The Benefits of Blog Participation

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Charlie Munger is one of the lesser known billionaires. He is the right hand man of the second richest person living - Warren Buffet. And he maybe one of the smartest person living. Here is an excerpt from a speech given by Charlie Munger on the topic of “mental models” and “human mis-judgment”:

For instance, a lottery.

• You have a lottery where you get your number by lot, and then somebody draws a number by lot, it gets lousy play.
• You have a lottery where people get to pick their number, you get big play.

Ita_Ts this consistency and commitment thing. People think if they have committed to it, it has to be good. The minute theya_Tve picked it themselves it gets an extra validity. After all, they thought it and they acted oA-n it.

The Power of Participation

The power of participation doesn’t only work for lotteries. It works for blogs too. Involve people with your blog and they will keep coming back again and again to read more.

3 Ways of Involving Readers With Your Blog

1. Comments: Allowing your readers to comment on your blog posts is the easiest way to get them involved with your blog. Some people argue that comments are not worth it because only 1-3% of your readers will ever comment. But don’t ignore reader commenting because those 1-3% readers will be your most loyal readers. Encourage your readers to comment and they will stick with you longer.

So How To Encourage Commenting?

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i. Ask. Simply end your post with a question and ask your readers for their opinion.

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ii. Be outrageous. The more whacky your post will be, the more comments you’ll receive.

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iii. Leave your posts incomplete. Don’t talk about everything under the sun. Leave gap in your posts so that people can comment.

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iv. Give incentives. Give rewards to people to comment. This could simply be listing your top commenters on your blog every month. Or giving them goodies and rewards for making quality comments.

2. Polls: From time to time, create a poll - where you have one question and multiple choices for answers. And then ask your readers to vote for their best choice.

Polls are very powerful tools. Not only from reader participation point of view. But also from PR point of view. After you collect and compile the poll results, simply write a short press release with the poll results and send it to the media. They love quotes and sound bites!

3. Reader Roundtable: Another simply tactic you can use is simply ask an open ended question to your readers. And ask them to email their opinions and answers to you with a link to their website. The idea is to compile a special report or create a special blog post with the best answers you receive.

Can you think of any other idea to increase reader participation with your blogs?

3 Blog Tag Line Tactics

Frequently Asked Question: I’m having a hard time creating a tag line for my blog because I cover a lot of different topics.A  How should I go about creating the tagline?

Since writing the Blog Tag Line post, I’ve had 3 people ask me a similar question.A  What should you do if you cover a lot of topics and can’t decide on a short tag line?

Tag Line Tactic 1: Focus

Case Study 1: Dominos sells more than just pizzas.A  Yet their tag line was “Fresh Hot Pizza in 30 Minutes or Its Free.”

Case Study 2: This blog covers a lot of various topics like blog designing, making money and increasing traffic.A  Yet the Tag Line is just “How To Grow Your Blog Traffic.”

It doesn’t matter what you offer.A  Your tag line is not there to convey your entire sales message or mission statement.A  The purpose of the tag line is simple:

To Make People Interested and
Surf More Pages of Your BlogA 

So focus on your best feature and go with it.A  Some questions that may help you out:

• What can you be the best in the world in?
• What differentiates you or your blog?
• What is the corner stone of your blog?
• What topic is your target audience most interested in?

Tag Line Tactic 2: Umbrella

Another tactic to create tag lines is finding the umbrella - the big picture topic that covers all the things you publish.A  For example: one reader asked me that he fixes computers and is also interested in blogging about new media.A  What tag line should he go with?

My answer: Computers and New Media - both are two very different topic.A  But fall under the same big umbrella: Technology.

If he wants to cover all bases, he should create a tag line that focuses on technology as its key word.

Tag Line Tactic 3: DivisionA 

The third tactic is: division.A  Create new blogs on each different sub-topic.A  And then create a tag line for that narrowly focused blog.

