There are 3 days left of my personal coaching bonuses for the Blog Mastermind Blog Mentoring program.

To recap - Blog Mastermind is a fantastic blogger mentoring program with some great teaching from successful Blogger Yaro Starak and his team. BlogMastermind is a six month program which you can either sign up for month by month or for the full six months at once (at a discounted rate). I’ve written about my impressions of Blog Mastermind here and have also shared some student mini reviews here (I’m getting more positive emails about the course from readers every day or two).

For those who are still thinking about it - here’s what I’m offering for those who sign up here at ProBlogger:

1. For all those who sign up whether it be for one month or six I’m putting you in the draw to win one of 3 ProBlogger books which I think would make a great accompanying text book for the course. I’ll draw this on 1 September.
2. For each student who signs up for the full six month package I’m offering a free one on one hour long consultation with me to unpack what you’ve been learning in Blog Mastermind. You can use the hour in a variety of ways. Get full details of my personal hour coaching bonus offer here.

These offers run out at the end of August and I won’t be repeating them any time soon because I’m going to be very busy with the 1 hour coaching sessions that I already owe students who’ve signed up for the six month course (there are already 25 of these)!

To be eligible for these bonuses sign up through this Blog Mastermind link.

Whether you invest in BlogMastermind for a 1 month taster or the full 6 months to get my bonus coaching - I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. The feedback I continue to get from students is that they are finding the intentional training and personal interaction with other students an teachers refreshing, inspiring and an experience that is practically helping them to improve their blogs.

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Just a quick note to let you know that Chris Pearson and I (ok… Chris) has added significant new power and flexibility to the Thesis Theme for WordPress. There’s also a special offer that runs through the weekend (at least you can thank me for that).

Here’s what’s new with this latest update to Thesis (which should be live and available by the end of the day):

• New “Design Options” panel allows you to customize fonts and font sizes all across the theme. Testing different typographical combinations has never been this easy on the Web, and this is a feature that should appeal to designers and non-designers alike because you can play around in a non-destructive, non-code environment. Best of all, no reinventing of the wheel is required—the resulting typography is expertly constructed no matter what font/size combination you choose.
• The Layout constructor in the new “Design Options” panel allows you to select a 1, 2, or 3 column layout AND to specify the width of your content column. When used in conjunction with the font selector, the layout constructor yields a nearly endless set of design possibilities. Now, your Thesis doesn’t have to look like the next guy’s, and you don’t have to code anything to make it happen.
• New title tag constructor allows for detailed title customization through the options panel.
• Plus a bunch of tweaks and improvements based on suggestions from the Thesis community.

And believe it or not… there’s another Thesis upgrade coming next week. Color customization is on the way with multiple pre-defined theme color schemes plus a template for your own easy custom color scheming.

Of course, once you join the Thesis community, you get every upgrade at no extra charge, so no need to hold out for a better version. Good thing, because…

Get the Upcoming Cosmo Magazine-Style Theme… Free

We’ve been quietly running a special offer that’s good through the end of the weekend, but then it’s gone. When you join the Thesis community before August 31, 2008, you not only get all the goodness that is Thesis, plus all that amazing support, you also get the innovative new Cosmo magazine-style theme at no extra charge (Cosmo is coming late September).

Check out the details here, but remember… Monday’s too late.

The vast majority of visitors to your blog are paralyzed by passivity.

They never comment, they don’t vote in polls, they won’t subscribe to your feed or newsletters, they won’t buy the affiliate products that you recommend, they won’t email a friend about your blog, they won’t vote for you in social bookmarking sites and most of them will never come back.

Image by Aaron Jacobs

Depressed? You’re not alone.

Some days it gets me down that readers can be so passive too.

In this post (a part of our crafting blog posts series) I’m going to share how using Calls to Action can significantly increase the interactivity on your blog. I’d also love to hear what you have to say on the topic.

The Problem of Passivity on Blogs

I still remember early in my blogging expressing my frustration to another blogger. At the time my main concern was that while I was getting a lot of visitors, so few of them left a comment.

He responded to me with a question that was like a SMACK to the side of the head with a BRICK - it was so simple yet stupidly I’d never thought of it. He said:

“Do you ever ask for comments?”

He went on to explain to me a ’secret’ that copywriters have known for ages - ‘Call to Action‘ - if you don’t call your readers to action they are far less likely to take it:

• If you want people to comment, invite them to do it.
• If you want people to subscribe, don’t assume that they’ll think to do it themselves, ask them to. If
• If you want people to buy something - give them a way to do it.
• If you want people to come back tomorrow, give them some motivation to do so and show them how to remind themselves.
• If you want a vote on Digg or StumbleUpon - ask.

