, creating a terrible user experience. This means that you will need to prioritize. I recommend that you write down five top priorities, and then design the elements of your blog around these priorities.
Whatever does not support the priorities should be removed, or at least moved to a place where it won't get in the way of the user experience (e. g. the footer). Obviously the number five is just a rule of thumb, so feel free to change it. The key message is: the fewer things you ask your visitors to do, the higher the chances that they will actually do them.
Subscription Calls
In the previous point I mentioned that you should choose five priorities for your blog. Well, one of them should be to get as many subscribers as possible. Why? Because subscribers represent a
guaranteed audience for your content. Secondly, it is easier to build relationships with
people who read your posts regularly. Traditionally blogs use RSS feeds to let people subscribe to their content, but you should not limit yourself to that. Make sure to offer subscriptions via
email as well (you can do that with Feedburner ), and possibly to have a Twitter account that will be updated with all new posts. As far as the design of your blog is concerned, you should reserve two spots for your subscription calls. One of them must be above the fold, which could be
either in the header or on top of the sidebar. The second one should be at the bottom of single posts. In the section below your single posts you could include a message to encourage visitors to
