Mind the Beginner

I’ve been blogging for almost a year now and last week I tweeted a question, asking how people got their blog to grow. You can read stories all over the net of people having a hugely successful blog within a year. I’m defining success as a lot of comments on each blogpost and hundreds/thousands of subscribers. Although this blog isn’t exactly what you call unsuccessful, things could be so much better. And that’s where I really could use your help.

Guest posting and engaging with other bloggers is key. That and being useful to your readers  -  Corbett Barr

The quote here is what I got back on my question via twitter. Guest posting and engaging with other bloggers isn’t to hard. My plans for that are simple: Guestposting on any blog that will have me. Small blogs and big blogs, none will be left  out as long as they fit in the same niche. To get in touch with more readers I’m going to dive deep into the blogosphere and comment on at least three blogs every single day. Of course those comments need to add value, a simple “First! hahaha”  or “What a great post, please visit my blog” won’t cut it. The most effective is looking for new blogs out there you didn’t comment on before, it’s getting your name out there. Frequently posting meaningful comments on the same blog will get you noticed by the writer and readers and so that’s also a good idea to get out there.

What is usefulness?

Usefulness is useless if nobody knows that you’re there

But I’m left with a single problem: I have no idea if my blogposts are useful to you. Am I writing things that matter and help? Or is it all a load of **** that nobody really finds interesting to read and/or is just dime a dozen content? How would you describe usefulness when it comes to blog content.

A long while back I laid out the plan on growing my blog  A blogpost filled with 16 building blocks to a succesful blog was what resulted. Back then the goal was 500 pageviews a day or 300 subscribers. I haven’t reached either – yet-, but the blog is still growing slowly every month and it’s only a matter of time until those goals are reached. There is no doubt in my mind about that. If there is one thing that I’ve learned from the successful bloggers out there is that things very rarely happen overnight. You’ll have to really commit and it can take years to build a really useful blog which is successful. Being useful by writing good content, answering questions and providing help is one side of the coin, it’s useless if you don’t reach anybody with it so you’ll have to market your blog as well. Usefulness is useless if nobody knows that you’re there.

I’d like to ask you two questions:

1. Is this blog useful to you?
2. What would make this blog more useful to you?

Blogging is very different from writing a book, you can actively engage with others and address issues that come up. It’s a great way of communicating and I want to make your experience on this blog better. Help me help you and we’ll both profit from it.

Thanks for the support my friend, I hope to hear from you

If you’re not interested in effective writing or have mastered the skill of writing skip this blogpost. If you’re like me and always on the lookout for tips to make things more effective, this one if for you!

Block quotes are one of the three attention-grabbers when scanning an article to see if it’s worth reading. Read the blogpost to discover the other two.

Yesterday I dug up and old syllabus from my previous education as therapist. It was about effective writing and there were some nice pointers in there I really want to share with you. Over the years there have been a lot of blogposts and entire blogs on writing effectively. But as of yet there is one rule in my syllabus that I haven’t found out there yet. It might be, it might not be, at least now it’s here on this blog.

The rule of seven:

• No more than 7 sentences to a paragraph
• No more than 7 paragraphs to a chapter
• No more than 7 chapters to a text

With a margin of 2 on all these.

The word count

Simple isn’t it? But there is more of course. The maximum length of a sentence that  people can comprehend is related to education. It’s bit harsh but people who didn’t finish high school can’t handle sentences the way academics can. If you want to write a text that’s readable for everyone sentences should be no longer than 10 words. High School drop-outs can take 14 words and 24 words is a suitable length for academics. It’s not set in stone but it’s a good guideline to keep in mind when writing. Who is your audience? It’s quite easy to overestimate your readers.

Combining these two rules we get between 1250 and 7290 words to a text for everybody, and 3000 to 17496 words for academics. Somewhere in the order of 7000 words seems the ideal length for the typical eBook and 980 for a blogpost. All these are rough estimates of course but using these you can expect that an eBook over 17500 words long will surely be a bit on the long side.

Improving readability can be done by including underlines, bold, and italics but especially underlines are not a particular good idea in blogposts. After all, links in blogposts are almost always underlined and you could send the wrong signal. A text full of underlined words at first glance would seem like a text full of links. It could get even worse if you underline a word and make it blue as well. Now surely your first impression is that it’s a link. Did you try and click it?

Subheadings

are another way of grabbing attention and dividing a text to improve readability. It draws the attention and effective subheadings will almost lure the reader deeper into the text. The title of the article is the first thing people see and so that too should grab attention while covering the essence of the article. Not to long and definitely to the point, it should leave the reader with the feeling of “I need to read this”. These aren’t all the tools you have to write effectively. Blogreaders are a special breed of readers, they want the information in quick, scannable bits and are always in a hurry. As a blogger you can help your readers with that and provide highly scannable content.