This requires more work on your part.A  But the pay-off is usually better too.A  Because by narrowing your interest, you’ll position your blog as the ultimate authority in that sub-niche.

Optimizing Your Blog Design Layout (Part-2)

In part-1 of Optimizing Your Blog Design, we saw why 3-column blog themes aren’t good for click through rates. And why you should go with 2-column blog themes.

In part-2, we will delve further into creating the perfect column layouts for your blog theme.

Question: Do you know why offline newspapers divide their pages into 4-6 columns?

Newspapers have been doing readability research since the past 120 years! And the research results have been unanimous.

1. Longer line lengths decrease the speed of reading.

2. They decrease readers’ comprehension as well.

3. And worst of all, the decrease readers’ enjoy-ability factor too.

Newspapers have found that any line that is longer than 3.6 inches in length reduces reader performance.

But why do longer lines reduce performance?

“The ideal line length for text layout is based on the the physiology of the human eye… At normal reading distance the arc of the visual field is only a few inches - about the width of a well-designed column of text, or about 12 words per line. Research shows that reading slows and retention rates fall as line length begins to exceed the ideal width, because the reader then needs to use the muscles of the eye and neck to track from the end of one line to the beginning of the next line. If the eye must traverse great distances on the page, the reader is easily lost and must hunt for the beginning of the next line. Quantitative studies show that moderate line lengths significantly increase the legibility of text.”

- Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton

The optimal line length for newspapers is between 2 to 3 inches (depending on the font style and size.) But what about the length of text lines online?

Optimal Line Length For Blogs

In 2001, Dyson and Haselgrove conducted a research to determine which line length was the most effective for reading from screen. They gathered a bunch of students and tested them while they read comprehension and news paragraphs on the computer. And they found that

The best line length is 55 characters long!

Depending on the font style and size you use, your blog post column should fall between 50-70 characters in length. That is roughly 400-500 pixels in width.

Saying No To Fluid Column Width Themes

Many blog themes come with fluid width columns. Where the column width depends on the screen resolution and size. Designers like fluid column widths because they don’t leave a lot of white space at the sides.

But these fluid width themes aren’t a good idea because someone with high screen resolution will see very long text line lengths. Which reduces their comprehension as well as reading speed on your blog. So stick with fixed width themes. And improve your readers experience on your blog.

“Optimizing Your Blog Design” to be continued…

My Blog Adsense Strategy

On this blog, I’ve placed Adsense ads in three places:

1. Just above the Title of all blog posts.

2. In the Sidebar.

3. Above Comments in the single post pages.

Because of that, one of the most common questions I get (especially from beginner bloggers) is: should they place Adsense on their blogs too?

Should You Place Adsense Ads on Your Blog?

My answer:

• Yes place Adsense ads on your blogs.
• But not to make money from it.
• But to increase traffic to your blogs.

Adsense is not a good source to make money. The payout on average is $1 to $1.5 per 1000 page views. So if you receive 10,000 page views a month, you will earn a whooping $10! Maybe good for a pizza. Not something you can retire on.

So why use Adsense at all?

1. Adsense ads are the most “relevant” ads. I like Adsense over other ad networks or manual ad placement only because of that one reason: relevancy.

2. But the main reason to place Adsense (or any other ads) on your blog is: to increase your blog traffic.

Any money I make from Adsense, I pump back into promoting this blog.

Action Summary:

• Place Adsense codes on your blog. But don’t expect to make a lot of money out of it.
• Use the little money you earn from Adsense to promote your blog. (Read this blog regularly and I’ll share with you the best places to pay and promote your blog.)

Benefits of Adding Category Menu to Blog Header

Yesterday, a campaign I had running with crazyegg.com came to an end.

Crazyegg is a tool that allows you to make your blog navigation better by telling you what people are clicking. It has a superb heatmap generation feature. Let me show you a cropped heatmap of just the header section of my blog.