Call me ‘Captain Obvious’ - but so few of us bloggers have mastered the ‘Call to Action’ in their blogging that it is no wonder that so many of us struggle with passive audiences.

Why Calls to Action are Important

After my friend gave me the above advice I began to experiment with inviting readers to comment on my posts. Here’s what I found:

• Some People Respond to Invitations - When I invited comments and didn’t assume that people would leave them I noticed a marked increase in comments. While the majority of my readers still ‘lurked’ I’d estimate comments were up by between 50-100% on posts.
• Action grows Reader Engagement - I began to notice that when people commented once it would open a floodgate of comments from them over future days. When I questioned a few of these readers I found that some had been ‘lurking’ a while, too scared to comment but once they had they felt more ‘ownership’ and ‘confidence’ to do it again.
• Action brings loyalty - I noticed that first time readers would become loyal readers - they’d often come back to the blog in the days after their comment to see how other people responded to it.
• Action breeds Action - When you grow the interactivity on your blog it draws others to be interactive. When a first time visitor to your blog sees that you have thousands of subscribers and hundreds of comments they take notice and many will be drawn to do likewise (it is called social proof).

In time I saw similar things as I ‘asked’ readers to do other things (vote in polls, subscribing to feeds etc). I learned that as obvious as it might seem to us as bloggers to do these things - many readers don’t think to do these things unless asked to.

12 Tips for Calls to Action:

So how do you effectively use Calls to Action on your blog?

Let me say that the following Call to Action Tips come out of my own experience of experimenting with this type of thing. I’m by no means a copy writing expert (although am about to start some training in it) and would love to learn from your own experiences of Calls to Action so please do feel free to share you own experience in comments below.

1. Know what Action you want Readers to take

Sounds almost too basic to include in these tips but I think it’s really important to be clear about what you’re trying to achieve with your blog post. This really builds on the last post in this series which talked about making your posts matter and identifying purposes for posts. What’s the purpose of your post? What do you want readers to do as a result of reading the post? Answer these questions before writing your call to action and you’ll be in a great position to write an effective one.

2. One Call to Action Per Post

Early in my own experiments with Calls to Action I wrote a post that was linked to by the uber blog Slashdot. It sent more traffic to my blog than I’d ever seen before and so I decided to update the post with some calls to action. Problem was that I stuffed so many of them into the post that no one did any of them. I asked for comments, pointed to my RSS feed and newsletter, asked for people to link to the post… etc. I find that I have a lot more luck with just one call to action per post - it gives people a simple next step rather than overwhelming them with choices.

3. Make it a Win/Win Call to Action

There’s nothing wrong with benefiting from the actions that your readers take on your blog. Don’t be afraid to ask things of them - but do make sure that what you ask of them will have an upside not only for you but for them.

4. Make the Action Simple and Achievable

I was recently asked by a reader to look at a competition that they were running on their blog and to give my opinion on why no one had entered it. Upon looking at the competition it became clear that while the prize was great and the blog did have readers - that the requirements to entry were too complicated. The blogger was asking readers to leave a 500 word comment, write a post on their own blog linking to their competition AND subscribe to his RSS feed (and to prove it take a screen shot of the subscription confirmation page). Ask your readers to jump through too many hoops to do the thing you want them to do and you’ll get significantly less of them to take that action.

5. In Post Calls to Action Work Best

Positioning is everything in many aspects of your blog and calls to action are no exception. In the same way that click through on ads increase when you put ads near or in content - responses to calls to action will work significantly better for you within posts than if you slap them on your sidebar. This doesn’t mean you can’t have an invitation to action in your sidebar (almost every blog I know does this with RSS subscription invitations for example) however in post invitations will generally work best.

6. Express Clearly what you Want People to do

This really builds upon the ’simple and achievable action’ point that I’ve made above but comes down to the way you communicate the desired action to readers. In the same way that I’ve suggested taking extra time to craft post titles and opening lines it is important to pause and consider the words that you use in your call to action. If your call to action isn’t a simple thing (and sometimes it is unavoidable) consider outlining what you want readers to do in ’steps’ or a list of points. This is what I do on my Group Writing Projects and I find it works quite well.

7. Multiple Calls to the Same Action Can Work

While it’s best if you keep the number of actions you call for to a minimum (preferably 1 per post) this doesn’t mean you can’t invite readers to take that action more than once in the post. The most logical place for a call to action is at the end of the post - after all it is where readers stop reading and start thinking about what to do next. However I find that adding a call to action earlier in the post can increase the likelihood that people will take the action. This works for two main reasons - firstly you are sowing the seed of the action in their mind early and secondly some people will never make it to the end of your post but may actually take the action early on. For example - in this post I’ve already invited comments twice - and I’ll do it once more at the end of the post.

