PureBlogging

One of the challenges that we all face as bloggers is turning that first time visitor into a regular reader. This is particularly important on those days when you get dugg, stumbled, or farked. In order to survive and grow your blog, you need to have a plan in place to convert new visitors into regular readers.

I have put together a list of 10 things that I believe will help you accomplish this and I’ll talk about them here over the next couple of days.

1. What’s Your Message?
   Ask yourself a couple of questions – What is the purpose of my blog? Is it obvious? Visitors should be able to easily identify the purpose of your blog or you will quickly lose their interest. You need to give them a reason to add you to their bookmarks or subscribe to your feed and if you make your message clear, you will be a step ahead of most. Your blog will have purpose and meaning.
2. Tell Them Who You Are
   Don’t blog anonymously, include an about page and let people know more about you. Include some basic facts, like where you live, your experience, your interests, or any other biographical information. Your blog reveals your personal views and expertise, so introduce yourself to your readers and they are more likely to connect with you.
3. Create Conversation
   Write posts that have a call to action… ask your readers to get involved. By doing this you will create an environment that will encourage new visitors to get involved in the conversation. If you can draw them into the conversation, they will be back.
4. Build Relationships
   Don’t forget to get involved in the conversation yourself. Your readers will be more likely to participate if they see that you respond to comments and questions. A great way to build relationships is to show your appreciation to those who get involved by sending them a thank you email or by rewarding your top commentators.
5. Make Things Easy
   Make sure your blog is easy to navigate and use. You should prominently display links to your RSS feed and email subscription form, include links to your most important pages, and display a list of your most recent posts, as well as, your most popular posts. If your blog is easy to use and important information is easy to find you will be more likely to convert visitors into readers.

Tune in Wednesday for the second and final post in this series on converting first time visitors to loyal readers.

Update: Part 2 has been posted and can be found here.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Google Toolbar has a cool feature that allows you make and install custom toolbar buttons. I created one for PureBlogging.com and actually get a few visitors from Google’s Toolbar Button Gallery every day. So not only can your regular visitors add your button to their toolbar, you may get a few new visitors too.

To make your button, all you have to do is create a simple XML file that contains some basic information about your site. After making your new button, you can use this simple form to add it to the button gallery. Google offers a few samples here and their official instructions can be found here.

First, let’s take a look at a basic template:

What you need to do is copy the above XML code into your favorite text editor and replace the values inside the elements. The elements are:

1. title – Enter the name of your site or button between the tags.
2. description – Enter the description of your site or button between the <description></description> and tags.
3. site – Enter the URL of your site between the <site></site> and tags.
4. update – Enter the location of the XML file on your site between the <update></update> and tags.
5. feed – Enter the URL to your rss feed between the <feed refresh-interval="1800" refresh-onclick="true"></feed> and tags.
6. icon – Enter the base 64 version of your favicon between the <icon mode="base64" type="image/x-icon"></icon> and tags.

If you don’t have a favicon, you can easily create one using your logo or any other picture with this tool. After you have created your favicon you will need to convert it to base 64 by using this tool. You then place that code between the <icon></icon> and tags in your toolbar button XML code.

You should now save your XML code with a .xml extension.

And that’s it! You should now have a functioning Google toolbar button. Here is what my XML code looks like:

After you have created your XML file you need to upload it to your server. I recommend saving it to your domain root so the button address would be something like:

http://www.domain.com/your_button_name.xml

Once the button is in place, try it out. You can use something like this for a link (be sure to enter the URL to your XML file):

<a href="http://toolbar.google.com/buttons/add?url=URL%20TO%20XML%20FILE">My Toolbar Button</a>

That would result in a link like this: PureBlogging.com Toolbar Button

Click on your new link and make sure the Google Toolbar is actually adding your button. If all goes well, go ahead and submit your button to Google with this form.

Popularity: 31% [?]

One of things that I struggle with is how often I should publish on this blog. At any one time, I may have several posts that I am working on and could publish multiple times a day if I wanted but I prefer to publish about 5 or 6 times a week.

Yesterday I ran across a post at 901am by Sharon Sarmiento that addresses this issue:

Really, take a moment to think about it–do you ever get the feeling in your blogging life that you’re running hard simply to stay in place?

One thing that springs to my mind is the standard for having lots of posts on a blog. The more content the better, it seems.

You may have started out with the personal expectation of posting 3 times a week, then increased the expectation to 5 times a week, then all the sudden it’s the norm for folks to publish multiple times a day every day of the week, and you’re wondering, “Should I be posting more?”.

I have to admit, I see blogs that have 4 or 5 posts a day and I wonder if I should be doing the same. It has become a race to see who can put up the most content in the shortest amount of time. For a blog with multiple authors, having several posts a day is no problem but what about those of us who own single author blogs? Can we expect to match their quantity and still maintain the quality of our posts?

