Made you look. In the blogging world, a catchy title will make people click through to read your post.
That’s just one lesson I learned since starting this blog a year ago. I still consider myself an advanced beginner, but I’ve picked up enough over the past 12 months to want to share. Here’s what I’ve learned:
Sex sells. Good headlines attract attention, whether they’re in a newspaper or a blog post. That’s one of the biggest things I’ve learned from Twitter, which limits users to messages of 140 characters, forcing them to be catchy and concise. Recently I’ve been channeling Cosmo to come up with blog post titles like Work smarter, not harder, Write like a pro and Beat the recession. Big caveat: once you’ve got people’s attention, though, you gotta give them something worth reading.
Mix it up. The best blogs offer a variety of types of posts, a blend of news, how to’s, first-person experiences, round ups based on other people’s opinions or experiences, Q & As, pointers to great material on other blogs, lists, “best of’s” and just enough off topic material to keep things interesting. Offering a variety of material keeps things from feeling stale – and gives a blog a personality.
When writing a new post, include links to old ones. A couple weeks back I wrote about my picks for top 10 digital media trends for 2008 and included a bunch of links to older posts. Not surprising, many of the older posts I linked to got a nice a bump in page views. What was surprising, though, was the overall number of old posts were getting click throughs at the same time. So I counted – 104 of the 226 posts I wrote in 2008 had been viewed that week. That’s almost 50 percent. There is something to the long tail theory after all. One of the reasons is…
Evergreen topics have an incredibly long shelf life. My no. 1 most popular post of 2008 was a list of best blogs for writers I did last February. It still gets a couple click throughs a day. That’s something to remember when thinking of subjects for new posts. There’s no need to re-invent the wheel, just revise posts that worked well the first time. Especially if you’re committing to posting every day of the week. Which brings me to the next lesson learned.
More is better. I was contemplating cutting back to three times week from five times a week in 2009, following the advice of 4-Hour-Work Week author Tim Ferris to let posts percolate through the blogosphere to build momentum and readership. Now I don’t think I will. The guys at ProBlogger advocate posting multiple times a day on the theory that the more you write, the more traffic you get to your site. That’s holding true for me.
Need a break? Recycle. Twice this year when I’ve gone on vacation I’ve run “Best of” compilations of three to six posts related to a common theme. This post, Work smarter, not harder is a compilation of seven posts I did earlier in the year on some aspect of being more productive. It works: click throughs for that and other “Nest of” posts I did was exceptional. In fact, the weeks my “Best of” compilations ran my blog had some of its biggest traffic days ever.
It’s all about community. If you’re using a blog to build a brand, platform or business, you want people to know about it and the best way to do that is to circulate in your virtual community. Befriend bloggers writing about the same thing you do and leave comments on their blogs or write guests posts. Join blog rings. Use Twitter. Make it easy for people to interact with your blog by adding all of the RSS and subscription bells and whistles. Caution: there’s nothing worse a blogger whose only aim is self promotion. Be real, and give back.
The past year has served as something of a learning curve for me. Now it’s time to get serious. That hit home after I started using Twitter a couple weeks ago and have seen traffic to my blog increase as a result. I’m kicking myself for not putting some kind of income-generating mechanism in place before now – especially with the publishing industry going down the tubes and taking freelance writing opportunities with it. So I’m moving that to the top of my 09 to-do list, which means buying a domain name, porting the blog to a hosted service, finding a designer, figuring out what to sell, etc. Hmm, sounds like fodder for a bunch of new blog posts.
But enough about me. For any fellow bloggers, what have you learned over the past year?
Nice writing style. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Chris Moran
I love this post and your style, as Chris mentioned above. I’ll be seeing you in my RSS feed!
(I have no tips to share as I’m very new at blogging and only do it for fun.)
You’ve done a great summary. The only thing I’d add is the old “Content is King”. Good writing, as the above commenters have noted, wins loyal readers better than hot keywords.
Michelle…good post and very true. I’ve been a bit of a laggard over the holidays, but of the posts that I’ve done, the ones that have connected have been the ones connecting back to previous posts under some sort of “best of” framework. As a really bad headline writer, your comments are on target. I don’t know if I could get away with the picture, though. (Although did make me look)
This is a great post. Thanks for all the good advice. I’d better put it to work now. I wanted to write a post about what men don’t know about their penises for my baby bonding blog for dads (http://babybondingbookfordads.blogspot.com/). Not sure if that counts as sex but maybe?
I discovered your blog today through LinkedIn’s Freelance Succes group. I’m new to LinkedIn, ramping up my existing freelancing business and looking into whether starting a blog is worthwhile. It looks like you have some great insight. I look forward to reading more from you. Thanks!
Thanks for a great post – good for seasoned writers, too – your forget to clean house, Ping, write for engines, write for readers, etc. It’s good to get back to basics. In the shelter category bedroom (and kitchen) seem to be the big hitters.
Sex DOES sell in blogs, Michelle. Whether anyone wants to buy is another question. For example, I offer a recent Brazen Careerist blog: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/06/high-income-women-get-more-oral-sex-maybe/
Michelle,
I’d add, remember that you have (or perhaps want to build) an international audience. thinking about that is a good source of ideas, both for topics and ways to connect. consistently, half of my readers come from outside the US.
Carroll: P.T. often weaves sex into her blog posts – I stopped being surprised when I started suspecting it was an SEO tactic.
Kerry: Good point, I definitely need to pay more attention to international readers.
Michelle R.
I’ve learned that it still requires the basics of writing: good grammar, storytelling suspense, and a message. Some of the blogs I’ve read out there are deadly dull, too narrow in focus and such an illiterate mess I can’t follow them.
Helpful tips and info, Michelle. Thanks for writing this. I’ve been blogging for a month and before I started I thought there was nothing to it. But there’s so much to learn.
Thanks again!
[...] Sex sells, and other blogging lessons learned – Good headlines attract attention, especially on blogs. That’s just one of the things I learned in my first year as a blogger. [...]
[...] catchy title – A clever headline will capture more attention than a dull one. Just make sure it accurately reflects what’s in [...]
[...] inverted pyramid style. I can write an essay, a feature, a Q&A, an op-ed, a column. I can write headlines, cutlines and pull quotes, charticles and “at a glance” fact boxes. I blog. I tweet. I [...]
[...] Sex sells, and other blogging lessons learned – Good headlines attract attention, especially on blogs. That’s just one of the things I learned in my first year as a blogger. [...]
Thanks Chris and April. If you’re still new to blogging, keep plugging away at it. It gets easier as you go. Don’t feel like you have to learn everything all at once. Slow & steady gets you there too.
Hmmm Jennifer, that’s a tricky one – it’s scintillating material but you don’t want your post to get caught up on spam filters because of anything you use either! May innuendo is the way to go.
Michelle
Thanks Melissa, and welcome to WordCount. If you do a search on “blogs” or “blogging” you’ll see a lot of older posts that would be good for beginners. Actually I’d already thought about doing a “Blogging 101″ post early this year for new bloggers who might have wandered onto this space, so maybe I’ll rev up those plans and do something next week. Stay tuned.
Michelle