8. Draw the Eye to Calls to Action

Why do we make titles bigger and more eye catching on blog posts but leave our invitations to action as plain text languishing at the bottom of our posts? As with any important part to a post it is important that your readers see calls to action. You can ensure this happens in a number of ways including putting a heading above them, using an image near them, making the call to action a striking image itself, using text formatting (bold, italics, capitals), using colored backgrounds and borders around the calls to action etc.

9. Lead your readers to the Action

Your post itself needs to lead people to the action. The call and the topic of the post should strongly relate to one another and you should give reasons why the action would benefit readers. One technique that is worth using with some calls to action (particularly bigger ones) is to paint a picture of what life would be like after the action is taken (or what it’d be like if it is not taken).

10. Give an Incentive

Some calls to action will have an incentive to the reader built into them - but at times you might want to add extra incentive. This can be especially effective if you’re promoting an affiliate product and want to give your readers extra value by offering a bonus.

11. Mix Up Calls to Action from Post to Post

Readers can become a little blind (or numb) to calls to action over time if your calls are always the same (either given in the same way or asking them to do the same thing). Mix things up from post to post. Also don’t feel you need to have a call to action in every post. If you’re constantly asking your readers to do things you could burn them out.

12. Don’t Hard Sell But Call with Confidence

Using Calls to Action can be a bit of a balancing act at times. In talking to bloggers I find that they usually struggle with them in one of two ways. Either they feel awkward asking readers to do anything OR they SELL SELL SELL and lack subtlety. Somewhere between these two extremes is the place you need to dwell. The place you position yourself along the spectrum will differ from blog to blog and probably based upon your personality. Some bloggers get away with the hard sell better than others - the key is to experiment, listen to your readership and how they respond and to try to strike a balance between the two extremes.

What Was Your Most Effective Call to Action?

What I’ve shared above is my experience of Calls to Action but as I’ve said above - I’m still on a learning journey on this topic and would love to hear what you have leaned on the topic? Feel free to give an example of what you’ve done with a link and share your lessons in comments below so we can all improve our call to action technique!

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Just a short note to let readers know that I’ve just added another 103 reader submissions to the Killer Titles Group Writing project submissions page. Those still wanting to participate need to get their skates on - there’s less than 24 hours and I’ll be closing this off and picking the prize winner. See how to enter here.

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An idea for a killer post just pops in your head. You perform a quick Google search to check if someone wrote about it in the past, but no one has. Cool! You spend some days researching and writing the post, and then editing it to make sure it is bullet proof.

Now the question arises: “When should I publish it, to ensure it will get as much exposure as possible?”

There are different statistics around the Web, but most of them highlight higher traffic from Monday to Thursday, and a small dip on Fridays and over the weekend. That is what one would expect though, and it doesn’t help to answer our question.

Is it the same if you publish your killer article on Tuesdays or on Thursdays? The difference might be small, but I think that the earlier in the week you publish it, the better.

The answer therefore is: Monday is the best day to publish your best content.

The overall traffic around the web must be similar for the first week days, but there are other factors favoring Mondays, including:

1. Fresh stuff. Bloggers and webmasters are always more likely to link to fresh material. Weeks start on Mondays (on most western countries at least), therefore people tend to associate content published early in the week with fresh stuff. I suspect that the same breaking news would generate more buzz if it came out early in the week, then if it broke on a Friday, for example.

2. More time for links. You need to also to consider the fact that bloggers and webmasters won’t link to your article right away. Most of them have a posting schedule, and they might have other material to be published on the same day that you released your killer post. Now if you publish your material on Monday, they will have the rest of the week to find some time to link to it. If you publish it on a Wednesday, for example, there is a risk that the weekend will come in and that some bloggers will just forget to link to your material.

3. More time for social media traffic. The same principle applies to social media traffic. Usually it takes 24 hours for the traffic to peak (e.g. hitting the Digg front page or getting a critical mass of thumbs up on StumbleUpon). If you submit your material on Monday, therefore, the mass traffic will start coming on Tuesday, and you will have the rest of the week to capture it. If you publish your content on a Thursday, on the other hand, the traffic peak will already be smaller, because it will happen on a Friday, and the subsequent days might be disappointing as well because it will be the weekend.

Obviously there are some drawbacks as well related to publishing your stuff on Mondays. It is the most crowded day of the week, so you will be competing with more material for attention.

That being said, if your content is really top notch, I think that the advantages out weight the disadvantages.

What about you, when do you prefer to publish your best content?

