This post is by ProBlogger Writing Expert Ali Luke
You’ve finished your post, and you breathe a sigh of relief. After a quick edit you publish it to your blog, and wait for the comments, tweets, shares, or any sort of feedback.
But once again, you get nothing. There may as well be no-one reading it.
So what’s the problem? It could be that your writing isn’t as strong as it needs to be. But there’s also a very good chance the problem isn’t your writing.
It’s your formatting.
Over the years I’ve reviewed dozens of different blog posts, and most of them were fairly well written. But some were really let down by poor post formatting: the post just didn’t look good.
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Hi there. Welcome to Episode 216 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com – a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of ebooks all designed to help you as a blogger to start a great blog, to grow your audience, and to build some profit around that blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com.
As the end of the year nears, you might be thinking about plans for your blogging in 2018.
One thing that will help inform that is a reader survey. On both ProBlogger and Digital Photography school I do an annual survey, usually around November.
As we plan our surveys, I thought I’d share some of the types of questions you can ask and give you a chance to share some of the survey techniques that have been successful for you too.
Types of questions you could ask:
Demographics: find out your readers’ gender, age, income, and interests. You can compare this with the analytics you get from Google Analytics and Facebook Insights.
Content: What types of content do your readers like? Practical, inspirational, case studies? What length of blog post do they prefer, and how often do they like reading?
Products: If you’re planning new products you can test out some ideas and price points in your survey.
Problems: Some of the most useful information you can find out is the kinds of problems your readers want solved – the keystone to creating engaging content.
Another area you may want to include is any questions that regular advertisers/sponsors may want to know, or information you can use to attract regular advertisers and sponsors.
As you know, most blogs have a contact page. It’s one of the first pages we create when we’re building a new blog. We want people to be able to shower us in praise, offer us lucrative advertising and book deals, and beg us to create wonderful products for them, right?
Okay, so that might be stretching things a little. But we do want people to be able to get in touch with us. Blogging is about connecting with people after all.
It’s easy to add a simple form to a contact page using a WordPress plugin such as Contact Form 7, Ninja Forms or Gravity Forms (my personal favourite). But what you might not realise is that a contact page can become a burden.
Originally posted as a Facebook update from FinCon in Dallas (video below)
In my opening keynote at FinCon I challenged the attendees to think about how their blog, podcast and video content could potentially be changing people’s lives.
You see, many of us see ourselves as being in the ‘content business’. But I think it’s better if we start seeing ourselves as being in the ‘transformation business’.
Great content leaves a mark on people. It moves them from one place to another.
Transformation comes in many shapes and sizes
The the creators of that content do it in various ways – teaching, giving information (such as news), entertaining, providing motivation, and giving their audience a sense that they’re not the only ones and providing hope for a better future.
What is social marketing? SEO blog provides tips, tricks, and advice for improving websites and doing better search, social, content, and brand digital marketing 2017
As you know, most blogs have a contact page. It’s one of the first pages we create when we’re building a new blog. We want people to be able to shower us in praise, offer us lucrative advertising and book deals, and beg us to create wonderful products for them, right?