One of the easiest things to scan is the:

• The list
• it’s short
• easy to scan
• and provides structure
• see what I mean?

Chances are you already scanned the list before actually reading the blogpost. Together with the subheadings these are two of the three most scannable features in any blogpost. The last one you’ve probably already scanned as well before deciding to read this post. It’s the block quote at the beginning of this blogpost. These three text-based eye catchers are what grabs you at a first glance. (Four if we count the title of the blogpost.) That leaves us with one non-text eye catcher that is absolutely crucial. A picture is worth a thousand words and doesn’t increase the word count! A bad picture or no picture at all will seem dull and uninspiring. The right picture makes or breaks a blogpost.

The closing line to a blogpost is where you make your statement. Use all the tools you have, make your blogpost scannable, make a clear statement, and don’t forget to write both a good opening and closing  line, they really matters.

A few hours ago an e-mail entered my inbox. Sent by Problogger, a blogger you might now as Darren Rowse, one of the biggest bloggers out there and one of the happy few who makes a six figure income by blogging.

A long time ago when I started this blog Darren was offering a cycle of the 31 Days to Building a Better Clog challenge. I eagerly jumped on the project and the following 31 days was total pandemonium. Thousands of bloggers took part in the challenge to make their blog a better blog in just 31 days. Every day a new assignment would come online and we’d all implement what Darren was suggesting and follow things up with discussing about the assignments on the forum. THousands of bloggers doing so at the same time, hundreds of bloggers looking at each others blogs.

In 31 days my blog got a really good start in it’s digital life and the lessons learned are still being applied to this day. Now you must be wondering, what does that mail have to do with things and why am I trying to sell you something?

The truth is, yes this is an attempt to sell and the link I’m offering here is an affiliate link. << Click

Now I might have already lost you right there, I sure hope not because I have a very good reason to do this. By following the link you will be taken to the product page, but what it doesn’t tell you as far as I can tell is the temporary (7 days) bonuses that are on offer.

• A report by the name of 9 Things to Do to Get Your Blog On Track for the New Year – it is a 9 day extension of the 31 Day workbook and contains 9 extra tasks, particularly designed for the new year. This means you have 40 days of exercises to get you going.

• A 55 minute podcast with Leo Babauta from ZenHabits.net – this podcast is rich with tips on how Leo has launched his blogs and leveraged them to sell successful e-books and a best selling book.

• A 45 minute podcast interview with Neil Patel from Quicksprout.com – another practical podcast with Neil on how to drive traffic to blogs as well as tips on personal branding, SEO and more.

Now If you are still with me after all that you might be wondering why I’m doing this, why am I lowering myself to this shameless promotion. It’s a simple truth: blogging is an enrichment of your life, at the very least you become skilled in putting your thoughts to words and sharing your thoughts with others. By themselves writing skills are already very useful. Interaction is very likely to follow and you’ll get in touch with people who share your way of thinking or are really interested in what you have to say.

The main item itself is a workbook filled with tasks to get your blog up to speed. If you’re a first time blogger or thinking about writing a blog but don’t know where to begin this is just about the best resource around. You can work through the workbook in your own time and have it all in a nice bundle.

To sum things up: No, this blog is not permanently lowering the standards. I just feel that if you plan on blogging, have a beginning blog or have a writers urge then this really is a good place to start.I really do endorse this product, the 31 Days to Building a Better Blog is the single most significant thing that helped me start this blog and give it the flying start.

 Time and time again I look at this screen and think about what to write next. Where to get my inspiration and how to make an interesting blogpost. Today I had no inspiration at all so I decided to look through some of my old blogposts and the comments I got there.

One in particular did manage to inspire me. The comment came from Stephen over at ratracetrap stating that he liked my short blogpost style. Now you might have noticed that lately I’ve been writing longer and longer blogposts so it seems I didn’t listen to Stephen.
Short blogposts do have their advantages, there are whole blogs dedicated to the tao of short posts. They usually post several times a day and have multiple bloggers working on the same blog. This blog of course has only one blogger so multiple posts a day would seem a bit steep.
Now what is this tao of the short blogpost. Again, it’s quite simple after someone tells you:

• Short posts make for quick reading
• Short posts pack a punch (a quick one of course)
• Short posts get to the point quickly

The overall theme here is being fast and being witty.

That’s the tao of the short blogpost in a short post: Make a statement, do it fast and get away with it!