Your Most Popular Stuff Must Go On Mondays

The Holy Grail of incoming links for many bloggers is an appearance on the front page of Digg. It has the potential to send tens of thousands of visitors and bring about a lot of secondary links from other sites who see it.

However the downside of a site the power of Digg linking to one of your articles is that it is an authoritative site in the eyes of Google.

Yesterday one of my posts - 15 Stunning Lightning Images - got to the front page of Digg. It was actually an old post that I’d recently updated and moved back onto the front page and it already had done pretty well on social media sites so had some link equity already.

The front page appearance on Digg brought a fresh influx of visitors which was fantastic but here’s what I saw in Google’s search results when I searched for Lightning Images this morning:

Yep - Digg out ranks the post it links to.

I fully expect this to change at some point as Google’s rankings are in constant states of change and even the link to my post above will give it a little extra authority but it is an issue that many bloggers face and should be aware of when submitting their posts to social media sites, or other sites and forums with established authority on Google. update: the DPS article now outranks the Digg one.

I’ve seen this same thing happen again and again on Digg but also when a site gets linked to like a site like Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Engadget etc who link back to the source of their story but use a similar title for their post to the post they’re linking to.

I don’t think this is the problem of the sites linking to posts - it’s probably more an issue for Google to work on - but post this as a little warning for bloggers active in promoting their blog posts on other sites.

TIP: One quick tip for those of you who suffer from this problem. If you have any control for how your posts are submitted to Digg, try to get the title to be something different to the title of your blog post. For example, if the title of the Digg submission above had been ‘Lightning Pictures’ or something completely different like ‘Flash, Bang - 15 Images of Storms that Will Rock Your World’ then it wouldn’t rank as high for ‘lightning images’ as my own post.

Of course not everyone has control over how their posts are linked to - but if you do, it’s worth keeping in mind.

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If you head over to TechCrunch, one of the largest blogs (and websites for the matter of fact) in the world, you will see that they just released a redesign.

There are many interesting things to notice on the facelift. First of all they have migrated to excerpts on the homepage. I have been an advocate for that layout for a long time, and I had also predicted that most popular blogs will end up using that. TechCrunch was one of the latest large blogs still displaying full posts on the homepage.

For more inputs on this issue check the post where they announce the redesign. There are over 180 comments on it, some criticizing the change, some congratulating on it.

Another interesting point is that they inserted a new 300×250 ad block on top of the sidebar, pushing the 125×125 ad blocks down. This could mean that they are seeing better returns with CPM ad deals and not with the direct adverting ones.

One thing that I like is the “Previous Post” and “Next Post” links. I think those can have a positive impact on your page views.

Finally, the “Subscribe” section on top of the sidebar is currently only being displayed on the homepage, and not on the single post pages. It is probably a mistake on the coder’s part, or they will end up many subscribers on the long run (not that they need them, I know, but still).

TechCrunch Got Redesigned

Who needs to learn how to read?

After all, we all learned how to read fairly early in life, usually in elementary school, right?

But do you know how to really read?

More importantly, are you really reading?

Reading can make you a better writer, as long as you’re paying attention and leaving time to actually write. But what we’re talking about here is what you say, rather than how you say it.

If you haven’t noticed, competition in the world of online content is fierce. Anyone playing to win is searching high and low for information that others don’t have, which for many means subscribing to a ridiculous number of RSS feeds.

While seeking out novel information from a wide variety of sources is admirable, it doesn’t necessarily give you an advantage. The ancient Greeks had a label for those who were widely read but not well read—they called them sophomores.

As in sophomoric… not a second-year college student (I suppose there’s not really much of a distinction).

Scanners and Pleasure Seekers

We know that people don’t read well online. They ruthlessly scan for interesting chunks of information rather than digesting the whole, and they want to be entertained in the process. This is the reality that online publishers deal with, so we disguise our nuggets of wisdom with friendly formatting and clever analogies.

But that doesn’t mean you should read that way.

If you’ve been publishing online for even a small amount of time, you’ve seen someone leave a comment that clearly demonstrates they didn’t read or understand the content. Even more painful is when someone writes a responsive post that clearly misses the entire point of the original article.

While it happens to us all from time to time, you do not want to consistently be one of these people. Credibility is hard enough to establish without routinely demonstrating that you fail to grasp a topic that you’ve chosen to write about, whether in an article or a comment.

Plus, if you’re doing nothing but scanning hundreds of RSS feeds and reading purely to be entertained, you’re at a disadvantage. Someone in your niche or industry is likely reading books and reading deeper to become the higher authority.

Or they will after they read this article.

Information vs. Understanding

People often think of learning as an information-gathering and retention process. But being able to recall and regurgitate information is low-level learning compared with insightful understanding.

