What makes you different? What makes you better than the others?
Seriously, ask yourself these questions and be honest. I see too many blogs that are the same as everyone else.
Be different!
Let me give you some examples of why this blog is different.
Comic Strip
Video (one of the first in my industry to integrate video blogging)
Take these examples and apply them to your blog. You do not have to use all of them, just a couple to start off with. I’d suggest podcasting and personalization. Podcasting is a nice feature. Site visitors can download your blog post and listen to them when away from the computer. As for personalization, well let your readers know you are a real person and can relate to what most of them go through.
As the saying goes, “You have to spend money to make money.” It’s true to a certain extent when it comes to a blog. You do not have to spend thousands but should consider spending $200 on a lightly customized theme and logo. When you approach an advertiser they can tell you are serious.
If you don’t have money to start off with a custom theme, don’t worry because content is still key. Start by building a good foundation of readers. Visit this link for free traffic tips. Once you have that you can provide value to potential advertisers. Take the money from your first few ad sales and put it back into your blog. Do not be afraid to tell advertisers this either – they will appreciate the effort of bettering your blog for their benefit.
Now if your goal is just to blog and not make money from blogging, then a free theme will do just fine. But, as most bloggers do, they have a hidden agenda. So what’s the hidden agenda? Building a brand, a reputation and an email list. If this is true for you, read above tips again
What is a Podcast?
A podcast is a series of digital media files, usually digital audio or video, that is made available for download via Web syndication. In simple terms it is similar to a radio broadcast. Voice is recorded by a publisher then stored on the internet for others to download and listen.
My video and text articles are not going anywhere. This is just going to compliment what I am already doing. My plans are to continue doing what I do and add the podcast to the bottom of each post. What this does is give you the visitor an option on how you would like to receive my published information.
I ordered the Blue Snowball Microphone through Amazon yesterday and should receive it tomorrow. It will be about a week before you get to see (hear) it in action. I need to take the time to study the features and how to utilize the different audio editing software on the market.
Once I get things figured out I will make sure to follow up with a review of the microphone as well as a series of podcast tutorials.
I also have some other ideas on improving the site and overall experience of visiting. I am playing with the ideas of adding streaming video, live chat, radio show and so forth.
You have spent a countless amount of hours working on your site and the last thing you want to do is steer visitors away. Make sure that all links, ads and images leading away from your site open in a new window. By doing this it makes the site visitors come back and have to consciously make the decision to leave your site.
Why I like this personally as a reader…
When I go to a site and click on a link that opens up on the same page instead of in a new window I, more often than not, wind up not going back to the original site I started at. This will especially happen if I get hooked into what I’m reading about and have to click through several pages. When I’m done reading the extra pages I normally wind up closing out the window. If I remember to, I will type in the original site address and start over. Other times I just don’t feel like going through the hassle of starting over, so I don’t. This means the original site I started out at just lost me – not forever, but for that time.
When I go to a site that allows me to click on a link that opens up a separate window, I always get back to the original site. The original site is left open. You only have to close out the extra window. I go right back to what I was originally doing because it’s still right there in my face.
Below are two very popular services that I use. Both services create links that bring visitors to their sites. Well, that’s not what I want. I don’t want my visitors to leave. Here are examples of how I have made these services work for what I want.
Vimeo.com
I use Vimeo to showcase my videos. They offer both free and paid accounts. The paid account which is $59.95 per year, allows me to remove their branding. Besides the removal of their logo the paid account allows me to turn off the options for comments and favorites, both of which would bring my visitors to their site.
Vimeo has a great widget that would allow me to showcase my videos with tiny thumbnails on my blog. Although it’s a great feature it has a flaw, it would take my visitors away from my site. Instead I have created something similar by adding thumbnail images of my videos in the middle of my site. I then take those images and link each one to the appropriate blog post.
Flickr.com
To showcase my pictures I use Flickr. There are tons and tons of widgets/plug-ins for Flickr. If I would have used the plug-in that they provided it would have brought my visitors to their site to view my images. Instead I did a lot of research and found a plug-in that will embed all of the images on my site. Here is that link. Of course it opens in a new window.
Today I am going to tell you how the power of Twitter has worked for me. Wednesday I posted an article about the top domain sales of 2008 not developed. Well, it went viral!
What does Viral mean?
According to Wikipedia viral is the concept of something, other than a biological virus, being viral came into vogue just after the Internet became widely popular in the mid-to-late 1990s. An object, even a non-material object, is considered to be viral when it has the ability to spread copies of itself.
After posting my article Wednesday a few of my followers on Twitter liked the article enough to retweet the message, sending a link copy to their followers. This was the beginning of the viral process. Where viral really kicks in is when those followers now retweet the message and so forth. The magic happened when Matt Cutts, head of web spam at Google, got a look at my article. Matt must have found the article interesting enough that he sent the link out to his 15,000+ followers.
After Matt sent the message I received a very nice spike in traffic to my website. On average this site receives 600 visitors a day. On any given day the range is 500-700, yesterday was 1149. Not only did I see a spike in traffic but a small boost in the number of people following me.
Yesterday I talked about Joel Comm’s new book Twitter Power. I also discussed my uses of Twitter and that I would follow up with more of a detailed explanation today. For your viewing pleasure I put together a video about just that and don’t tell anyone but, I spilled the beans about how much money I generate from this blog.
One thing I forgot to mention was following your brand. Make sure you use the same name as your blog/site and create a background to mimic it as well. You will notice my background on Twitter showcases my logo and newsletter giveaway of a $25 gift card. Bottom line is the more you put something in front of a potential reader or client the more likely they are to trust that brand and visit the site.