Thank you for the two minutes of your time. 

It’s almost every day that you notice how unhelpful people can be. Everyone is minding his or her own business and not caring about what others do or what they can do for the other. Self first is the way to go it seems.

But doing things alone has two major disadvantages:

• You’re restricted to only the knowledge you have yourself and your perspective on things
• Your social network stays small

Working together might not be for you but through the internet there are certain things you can work on together without ever having to see eye to eye. In this perspective online life doesn’t mirror real life. Online we seem to want to help others with just about anything we can. Social networking is a force to be reckoned with online. Take the problogger challenge I took part in for instance.

It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Soon after starting with that challenge the realization came to mind that doing it (building a blog) all alone won’t be easy. You need “blogging buddies” who can help you when you’re stuck and who can help you promote your blog. This of course, works both ways. You might even get guestposts both ways. One of the powerful tools to reach a bigger crowd.

The need we have to work together and to tell others about our discoveries lies at the basis of forums. There are thousands (millions?) of forums on the internet in every single niche you can imagine. There are people there who are interested in the same things as you. This is especially useful when you’re in a very small niche as finding people in real life with the same interests might be very had indeed. The problogger forum that accompanied the 31DBBB helped me reach a bigger crowd. Everyone there is a blogger so specific questions still got answers.

There was another possibility however that got set up. A blogger’s collaboration. For beginning bloggers it’s hard to get noticed and to build traffic. There is only so much you can do by yourself. You can tweet all day long about your blog but you’ll only reach your followers (a few hundred?) and if you get lucky you get a retweet and you instantly reach more people. Other channels might be digg, stumbleupon, del.ici.us. They all depend on luck however.

Influencing luck

Can we help luck to be in a our favor? Sure we can: Find other bloggers who are willing to help a bit. It’s quite simple, digg their blogposts, stumble them, tweet about them, help them with questposts on your blog. Scratch their backs an they scratch yours. And if you have blogs-specific questions you have a group of bloggers you can ask to help. There’s bound to be someone in the collaboration who is good with webdesign. Another might be a wizz with twitter and everything he retweets can count on loads of traffic.

The results:

• Reaching more people
• A fresh perspective
• A bigger social network
• New friends
• A helping hand is never far away

Get out there, set up accounts at twitter, digg, stumbeupon, facebook, del.ici.us, technorati and any other place you can think of. Ask your readers if there are people there who want to work together for the mutual interest of building a better blog. Help yourself by helping others. Blogging is only one of many ventures that can benefit from working together. At the very least you get a fresh perspective on your preconceptions. At best you might end up with a friend for life.

In the near future I’ll be guestposting on other blogs and others will be guestposting here. It’s all part of the collaboration I’m taking part in that resulted from the problogger forum. There are fourteen bloggers in this collaboration and I must say, there are some real gems in there. 

This week I want to get more structure to my blog. To do so I need your help, there are a few questions I really would like your input on. Please do answer them in the comments, as the answers will help me build a better blog for you.

I’ve numbers the questions so it’s easier to answer them in the comment section:

1. How would you describe the niche this blog is in?
2. How many blogposts a week do you want to see here?
3. What is the optimal postlength for you?
4. Are there things on this blog that you are missing?
5. Are there things you think I should do more?
6. Are there things you think I should do less?

As a second option you can of course mail me the answers if you feel uncomfortable about posting them publicly or have other reasons not to use the comment section. The mail is Mindthebeginner(at)gmail(dot)com. 

Also, if there is anything else that isn’t covered by this inquiry but you feel I should know please do tell me. I need your help.

Thank you, I really appreciate it.

The weekly update is here again and by just looking at the numbers it hasen’t been a great week:

Average number of pageviews over this week: 70

Number of subscribers to my RSS feed: 21 (very nice!)

Where the traffic is coming from: Again it’s mostly from problogger but twitter is pitching is as are the blogcomments I’ve posted elsewhere. I think it’s getting a bit more stable now. The initial hype is over and now I have to work even harder than before, jut to keep it up.

What I’ve done this week to get my blog bigger and what I learned: I have added a lot of people on twitter in the hopes if getting to know more of my readers. A lot is defined by going from 158 following to over 400 and doubling my followerd to over 250. As I said last week I havn’t jumped on every blogpost at probloger anymroe and I don’t think it has caused my to much traffic I musts say. Most traffic is comming from the forum, not the blog comments. I’m also working on a collaboration of bloggers and it’s growing, we have about 10 members at the moment and it’s still growing. Somewhere this week I’ll be posting my plan in how I would like this collaboration to function. So stay tuned and hang on to your hats. This is going to be a wild ride.