Bloggers are big on regurgitation. These cut-and-paste creatives add value to the world through a mash-up of sources, right? Maybe, but without the ability to understand and communicate what it all means for the reader, you’re simply passing on your reading obligations to others, and that’s not giving people what they look for in a publication.

On the other hand, if you understand everything you read upon a casual once over, are you truly learning anything new? The material that gives you an edge in the insight department is the stuff that’s harder to understand. In other words, the writer is your superior when it comes to that particular subject matter, and it’s your job to close the expertise gap by reading well.

You do that by moving beyond learning by instruction, and increasing your true understanding by discovery. For example, you read a challenging book full of great information, and you understand enough of it to know that you don’t understand all of it.

At that point, you can dive into the book again and read more carefully. You can go to supplemental resources. You can read other books. All that matters is you do the work rather than asking someone, and I guarantee you’re really learning in the process.

For example, next time you read a challenging blog post and you’re not clear on a point, your first inclination might be to ask a question in the comments. Instead, read the post again. If it’s still not clear, go do some research on your own to see if you can figure it out. Then when you finally do ask a question, you’re on an entirely different level of understanding and can likely engage in a meaningful dialogue with the author.

Instruction is important and beneficial. But true understanding comes from your own exploration and discovery along the path.

The Four Levels of Reading

Back in 1940, a guy named Mortimer J. Adler jolted the “widely read” into realizing they might not be well read with a book called How to Read a Book. Updated in 1973 and still going strong today, How to Read a Book identifies four levels of reading:

• Elementary
• Inspectional
• Analytical
• Syntopical

Each of these reading levels is cumulative. You can’t progress to a higher level without mastering the levels that come before.

1. Elementary Reading – Aptly named, elementary reading consists of remedial literacy, and it’s usually achieved during the elementary schooling years. Sadly, many high schools and colleges must offer remedial reading courses to ensure that elementary reading levels are maintained, but very little instruction in advanced reading is offered.

2. Inspectional Reading – Scanning and superficial reading are not evil, as long as approached as an active process that serves an appropriate purpose. Inspectional reading means giving a piece of writing a quick yet meaningful advance review in order to evaluate the merits of a deeper reading experience.

There are two types:

• Skimming: This is the equivalent of scanning a blog post to see if you want to read it carefully. You’re checking the title, the subheads, and you’re selectively dipping in and out of content to gauge interest. The same can be done with a book—go beyond the dust jacket and peruse the table of contents and each chapter, but give yourself a set amount of time to do it.
• Superficial: Superficial reading is just that… you simply read. You don’t ponder, and you don’t stop to look things up. If you don’t get something, you don’t worry about it. You’re basically priming yourself to read again at a higher level if the subject matter is worthy.

Stopping at inspectional reading is only appropriate if you find no use for the material. Unfortunately, this is all the reading some people do in preparation for their own writing.

3. Analytical Reading – At this level of reading, you’ve moved beyond superficial reading and mere information absorption. You’re now engaging your critical mind to dig down into the meaning and motivation beyond the text. To get a true understanding of a book, you would:

• Identify and classify the subject matter as a whole
• Divide it into main parts and outline those parts
• Define the problem(s) the author is trying to solve
• Understand the author’s terms and key words
• Grasp the author’s important propositions
• Know the author’s arguments
• Determine whether the author solves the intended problems
• Show where the author is uninformed, misinformed, illogical or incomplete

You’ll note that the inspectional reading you did perfectly sets the stage for an analytical reading. But so far, we’re talking about reading one book. The highest level of reading allows you to synthesize knowledge from a comparative reading of several books about the same subject.

4. Syntopical Reading – It’s been said that anyone can read five books on a topic and be an expert. That may be true, but how you read those five books will make all the difference. If you read those five books analytically, you will become an expert on what five authors have said. If you read five books syntopically, you will develop your own unique perspective and expertise in the field.

In other words, syntopical reading is not about the existing experts. It’s about you and the problems you’re trying to solve, in this case for your own readers. In this sense, the books you read are simply tools that allow you to form an understanding that’s never quite existed before. You’ve melded the information in those books with your own life experience and other knowledge to make novel connections and new insights. You, my friend, are now an expert in your own right.

