Posts tagged blog community building
8 ways blog writing is unique
Oct 28th
There are many great writers who have unsuccessful blogs. Here’s why. They may be great writers, but they are not great bloggers. There’s a big difference. Here are eight ways that blog writing differs from how you might write in school or at work.
1) Headlines matter. A lot.
Nobody is going to sit by the fireplace with a glass of wine and relax with a good blog post. Blog readers are SKIMMERS. More than likely they are scanning their inbox or blog reader to figure out what posts are worthy. So a headline that says “My views on soap” or “Thinking back” are not going to cut it. You have to GRAB ‘em and make them read. Here are characteristics of great headlines:
- Catchy
- Descriptive
- Accurate
- Contains keyword
- Tweetable (short)
Also, any headline that indicates a numbered list is going to attract more eyeballs. Busy readers like lists.
2) Write upside down
In school, we are taught to write linearly. A beginning, a middle, an end. That does not work on blogs. You have to tell the ending first. I call that writing upside down. Busy readers are going to be bored and frustrated if you don’t tell them exactly why they are there and what the pay-off is. So start with the end … and then explain it.
3) Keep it short.
You have to EARN the right to go long. If you are Malcolm Gladwell, you have earned the right to go long. If you are just starting to build your audience, don’t challenge them with long posts unless it is something extraordinary. Somewhere between 500 and 1,000 words is golden.
4) Use sub headings
A sub-heading is like a mini headline – like what you see above this sentence. Subheads draw attention down the length of the blog post and breaks up the block of gray. This is especially important in a challenging reading environment like a smartphone.
5) Use your original voice
In journalism school I was taught to keep my “voice” OUT of my writing. Just stick to the facts. The best blog writing weaves your personal narrative into the discussion and lets your personality shine. When somebody wants to write a guest post for {grow} I challenge them to write a post that ONLY they could write. Dig deep. Be you. That is the heart of originality and that is the source of blogging success!
6) Keep it RITE
This is easy to remember. Try to make every blog post R- relevant, I – interesting, T – timely and E – entertaining. If you can do that consistently, you will be creating share-able blog content.
7) Be conversational.
Throw the rules out the door. Write like you speak. Even. If. It’s. Choppy. After you have written your blog post, read it out loud. If it doesn’t sound like you simply talking to your audience, lighten it up. Just tell them the story.
8) End with a question
How do you know if your blog is making an impact?
Oct 23rd
About two years ago, I was really down on my blogging.
I would work hard on something that I thought was really smart and provocative and it would just fall flat. And then I would put out something dumb like “The 20 Funniest things you can do on Twitter” and it would go viral. It didn’t make any sense. It was disheartening.
I felt like my hard work was going nowhere. Maybe you feel that way sometimes too?
No matter how much you stare at your Google Analytics, it’s not going to interpret for you whether anybody cares about your blog.
Even comment sections aren’t much help.
A rule of thumb is that only about 2 percent of your readers leave comments. That’s a generalization I have found that holds up across many types of blogs. Readers may be too busy, too shy, or just not interested enough to comment. So you need a LOT of readers before you start getting comments.
Drastic action
In addition to only hearing from a vast minority of your readers, there is a big difference between a “comment” on the topic and real “feedback” on how you are doing as blogger – if you are making a dent in the way people act and think.
I realized that if I was going to make truly meaningful connections with these strangers popping in on my blog and figure out if this thing was having any impact, I was going to have to make an effort to get to know them better. So, I started to call up my readers.
I made a goal to call at least three of my blog readers per week over a period of a couple of months and by far the overwhelming lesson I learned was yes — I was having an impact, in so many unexpected ways.
I’ll never forget a call I had with Caroline Di Diego, a businesswoman and entrepreneur who had left so many interesting comments on my blog. She told me in great detail how one quite obscure blog post I had written had changed her outlook on business and marketing. Although the post had run two years ago, she could still recall its lessons and it still impacts her even to this day.
This conversation meant so much to me, because I had been particularly proud of that blog post but it had not been a popular post in terms of how much it had been shared. In fact, I was so disappointed by the reaction to this thoughtful post that I wondered why I was blogging at all.
A re-energizing impact
Caroline’s reaction — and the reaction of so many others — gave me a new energy, a new commitment to blogging, because these conversations made me realize that even though I might not hear it every day, I am having an impact.
I recently recounted how one physician who averaged just 4.5 readers a day found out that she had impacted a life.