In the article mentioned above, Sharon mentions surveys that were taken by Darren Rowse and Guy Kawasaki that seem to indicate that too many posts will cause readers to unsubscribe from your blog and it’s better to post when you feel like it rather than try to follow some set schedule.

I can certainly see how too many posts could make readers unsubscribe from your feed. With the number of feeds that I subscribe to, it is very difficult to keep up and I find myself doing more skimming than reading these days.

So, what do you think… how often should a blogger publish?

Popularity: 23% [?]

A few days ago I wrote an article about removing the NOFOLLOW tag from your blog comments. Well, it appears that many other bloggers feel the same way that I do… including Saman from Samanathon who just added me to the D List.

The D List was created by Colleen fron GeekySpeaky.com and it is a list of all the blogs that use the DoFollow plugin. That means you can gain some great traffic by joining the list and commenting on these blogs. If you do decide to join, be sure to visit Randa Clay because not only is she a member of The I Follow Movement, she put together some cool graphics for you to use to show your support.

Join the Revolution!

***Begin to copy here***

1. Write a short paragraph at the beginning of your post and link back to the blog that put you on the list in the paragraph. This isn’t a suggestion. You need to break up the duplicate content. Someone took the time to add you so the least you can do is give them an extra link back.

2. Copy the list of originals below COMPLETELY and add it to your blog. If you would like a different keyword for your blog then change it when you do your post and it should pass to most blogs with that keyword.

3. Take the adds from the blog that added you and place them in the “Originals” list.

4. Add at least 1 new blog that you KNOW us using the DO FOLLOW plugin to the list in the “My Adds” section. (Add no more than 5!) Let the people you’ve added know, so that they can keep the list going!

My Adds:

Blogging Tips

The Originals:

Pure Blogging
Samanathon
JMH Techtronics
ChaCha
Internet Serious Business
Don’t Fear the Truth
CoolAdzine for Marketers blog
Bucket O Bulletz
My Thoughts
Thoughts Out of my Head
Feeding Time at the Zoo
Fiber of Life
Tiptail – From Agility to Zen
Butterflies Are Free
Mom Gadget
Skeet’s Stuff
Ang’s Chicken Coop
And to Think
Mothering Many
Midlife Musings
Utterly Geek
Whatever I Feel Like
My Dandelion Patch
Surviving NJ
GeekySpeaky
Simple Kind Of Life
3DayMom
BuyMeBlog
The Hockey Dad

***Quit Copying Here***

Popularity: 17% [?]

Are you familiar with the NOFOLLOW tag? As I mentioned previously, comments are a great way to grow your blog but it could be even better. The NOFOLLOW tag basically tells Google not to count any links back to your site that contain the tag.

Unfortunately, by default WordPress and other blogging platforms add the NOFOLLOW tag to all links to authors that appear in comments. This issue is being discussed at Weblog Tools Collection today:

NOFOLLOW is a tag that Google created as a means to fight back against spam on blogs. As of today, Google is the only search engine actively using the tag as an integral part of their algorithm. The NOFOLLOW tag simply tells Googlebot to not follow — aka don’t give any link love — to the link you have on your site with that tag. Yahoo! and MSN do not care whether a link has nofollow or not, they will follow the link you provide them.

Spam filtering and prevention has improved to the point where this is no longer an issue and bloggers are beginning to realize that sharing “link love” through the comments on your blog is a good thing. You should reward those who take the time to participate in your community.

There are several plugins that allow you to remove the NOFOLLOW tag already available. Andy Beard has put together the Ultimate List of DoFollow Plugins if you would like to begin sharing a little love.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Getting your blog noticed can be a difficult task. One of the things that has worked for me is posting comments on related blogs. This is a must if you want to get your blog noticed by the influential people in your niche.

If you have been around in your niche long enough, you will probably already know who gets the most traffic to their blog and who has a ton of commenters on every post. If not, Technorati can help you find the most influential blogs in your niche.

After you have you have found the heavy hitters, it’s time to hang out and see what they do and what they say. See if you can figure why their blog is so influential. What do they do differently than you? What is unique about their style or content? Once you get a feel for their blog and their blogging personality, it’s time to join in.

Don’t just post a comment that says “Great point!”, and then move on. You need to add some of your own opinions and wisdom to the discussion. This will get their attention.

I have never talked to single blogger that does not like getting comments on their articles. We all love the feedback. Yes, even the A-list bloggers within the most popular niches enjoy reading comments. In fact many of them will respond to a comment right away if what you have said is compelling and creates the need for more conversation.

I actually feel that commenting on other blogs is one of the most important things that you can do to grow your blog. Commenting begins a relationship with the blogger and over time, they will come to rely on your thoughts and opinions and people will be more than happy to come to your blog to get your wisdom first hand.

Then comes the hard part… having good content on your blog when they get there.

Popularity: 15% [?]