Here are the five steps to syntopical reading:

• Inspection: Inspectional reading is critical to syntopical reading. You must quickly indentify which five (or 15) books you need to read from a sea of unworthy titles. Then you must also quickly identify the relevant parts and passages that satisfy your unique focus.
• Assimilation: In analytical reading, you identify the author’s chosen language by spotting the author’s terms of art and key words. This time, you assimilate the language of each author into the terms of art and key words that you choose, whether by agreeing with the language of one author or devising your own terminology.
• Questions: This time, the focus is on what questions you want answered (problems solved), as opposed to the problems each author wants to solve. This may require that you draw inferences if any particular author does not directly address one of your questions. If any one author fails to address any of your questions, you messed up at the inspection stage.
• Issues: When you ask a good question, you’ve identified an issue. When experts have differing or contradictory responses to the same question, you’re able to flesh out all sides of an issue, based on the existing literature. When you understand multiple perspectives within an individual issue, you can intelligently discuss the issue, and come to your own conclusion (which may differ from everyone else, thereby expanding the issue and hopefully adding unique value).
• Conversation: Determining the “truth” via syntopical reading is not really the point, since disagreements about truth abound with just about any topic. The value is found within the discussion among competing view points concerning the same root information, and you’re now conversant enough to hold your own in a discussion of experts. This is what the “online conversation” was supposed to look like according to early bloggers, and sometimes, it does. But mostly, the online conversation looks like the unqualified, unsubstantiated opinions of the ill-informed, and you’re not looking to be part of that scene.

Be a Demanding Reader for the Win

Reading, at its fundamental essence, is not about absorbing information. It’s about asking questions, looking for answers, understanding the various answers, and deciding for yourself. Think of reading this way, and you quickly realize how this allows you to deliver unique value to your readers as a publisher.

If you think all of this sounds like a lot of work, well… you’re right. And most people won’t do it, just like most people will never blog or publish online in the first place.

That’s why your readers need you. They need you to do the work for them, because they don’t want to become an expert. So, it’s your job to understand the complex and grasp the essentials, then make it simple, easy to read, and entertaining.

You’re on it, right?

About the Author: Brian Clark is the founding editor of Copyblogger, and co-founder of DIY Themes and Lateral Action. Get more from Brian on Twitter.

If you’re going to Blog World Expo and can be there the day before the official program starts - b5media is running a training day for our bloggers that we are opening up to any BWE registrants that would like to attend.

It is running on 19 September at the Las Vegas Convention center and all we ask if you’re attending is to RSVP before hand so that we can make sure we’re set up adequately for those who are coming.

The day is designed to help our bloggers improve their blogging but will be relevant to bloggers who are not a part of the network also. It will include sessions with different members of our management team, channel editors and partners as well as a Q and A session with Board of Advisors (Robert Scoble, Doc Searls, Hugh McLeod, Renee Blodgett and Stowe Boyd).

There will only be one session that is ‘closed’ and jut for b5 bloggers so if you’d like to attend we’d love to have you. We’re not expecting hundreds or thousands of people to attend which will allow for more Q & A and personal interaction between presenters and attendees.

The sessions planned (and we’re still tweaking and locking in the times and topics) are:

I am planning to stuff my session as full as possible with tips on finding readers for your blog and hope to have time for Q & A and a little brainstorming together.

To Register…

If you are a registered attendee of Blog World Expo (sign up here) all you need to do to attend is RSVP to Rachel Segal at rachel AT b5media DOT com - just include your name. She can then give you details of where it’ll be (room numbers etc) and any other details as well as give you the most up to date schedule for the day as it comes to hand.

PS: the only other thing to note is that lunch isn’t provided. You’ll need to bring something or buy something at or around the venue.

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Just a quick note to say that I’ve added Day 2 submissions for the Killer Titles Group Writing Project submissions page.

Today there were another 92 Killer Titles Submitted. Check them out, surf them, bookmark them and enjoy seeing how other bloggers do their thing! Two days left to go - see how to participate here.

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As a blogger you probably know how important it is to write clearly and correctly right? Well, understanding the basic grammar rules is in turn essential for that purpose.

Now if you don’t remember what are conjunctions, prepositions, verb moods and the like, don’t worry! Over at Daily Writing Tips we compiled a nice summary titled English Grammar 101: All You Need to Know.

Here is a list of what you will find over there:

• Sentences
• Clauses
• Phrases
• Parts of Speech
• Nouns
• Plural Form of Nouns
• Pronouns
• Adjectives
• Adjective Classifications
• Articles
• Verbs
• Verbs Voice
• Verbs Mood
• Verbs Tense
• Adverbs
• Prepositions
• Conjunctions
• Interjections

Make sure to bookmark it for future reference as well!

Refresh Your Grammar

Google AdSense announced the beta launch of their Ad Manager Ad Server product back in March. At that time I heard from a number of publishers in the beta program that they were finding it to be an effective way of managing their ads.

Today on the AdSense blog they have announced that Ad Manager is now available to everyone. It’s still in beta but is obviously stable enough to be opened up to everyone.