Another post comming this week will be ” What’s in my bag” . I’ve always loved these things and I just have to do one of these. (I’m a regular at the EDC forums after all) Besides, I saw one the other day at The simple dollar and wrote in the comment that I would be doing one too. I have to keep that promise. 

Have a nice weekend everyone.

As you know I’m taking part in Probloggers 31 days to building a better blog challenge. Last Thursday we got the assignment to create a sneeze page. “The idea is simple – to create a page that propels people in different directions deep within your blog by highlighting a variety of posts that you’ve previously written.”

I looked into the statistics of my blog and realized there are older posts on my blog that hardly anyone has viewed let alone commented on. For whatever reason, these posts haven’t been seen so I thought, why not dig them up and present them in a sneeze page  for you. Today’s assignment is “breathe life into an old post” which means as much as give a post an overhaul to get it up to par with the rest of your blog. I realize now that those early posts (I’m talking about them like I wrote them ages ago, although it feels that way they are at most less than two months old.) are written differently than the current posts and although the concepts are there, some of those diamonds are still stuck deeply in the rough.

I will be exploring the concepts of those earlier posts in the near future but as it stands I would like to present you with the unseen posts of my blog:

Exploring beginner’s mind about the key of zen and preconceptions

Is logic really that logic about reacting vs responding

To blog or not to blog exploring reasons to blog

Is that a mountain? A post about the mental mountains I’ve talked about several times

Stand still please, the future will still be there tomorrow Getting your mind out of the future and into the now

I hope these earlier posts provide with a nice read. Bear in mind they are a bit rough around the edges but I’m slowly getting a better feel for writing as I hope you’ve noticed. Your feedback and comments are greatly appreciated.

Have a nice read

As some of my readers already know I’m working on a challenge to get my blog to grow big enough so that I can reclaim my domain. Big enough is defined here as >500 pageviews a day for seven consecutive days or >300 subscribers to my RSS feed. There already have been several occasions where readers have asked me how things were going. So I’ve decided to give an update every weekend on how things are going. I’ll split those up into four items:

• Average number of pageviews over this week (Monday-Friday)
• Number of subscribers to my RSS feed
• Where the traffic is coming from
• What I’ve done this week to get my blog bigger and what I learned

The observant reader will also know that not only has my domain been bought and I’ll get it for free if I manage to succeed, but another benefactor has stepped in who offered me free web hosting for a year.

Average number of viewers: 117
Number of subscribers to my RSS feed: 8
Where is the traffic coming from:

Mostly it’s getting here through the problogger.com forum (31DBBB)at the moment, a few more get here through my twitter and a few find their way through comments I’ve left on other blogs. The remainder get here through all sorts of little things I’ve done such as putting up a link to my blog in the signatures I have on all the forums I visit.

What I’ve done this week to get my blog bigger and what I learned:

I’ve become quite active on the 31DBBB forum and that alone has doubled my pageviews. I’ve also managed to be (one of) the first to comment on the new 31DBBB blogpost as it hit the net and as the assignment got announced on the forum. These both have resulted in a lot of traffic coming this way but it’s not the kind of attention you want to be getting in the long run. So as of next week I will no longer react to the assignments within minutes but will wait until after 7 pm to act upon them. That’s a good three to four hours after problogger posts the new assignment for the day. It’s not always good to be first. 

On the problogger forum I’ve set up a topic searching for other bloggers so we can help each other through Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.isi.us. and other means of promotion. As I’m writing this I’ve only gotten two other bloggers to join me but I hope more will follow. Perhaps I’ve turned the 31DBBB forum visitors against me already by being to omnipresent. 

I’ve received several mails of people who did a quick review of my site. Stating what they were missing and how things felt to them. The biggest issue is that the niche of my blog isn’t clear right off the bat although the minimalistic style and the “relaxing” green header combined with the title of my blog gives a vague idea as to what it’s all about. So far people are positive about its as a whole. I’ll tweak the layout when I get Wordpress.org. I like this layout a lot but there are minor things I’d like to change. I’d like a three column layout for instance and a subheading to go with the title of my blog.

I’ve seriously edited my “about” page after getting numerous comments (I asked for a review on the 31DBBB forum,worked like a charm) that my picture was portraying me as very inaccessible. People thought I was a speaker of sorts. Truth be told I was a picture taking during my final presentation in order to graduate as B. Health. I’m not a regular suit wearer though. So the picture got swapped for something friendlier. 

The text on the about page also got an overhaul, I hope it’s now much clearer on what this blog is all about as well as who I am as a person and blogger.

