“A Picture is Worth a 1,000 Words!” - Fred Barnard*
An easy way to make your post stickier and more popular is to add a snazzy picture to it. Adding a single picture has known to double and treble the traffic to a blog post!
How To Find The Perfect Picture for Your Posts
Step 1: Reduce your post to one core keyword. And search for pictures using that keyword. For eg: the keyword for this post is “pictures.”
Step 2: If you fail to find a good picture for a keyword, use the thesaurus to come up with alternative words you can search for. For eg: When I didn’t find the perfect picture while searching for “pictures”, I searched for “mosaic” and found the right one immediately!
Where To Find Perfect Pictures For Free
1.Google Images. Search for pictures on Google and contact the website owner to ask her if you can use her picture on your website. Don’t use the pictures from Google Images without permission.
2.Wikimedia Commons. All the pictures on that site can be freely reused.
4.Creative Commons Search. Select the Flickr tab on that page and search for your picture. Read the licensing terms carefully. Most pictures will require attribution.
5.iStockPhoto. Pictures on this website aren’t free. But they aren’t expensive either - pricing is as low as $1 per picture! The best thing about this website is: No attribution required. So you can use the images in brochures and business cards too. (Most of my pictures come from them.)
6.IconFinder. Good site to find icons that can be reused for free.
You should be able to find your perfect picture 99% of the time using the above 6 sources!
*Did you think that Confucius said “a picture is worth a 1,000 words”? Ad executive Fred Barnard wants to encourage people to use more pictures in their ads. So he coins that quote for an article he writes in 1927. And to add weight to the quote and make sure that people pay attention to it, he attributes it as a “Chinese Proverb.” Over the years, the attribution shifts to Confucius.
“A Word is Worth a 1,000 Pictures!” - Apple Computer Human Interface Group
In 1985, after finding that pretty but unlabeled icons confused customers, the Apple Computer Human Interface Group adopted the motto, “A word is worth a thousand pictures,” and a descriptive word or phrase was added beneath all Macintosh icons.
To jazz up your snazzy pictures, make sure you add a caption under all of them.
A good picture is eye candy and will win people’s attention.
But a good picture with a powerful caption won’t only win attention, but will also drive people to read your blog post!
How To Write Powerful Captions
The trick to writing powerful captions is: apply the same techniques you use to write headlines. Perceive your captions to be your sub headlines.
Create curiosity with your caption.
Write a benefit summary - what will readers learn when they read your blog post?
Question: What should you do of all the older posts on your blog - that not many people have read?
Here are four things you can do:
1. Write Review Posts
Write posts like “This Week Last Year” or “Top [category] Posts.” LifeHacker blog does that very well.
2. Build Up an Old Post
Go read your old posts with one idea in mind: can you expand on one of those posts?
3. Combine & Edit Older Posts
This is my favourite trick. By combining two good old posts, you can create a mega super blog post! My guest post at NxE is an example of how I combined 3 different half-finished drafts into one super blog post.
By combining 2-3-4 good ideas together, you overwhelm your readers with more ideas than they can process at one time. Which leads to them bookmarking your posts, submitting it to social bookmark sites etc - and all that leads to a lot more traffic to your blog!
4. Convert Old Posts into PDF
You could convert a series of old posts into PDF reports and documents. And then use thePDF reports as goodies or bonuses. Or lead generation tools for your blog!
Do you have any other ideas on using old content again?
James Brausch is someone I admire a lot. He is the author of Muvar and Glyphius tools which are very popular amongst the copywriting and internet marketing crowd. I am helping his “Life Management 101″ audio CD become the # 1 best seller at CDBaby.
So here is the deal.
You’ll receive the two BlogClout reports for free if you buy 3 copies of Life Management 101.
The two Reports you’ll get for free are:
1. Strategy: The Quick & Easy Formula to Make $10,000 a Month Online
2. Traffic: How To Go From 0 to 10,000 Unique Visitors Per Month in 60 Days Using Free Techniques
Both these reports have received some rave reviews from initial test readers. And will quickly give you a superb foundation to build your blog empire on. Both these reports will be sold for $12.95 each.
What Will I Do With 3 Copies of the Same Audio CD?
i. You could keep 1 copy for yourself and sell the other 2 copies on eBay and recoup your money.
ii. You could host a contest on your blog and give away the extra copies to winners.
iii. You could simply give away the extra copies to friends who are in a rut and will appreciate some life management tips.