If you’re an AdSense publisher already all you need to do is sign in here (no need to apply to join). If you’re not an AdSense publisher - you will need to sign up first.

What is Ad Manager?

I’m yet to test it (and have little need to as b5media have their own ad management tools to manage the ads on my blogs) but from reports of others and digging around Ad Manager today it’s a quite powerful tool that will help publishers to manage a number of aspects of the selling and displaying of ads on your blog.

Most larger websites will do this by having their own ad server - but what Google have done with Ad Manager is provide a product that they host and that is much more manageable for smaller to medium publishers.

You can see a full list of Ad Manager features here and can access their Help Center here.

What Does Ad Manager Cost?

This is the beauty of Ad Manager - it’s free.

Some publishers will no doubt worry about privacy as this is all hosted on Google’s servers but outside of that (and it doesn’t concern me) I’m not seeing too many negatives. Google don’t make any money from this unless you use AdSense to fill unsold inventory (something that it will easily do and that they are no doubt betting many publishers will do - note: it’s not compulsory to do this). You can also use other ad networks with it.

Ad Manager is going to be most useful to bloggers who have a decent amount of traffic and who are wanting to start selling ad placements directly to advertisers. If you’re still at the stage of just running AdSense on your blog then this will probably something you’ll want to grow into. It is reasonably easy to use and set up however unless you’re wanting to sell your own ads there isn’t much point.

Alternatives

If you’d like to check out the competition to AdSense Ad Manager you’ll probably want to check out OpenX which is a similar system.

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If your next blog post doesn’t matter - don’t publish it until it does.

In our series on How to Craft a Blog Post we’ve been talking about ‘points to pause’ while writing a blog post. So far we’ve looked at choosing a topic, titles and opening lines and today we’re going to get into the meat of your actual post.

Here’s the question that I think we should all be asking before we hit ‘publish’ on now blog posts:

“So What?”

This simple, yet profound, question was one that I heard a lot of bloggers emerging from SOBCon with earlier in the year. My co-author Chris Garrett is one speaker from that conference who I know used it as a central theme in his presentation.

Other similar questions might include:

• What’s the Point?
• What am I trying to communicate?
• What impact do I want to have on my reader?
• How will this benefit my reader?

All of your hard work in choosing topics, titles and opening lines will go to waste if the actual meat of your post has no real point to it, if it doesn’t communicate anything, if it doesn’t have any impact upon your readers, if it doesn’t really matter.

If you want a post to be more than just something that people flit past it needs to ‘matter’ to people on some level. Otherwise it will never get traction.

Why Many Blog Posts Don’t Have Points

The reality is that many blog posts that I read (and I’ll admit to writing a few) have no real points (or they are unclear).

There could be a variety of reasons for this including:

• laziness - sometimes it is just easier not to really think through the direction of a post
• busyness and distractions - life gets cluttered and many of us as bloggers have too many things on the go at once - leaving us unable to focus our attention fully upon the task at hand.
• pressure of deadlines - feeling the need to have to post something every day can mean many posts get published that are not thought through

Three times to ask ’so what’ as you’re crafting your next blog post:

1. Before You Start - I find that my blog posts are significantly better if I identify a goal that I want to achieve with the post before I start writing it. For me this usually happens during the topic selection process and leads me to write a simple sentence at the start of each draft (which I usually delete later, unless it becomes part of my introduction).

This sentence is usually something like ‘this post will teach readers how to hold a digital camera‘ or ‘this post will answer the question of “What is a Blog?”‘.

Important Note: I write blogs with a ‘how to’ type form so my goal sentences reflect this - however this same thing can apply to other types of blogs. The answer to the ’so what’ question can be to teach, inform, entertain, inspire, build community etc. It need not be to ‘teach’.

2. While You Write - with the post goal statement at the top of your draft it is important to keep it in the forefront of your mind as you develop your blog post.

I attempt to include a statement of what the post will achieve within the post (so the reader sees it) but constantly attempt to remind myself what I’m trying to achieve with the post. This is not always easy (and sometimes my posts do evolve beyond my original goal - read on for more on this) but I find that unless I do it I can end up with posts that have a wishy washy point.

3. Before You Finish - if you’re anything like me, your blog posts ‘evolve’. I often start out with a goal statement and then proceed to go ahead and write a post that ignores the statement. Don’t beat yourself up about that - but DO ask yourself the question of ’so what’ again at the end of your post.

Have you written something that will matter to your readers? Have you written something that meets a need that they might have? Have you fully explored the topic? OR…. Have you written something just for the sake of writing something? Does what you’ve written have a point?