My point is, if you’re working hard on your blog, it may be difficult to know if you are really having an impact unless you reach out and actually talk to people about it.
What has your experience been? Are you making an impact and how do you know?
Illustration: I added the WordPress logo to a Bigstock.com illustration
How to Turn a Small Blog Audience into Small Army
Sep 19th
By Srinivas Rao, Contributing {grow} Columnist
Every single day we focus on how to get more traffic to our blogs, increase our conversion rates, and sell more. The result is an obsession with raising our Klout scores, increasing the number of followers we have on Twitter and inflating every metric we can in hopes that we’ll become the next … insert famous blogger of your choice.
Let’s get real for a moment. I’m not going to become the next Zen Habits, Chris Brogan, or Seth Godin. Neither are you. They had a substantial head start and don’t appear to be slowing down. But the good news is that you have an edge that you may be overlooking. When your audience is small you can run your blog like a VIP experience.
“If you only have a few readers, treat them like the most important people in the world because they are.” – Chris Guillebeau
Email Each Reader Personally
I have to give credit where it’s due for this idea. Chris Guillbeau told me he emailed every single newsletter subscriber personally for his first 10,000 subscribers. While each one may not have had an impact, the cumulative effect was incredibly powerful. You can’t really argue with his success. I’ve made this part of how I treat my email subscribers and I recently received this email in response.
Thanks for your email! Of all of the resources that I subscribe to, I don’t think I have ever received an actual personal email that wasn’t an obvious use of email marketing personalization features. Your content is awesome, and I am finding it really helpful!
Just to be clear, while this is a tactic, if somebody does respond to you, that provides chance for you to take that relationship further. You’ve just discovered a super fan. Be genuine and engage them.
Write a Post Specifically for Each Reader
A friend mentioned to me in a conversation that he only had 25 readers. I told him to contact each one of them. If you have a small group of readers imagine the impact you could have if you wrote a post dedicated to each one.
Phone or Skype Your Readers
Although we live in an online world, we can’t forget that 95% of communication is non-verbal. When somebody who reads your content hears your voice you go from “that person who writes that blog” to a real person. Let your readers to get to know the real you.
Host a Fireside Chat
This is where an audience becomes a community. It’s no longer a tribe leader communicating with a tribe member. It’s how you become a facilitator of conversation between the members of your tribe.
Visit Your Readers in Person
My friend Mark Lawrence, who was and still is a relatively unknown blogger, runs a start-up called SpotHero. He used all his frequent flyer miles to visit every single person he connected with online. He used his connection with me as an excuse to visit California and to this day we’re friends. His blog is more or less dead, but here I am telling you about it 2 years later. For the A-list bloggers to emulate this they’d have to spend their entire year, every dime they have and possibly their whole life to accomplish this.
The Cost of Failure is Minimal When You’re Small
One of the great things about being relatively small and unknown is that the cost of failure is not that harmful. That gives a blogger with a small audience a tremendous amount of leverage. If Mark Schaefer did something that absolutely bombed on this blog, his audience is substantial and lots of people would know. When you’re small you can take some bigger risks with your creativity. I’m convinced it’s one of the reasons small companies are so innovative, while big companies lose this capability as they grow.
Don’t forget attention is a form of currency on the social web. When people spend theirs with you, give them more than they paid for. Nurturing a small audience is essential to converting a small audience into a small army. So take that small audience and turn into a VIP experience that has people lined up around the block for an opportunity to be part of your army.
Srinivas Rao writes about the things you should have learned in school, but never did and his the host-co founder of BlogcastFM. You can follow him on twitter @skooloflife
Welcome to {grow}
You’re in marketing for one reason: Grow.
Grow your company, reputation, customers, impact, profits. Grow yourself. This is a community that will help. It will stretch your mind, connect you to fascinating people, and provide some fun along the way. I am so glad you’re here.
-Mark SchaeferFollow Mark
Groups We Believe In
25,000 blog comments later, the party’s just starting
Aug 29th
51 comments
Click here if you can’t see this personal video about blog commenting.
I’m not much of a milestone kind of guy but I received my 25,000th comment on my blog yesterday and so I would like to honor all of you amazing commenters with some comments on comments.
In this short video blog (RARE!!) I explain what this milestone means to me, and one of the big lessons I’ve learned that you will be able to use in your workplace.
Thanks to all of you who make this place amazing and interesting every day. – Mark