1. FeedBurner dropped BlogClout RSS subscribers by 50% - 2 days ago.A (It doesn’t seem like any subscribers were dropped.A Just a reporting error.A But we’re not sure yet.A Fingers crossed.)
2. WordPress itself is acting a bit funny.A It deleted parts of my About Me page (now fixed) and parts of the Blogger vs WordPress post (not fixed yet - the pros and cons list has mysteriously disappeared).A Not sure if other posts are affected.A If you find any other error please let me know.
3. The affiliate program for BlogClout has once again been delayed!
4. My spam filters stopped working well.A Have sorted it out now.A But if you haven’t received a reply for your email you sent a couple of days back, please send your email again.
Its been one nerve wracking week. But I’ve lighted 3 candles, ate a banana and did a jiggy-dance.A So things should be good now!
I wrote a guest post for the awsome NorthXEast.com blog which quickly became very popular and was featured on the Digg.com front page as well as the Del.icio.us popular page. Click on the link below to read it:
Recently, an anonymous poster asks on my favourite forum:
“How can I start earning $7,500 a month”.
In response to that question, Jason Cain* made a quick 13 minute podcast. It’s simply superb advice! With Jason’s permission, you can listen to it here:
RSS subscribers: you won’t be able to listen to the podcast through your RSS feed. So click and visit the blog to listen to it.
Links:SOWPub forum (Jason’s as well as my favourite free forum online. This is the only forum I visit every time I’m online.)
Search for: CARVER matrix. (Or go read this article: How to Prioritize.)
Who Is Jason Cain?
Jason Cain is one of the old hands at blogging. He’s been making money with a blog since 1999! (Did we even have blogs then?) He’s a marketing genius in my books. And is most famous for running GoldBlogger - which unfortunately hasn’t been updated since ages now.
The reason GoldBlogger isn’t updated frequently is because Jason spends most of his time making money with blogs and websites instead of writing about it much. Now a days, he is busy creating an empire in the martial arts niche.
Jason is some one who has been there and done that. You’ll do well listening to his advice.
Question: How often should you post on your blog? Once a week? Once a day?
How long should your feet be? As long as they need to be to touch the ground!
There is no real answer as to how often should you blog. Some top blogs publish 3-4 posts everyday. While others publish just one post a week. And both of them do well. You’ll need to find your own publishing frequency.
I know thats not what you wanted to hear. So hear are 4 guidelines and rules-of-thumb that can assist you.
1. How many clients will you require?
General rule of thumb: the more clients you require to earn a full time income from your blog, the more posts you’ll have to publish.
If you earn all your income from ad revenue alone, then you’ll need to blog more often - at least once a day - if not more than that. But if you are selling high end consulting from your blog and all you need is 20 clients a year, then you can get away with posting just twice a month!
2. How many times will you be promoting your products on the blog?
General rule of thumb: You can only publish a blatantly promotional post after 4 good quality posts. So if you need to promote your or some one else’s products once every week, than you should post 5 posts a week. If you can’t post more than once a week, you shouldn’t promote blatantly more than once a month!
The more you publish, the more you can plug your products.
This applies for all the payperpost and reviewme posts too. For every pay-per-post you publish, you need to post 4 quality posts.
Follow the 80:20 rule or else you’ll turn off your blog readers. 80% good content for 20% promotional content.
3. How much time do you have?
If you can’t manage to spend more than 1 hour a day on your blog, then you should not write more than 1-2 posts a week.
Because 60-80% of your time should go on your blog promotion. Not writing. So if you can only put in 5 hours a week, and it takes 1 hour to write a decent post, than follow a weekly publishing schedule.
4. How long are your blog posts?
The longer your blog posts - the less often you’ll have to publish. If you only publish 20-30 page detailed research article on your blog, people won’t mind if you can’t post more than once a month. But if you’re posting 100 word snippets, you better post something on your blog more than once a day.
Question: Can you comment on how often do you now publish on your blog? And why?
Mark your calendars: October 15. Its going to be a day that is going to show the impact bloggers have on the world.
Collis and Cyan Ta’eed and Leo Babauta have got together to organize the Blog Action Day.A Where all bloggers: big and small - will get together and talk about one topic: environment.
Some of the heavy hitting blogs have already agreed to participate.A A You’ll be able to read my unusual views on the environment too - on 15th October.