Don’t Try To Achieve Too Much in a Single Post

A trap that I used to fall into regularly with my blogging was to try to do too much in every post that I wrote. I’d try to write posts that explored lots of themes, that tried to inform, entertain and inspire, that tried to get readers to have a sense of belonging…. etc

The reality was that the posts ended up being ‘epics’ and didn’t really achieve anything.

If you find yourself with lots of goals for a post - why not split them into multiple posts.

This is what I did earlier in this series when writing about crafting blog titles. I originally has this post on Crafting Titles and this post inviting readers to improve titles as one single post but before hitting publish I asked myself what my goal was with the post and realized that I was trying to do too much and that could better achieve my goals of ‘teaching’ and ‘involving readers’ in two separate posts.

What’s the Point of This?

The take home message of this post is to take your time in identifying goals for each post.

This exercise need not take a great deal of time or even be something that you formally set time aside to do for each post (for me it’s become a natural part of my blogging) but it is something that will help to lift the quality of your blogging significantly.

The benefit of identifying a point to your posts will especially help you in the next two steps in this process of crafting a blog post - ‘calls to action’ and ‘adding depth’ (things we’ll explore in coming days).

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This week I’m running a project here on ProBlogger called ‘Killer Titles‘ where readers are invited to write posts with great titles and showcase them here on Problogger.

Day 1 has come to an end and I’ve just posted the first 71 submissions here. You still have a few days to submit your own posts tot he project (find out how here) - but in the mean time, why not head by the ones that have already been submitted and start surfing, commenting on, bookmarking and subscribing to those blogs on the list that you resonate most with.

If you’ve made a submission and don’t see it here it will probably be in the list for Day 2.

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Content is surely king, but if no one gets to see your content, it will just get lost on the immense sea of bits and bytes that we call the World Wide Web, right? Email is the most popular method for online communications, and it can contribute immensely to your promotional efforts.

The image above only serves as illustration. Email someone with such a large and spammy font and he will trash it immediately…

The concept: Once your blog becomes popular and with a loyal following, you will probably be able to focus on the content creation alone. Until you arrive on that level, however, merely publishing top notch content will not be enough.

You will need to actively promote it, and one very effective way to do so is to email bloggers and webmasters on your niche to let them know about your best articles. Should they like what you are sending them, there are good chances that they will link to it, sending both visitors and link juice to your website.

Does it work?: Yes, although the overall success of this technique will depend on several factors. First of all, the higher the quality of the content that you are emailing away, the higher the chances of receiving links.

Secondly, the pitch that you include on your email will play an important role. If you add too much unrelated information the person on the other side might just think that you are spamming him, and skip your email.

Finally, if you take the time to develop your network slowly over time, and with a genuine interest for building win-win relationships, this technique will work better.

How to get started: As stated before, you will need to work on the content first. There is no use in emailing people around if you just have some average quality articles to show them. Check out the post Use These 10 Tips to Write Your Most Popular Post Ever for more info on how to create killer content.

In parallel to the content development strategy you should start to network with bloggers and webmasters on your niche. Do some guest posts on their blogs, invite them to guest post on yours, link to their articles and so on.

Once you have both of those in place, it is a matter of publishing your killer article and emailing your contacts and friends to let them know about it. Don’t beg for a link on the email, this is plain annoying. Just mention that you think they will find it interesting. If they do, they will be glad to link spontaneously.

Over to the readers: Do you email bloggers and webmasters on your niche to let them know about your best content? Has this strategy worked well for you in the past?

Website Traffic Series

• Part 1: Web Design and CSS Galleries
• Part 2: Blog Carnivals
• Part 3: Leave Comments on Other Blogs
• Part 4: Faking A Website Sale
• Part 5: Pulling an April Fools Prank
• Part 6: Using Forum Signatures
• Part 7: Putting A Blog on Your Static Website
• Part 8: Adding a Forum to Your Site or Blog
• Part 9: Buying Targeted Traffic
• Part 10: Email Signatures
• Part 11: Put Your URL On Online Profiles

Website Traffic Series Part 12: Email Bloggers to Showcase Your Best Content

Drama.

Drama jolts a reader into paying attention.

Novels use it. Movies use it. TV uses it.

There’s no reason why your content shouldn’t use it.

And one of the best ways to create drama is to disagree with your headline. (Yes, I said disagree).

So let’s look at an example:

Headline: The Logical Case For Increasing Your Prices

First Paragraph: Let’s do something really stupid: Let’s avoid increasing your prices. Let’s decrease them instead. By a whole 50%

That’s drama. And it’s dramatic because it takes the opposite stance from the headline.

The reason your reader is hooked into the article is because you wrote a powerful headline. Now once you’ve got attention, you can take the reader down the thread of ‘decreasing prices.’

Show him how stupid it