At the end of this article I now realize that getting more than 500 views on both Saturday and Sunday will be the toughest of all. As it stands I’ll only keep everyone informed on the average views Monday – Friday just to keep the excitement.

…Day in day out he stared at the statistics of his little blog, he had a dream, get his blog big enough to claim his place among the great blogs out there. Perhaps even cast a shadow over them and become the best of his niche. One day he would get there, he was convinced. They would see, just wait…

For many of us this is a dream we have about blogging. Making it big time and have a blog that will one day get into the illusive technorati top-50 blog list. Considering how many blogs there are out there this is not as easy as it sounds when we first have this dream. As soon as we start to work on realizing this dream we see just how hard it will be to get there. Struggling to get the first viewers, struggling to get people to subscribe to our RSS feed, struggling to get noticed.

A few weeks ago problogger started his 31 days to building a better blog program. The goals would be to make your blog better. With over 9000 participants he recognized a need and who better to lead all these bloggers to a better blog than the writer of the best read blog on the subject. I am one of the 9000 taking part in the program and I have another challenge. Get this blog bigger, and do it in the fast lane.

To get there we need a solid plan, stepping stones to get noticed. How to get more traffic, write quality (and quantity without loosing quality), how to get comments and get people to subscribe to your RSS feed. All these are questions we want answers to don’t we? Well, I can answer al the questions but I’ve asked myself how I would do it and the following points make up my plan:

•  Take part in the 31 days to building a better blog program and follow every piece of advice that is offered. Although this advice is temporary, it’s a great help. If I’m correct the entire 31DBBB will be offered on problogger’s site by the beginning of May.
• Use twitter to get the word out there on your blog and on new posts. Don’t overdo it though as this will become less effective over time because you saturated the market.
• Comment on other blogs in your niche, add value to their posts, be a help and do make sure you give a linkback using the “your website” box. Be honest in your comments, it’s not just about marketing your own blog on other blogs, it’s adding value.
• Participate in the comments on your own blog, let your readers know you appreciate their input and use the feedback you get. Making this obvious will make that reader appreciate you more and tell others about it.
• Set up an RSS feed. I use feedburner for this. This is very important as we all know.
• Write consistently, in the first weeks of your blog, it’s about a steady stream of posts. New readers will want to see that you regularly post on your blog. Only your trusted followers will forgive you if you don’t post for a week. Try one post a day, ever day. Try and use the right time to get your posts out. From other bloggers I’ve been told that the best time is around 1pm GMT. The US will be waking up and read your post during breakfast or in the early hours of work before really starting work. The UK will come back from lunch and take a quick peek. Australia will be done working and see your post in the evening.
• Work on the visuals. New readers will judge the looks of your site in about 0.2 seconds. If it doesn’t look right you’ve lost a reader. (Yes you had a pageview, but those don’t count, you want readers, not viewers.) Make sure your blog visually supports what you are writing. Add pictures to your posts that support the post. As a last note, most people like a light background.
• Make sure people know what your blog is about within a few seconds of looking at your front page. Some people will head off to the “about” page but if your front page isn’t clear you’ve already lost readers. Get a good one-liner up there that captures viewers.
• Don’t write outside of your niche to much. Your blog should express in it’s looks and in it’s writing what it’s about. If your writing is all over the place you won’t build a good base.
• Use all possible channels to get the word out on your blog: Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Technorati, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Blogcarnival, Forums you visit, even if they are not in your blog’s niche (make sure you have a link to your blog in your signature), I’ve probably forgotten a few, please let me know in the comments
• In all these channels, use the same name and avatar. You and your blog are a brand.
• Don’t be afraid to ask other bloggers to help you. Think guestpostings and linkbacks. Do offer something in return though! You could also reverse this and do other bloggers favours, you always get something back.
• Analyze your favorite blogs, what makes them tick for you? Why do you like to read them. Try to incorporate that into your blog. 
• Read anything “on blogging” you can get your hands on. 
• Get out there, leave your PC at times and interact with people and public places. This will teach you what is going on, what colors are used and how things are marketed. Marketing is something for professionals and their efforts are all around us. Watch and learn. Take notes, grab a cup of coffee and think about how you can apply what you’ve seen to your blog.
• Last of all: Write quality, nothing is more important than this.

Over the next months there will inevitably be more and more ideas to implement in the grand plan but this is how that plan stands so far. It’s not all implemented yet, so don’t be surprised if something changes on this blog. If there is anything you missed in this post that is part of your plan to build a better blog please do tell me about it in the comments. You will not only help me but also all the other readers that come here after you. Thanks everyone for all the ideas you’ve already supplied me with, I’m looking forward to hearing more. 

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