The heatmap shows all the clicks made on the header.

Early readers may remember that 3 weeks back, this blog header just had the title in it. The categories menu was added later on.

Like most blogs, I had my Blog Category menu on the sidebar too. But I decided to move it to the header. And I’m glad I did that. Because:

11.47% of *All* Clicks Made on this Blog were Made on the Header!

Adding the blog category menu to the header has been a stroke of genius. As it helped me increase the “unique visitors : page views” ratio from “1 : 1.72″ to “1 : 2.1″. (Each unique visitor on average reads more than 2 pages on this blog.)

In normal language, readers now visit 15% more pages and spend more time on my blog because the category menu is in the header!

Action Summary:

• Signup for crazyegg.com to evaluate what your blog readers are clicking on.
• If you can, move your blog category menu to your header.

Optimizing Your Blog Design Layout (Part-1)

What does Jam have to do with Blog Designing? Read the post to find out…

Sheena Iyengar is a professor at University of Columbia and teaches a course on Organizational behavior. She once conducted a scientific research to gauge the effect choices have on people.

Iyengar set up a tasting booth with a variety of gourmet jams in the grocery store named Draeger’s in Menlo Park, California.

• One day, she displayed 6 varieties of jam in the booth.
• The next day she displayed 24 varieties of jam.

And then she counted the number of sales generated each day.

The Paradoxical Results

Most people would think that the more choices there are, the more people would buy. But Iyengar’s research proved otherwise.

• 30% of people, who stopped by the 6-jam booth, ended up buying one of the jams.
• While only 3% of people, who stopped by the 24-jam booth, ended up buying the jam.

Action Summary:

Don’t overwhelm your readers with a lot of options on your blog.

Don’t show them 23 different buttons of social bookmarking sites under your posts.

Don’t provide them with 299 links on the sidebar.

Reduce the options to improve the impact.

Saying No To Three Column Themes

Bloggers love three column themes. Because it provides them with space to put up all the goodies and widgets and plugins and sections. And show ads on top of that. But three-column themes usually kill your click-through rate. They overwhelm readers with a lot of choices. The result being: readers ignore the sidebar columns totally.

If you still want to go with the three-column theme, please make sure that your two narrow sidebars are not together. Make your wide content column separate both the sidebars.

But the best layout is a two column layout. Because it’ll force you to offer fewer choices and links to your readers. And hence, improve your click through rate.

Update: “Optimizing Your Blog Design” part-2 has been published…

Link Clout # 5

1. Border Formula for giving great speeches (and writing great blog posts) - by master copywriter Gary Bencivenga

2. 8 Hours as a Blogging Socialite - by Court Tuttle

3.A  Automated Recurring Billing Now Supported by Clickbank - Membership site owners and trainers as well as affiliate marketers rejoice!

Do Blogs Need Tag Lines?

Question: Should Blogs Have Tag Lines?

When CocaCola was a young softdrink company, they were faced with a problem. People would hear about “CocaCola” or read its sign on the roads - but they wouldn’t know what it meant. They had no idea what CocaCola was and what they should do with it.

So some smart marketing executive at CocaCola came up with a solution. Tag one single word to all the billboards and other advertisements. The tag word was very simple. And it told people exactly what CocaCola is and what they should do with it. The tag word?

“Drink”

CocaCola started adding “Drink CocaCola” to all their ads.

Over the years, CocaCola dropped its tag word from their ads. But without it in their initial days, they would have had a much harder time making people realize what they were about.

Unfortunately, not many products - especially blogs - can convey their message with just one word. A whole line is usually required. The Tag Line is the answer.

Purpose of a Blog Tag Line

Just like CocaCola’s tag word, the purpose of your blog tag line is simple:

Your tag line helps people know what your blog is about.

The benefits of having a tag line for your blog:

• A tag line will increase your blog page views
• It’ll help people know what your blog is about and why they should read more of it than a 1001 other blogs
• It’ll keep them on your blog for longer durations
• A tag line is a re-inforcer. It’ll help build a stronger association in their brains - leading to them remembering your blog better

Three Steps to Create a Powerful Tag Line:

1. Mention what your blog offers

2. Mention how you take care of the downside (optional)

3. Don’t mention anything else.

These rules were conceived by de-constructing the best tag line of all time:

“Fresh Hot Pizza in 30 Minutes or Its Free!”

Important: Don’t try to be witty or creative with your tag lines. It just doesn’t work unless you’re willing to spend a few million dollars in promoting that tag line.

Tag Line Evaluation Test

How do you know that the tag line you’ve come up with is good or not? There is a simple trick that helps you evaluate tag lines. And that is:

Would you buy a book with that tag line as the title?

If the answer is No - go back to the dashboard. And come up with another tag line.

Action Summary:

• Come up with a short concise tag line for your own blog too.

(Disclosure: I’ve substituted my tag line as the name of this blog. The blog name was going to be “BlogClout”. And the tag line was going to be “How To Grow Your Blog Traffic.” But I changed it at the last moment because I’ll be using the name BlogClout with some other applications too. And didn’t want to over-extend that name and confuse readers. So thats why my tag line ended up being the blog title.)

Double Duty Business Cards

A week ago, I had new business cards made for this blog. But unlike most business cards, these cards aren’t boring. Most people won’t throw them away.

And why won’t they throw the business cards away?

Because these cards perform double duty. I’ve used both the front as well as the back side of the business cards.

1. One side works as all business cards are intended to work: it gives people contact details about me and this blog.
2. But the flip side is what keeps people hold onto the cards. Because there is an offer on the flip side for a free goodie!

You can take a look at them yourself:

Action Summary:

• Create double duty business cards for your own blog too. Use both the sides of the business cards.
• Offer a free report or a goodie or maybe even a coupon on the flip side of the business card. Something that prevents people from throwing the cards away. Something that su

The Most Important Blogging Tool

Do you know what are the two things that every ship captain always carried along with him?
(Hint: Look at the picture above.)

1. A Compass

2. A logbook

Do you know why a captain carried those two things with him on all his voyages?

A compass is easy. Captains carry it because it guides them in the right direction. (But only if the captain knows where he wants to go.)

But why did they keep and maintain a logbook?

Choose from one of the two possible options…

i. To pass time on a boring voyage.
ii. To improve their speed and safety in the future.

Its a silly quiz - I know. Hopefully, you selected the right answer (option ii.)

Ship captains kept a logbook because by knowing and comparing how things worked in the past, they can improve their performances in the future. The captains would write down every detail: how was the weather, where did they start from, where are they going, how did they maneuver their ship.

“Everything that is watched, improves.” - John D. Rockefeller

• Most bloggers don’t keep a watch on anything.
  
• There are a few bloggers that do analyze and watch their “results”. They keep an eye on a few metrics that show how their blogs performed.
  
• But only a handful of bloggers maintain a logbook to watch their “actions”! And these are the most successful bloggers!
  

Do you watch and track your actions?

Starting a logbook of your actions isn’t hard. You could start with a sharp pencil and notebook. Or you could go hi-tech and use tools like twitter.com

The 2 Question LogBook

Just answer the following two questions at the end of each day:

1. What did you write today on your blog?

2. What did you do today to promote your blog?

Once, at the end of the week or month, open your web analytics software. And compare your Actions with your Results. Take a look at your metrics 2-3 days after your specific actions. Did your traffic increase or decrease? Did your profits increase or decrease? Repeat the actions that improve your results.

Action Summary:

• If your goal is to increase your blog traffic and build a business around your blog, you could use this blog as your compass. I’ll do my bestto guide you by showing what works and what doesn’t.
  
• Start a logbook to track your “actions” today. And then compare your actions with your results to find out what actions work better.