A Guest post from Stanford from Pushing Social.

No doubt about it – Content is King. But, the formula for successful blogging doesn’t end there. In fact, content is just the beginning. If you want to make money, make a loyal readership, or attract new clients, you need to keep your readers ON your blog.

In a word, your blog needs to be sticky.

A sticky blog compels readers to read more than one post. A sticky blog immerses readers in an experience that results in comments and retweets. Sticky blogs are more profitable than regular run-of-the-mill ones because they place more offers in front of the same reader.

Got your attention?

Let’s talk about how to make a sticky blog by studying the 500 million-member juggernaut – Facebook.

The Facebook Trance

In 2005 Facebook was catching fire in the US. It had just passed the 5 million member mark after just being in existence for 18 months. Although Facebook’s growth was incredible, what made its college-dropout founders excited was something they called – The Facebook Trance.

If you watched a person interacting with Facebook, you would see them nearly hypnotically clicking screen by screen. Every click sucked the visitor deeper into Facebook. Every “engagement” deepened the trance.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, soon insisted that every new feature should enhance the “Trance”.

It worked. Even today people religiously visit Facebook and get lost in a trance for hours at a time.

You want to make something similar for your blog

5 Ways to Stick Your Readers to Your Blog Like Glue

#1: Interlinked Posts

As you write, look for opportunities to link to other posts that add value to your current topic. Go ahead and note these posts in your editorial calendar along with the topic you are plotting to write. Be frugal with these links, only pick one or two of your most relevant posts; too many links can become a distraction (and obnoxious).

#2: Tell the Tale in Different Ways

People learn in different ways. Up to this point, blogging has favored visual learners who like reading and viewing charts. Now you can use video and audio to make a fantastic experience for your auditory learners too.

It’s simple to read your post and offer as a podcast, or turn your post’s main points into a PowerPoint slide and offer it as video. You can take this one step further by adding a video commentary or introduction to your post.

The point is to appeal to your reader in the way that gets them to “lean forward” and gobble up your content. Video, audio, and visual slideshows are can’t fail tools that should be in your toolbox.

#3: Comment Responses

Have you noticed that a post’s comments can be more fascinating than the post itself? This is really a excellent thing. You’ve made your blog sticky when your readers actively respond to your posts.

You can encourage this interaction by quickly responding and following up with an “open-finished” question. Your commenters will get pulled deeper into the experience and “stick around”.

Try this: Take your most provocative comments and republish excerpts of them on Twitter. This will draw in a wider audience who can add reach and appeal of your post.

#4: Mini-Email Courses

Most blog posts are filled with “Why” and “What” information, but many fall small of offering brilliant “how to” advice. This means that many readers are left feeling cheated out of the excellent stuff.

You can make your blog sticky and build a list by making a “How To” email mini-course focusing on a specific post. Select a well loved post and turn it into an email course or even an ebook. You’ll build a list that you can monetize with follow-up products. Bonus!

#5: Extend The Experience

Gary Vaynerchuk is a social media high-roller because he understands how to use multiple platforms to make an experience. He uses Viddler for video, Facebook for community shout-outs, DailyBooth for photos, and Twitter to tap into real-time conversation. Once you get pulled into the Gary V’s world it’s hard to leave.

You can replicate the same experience. Reckon of each post as a “show” that can be supported by other social media outposts. Question yourself how you can use still-photos, video, Facebook updates, and tweets to surround your reader in an immersive trance.

How to Get Started

You might be wondering if all of this is a bit over-the-top. It isn’t. In fact, turning your blog into a “Sticky Blog” will soon be the price of entry. Anyone can write a post, but readers will flock to the author that takes it one step further.

With that being said, you can start slowly. Take a well loved post and use the tips to make it sticky. Pay close attention to your stats and comments to see if your readers like what they see. I’m confident you’ll be impressed with the results.

Tell me, have are you making your blog sticky? How can your sticky blog be a competitive advantage and make you stand out?

Stanford obsesses about how to get passionate people’s blogs noticed and promoted at Pushing Social… except when he’s fishing for monster bass. Follow him to get the latest about his new ebook “Get Noticed.”

This Post is from: ProBlogger Blog Tips.

5 Clever Ways to Make A Sticky Blog

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You don’t need to be a huge-time blogger to need to outsource some aspect of your blog. A beginning blogger with a serious business plot might want to contract a designer to make a skin for their blog. A entrepreneurial blogger might want to outsource some writing, or have an agency provide social media strategy for the blog.

There are plenty of reasons why you might outsource some aspect of your blogging. But once you’ve identified the need, how should you proceed?

Don’t make your first step trying to find excellent candidates! Before you go hunting for help, you need to do your homework. Here’s the process I’d recommend.

1. Define what you want.

“I need help with my blog content” is not a clear directive. If you’re going to source help, you need to know what to look for, which means you need to have a clear thought of what, specifically, you want.

Don’t just reckon in terms of contractor skillsets. Reckon in terms of your audience. So you want to have a new interface designed for your blog. Fantastic. But what do you want it to do? Do you have a visual identity you want the design to reflect or match? Are there interactive elements — like social media buttons or a subscription box — that, in accordance with your readership objectives, you want to prioritise in your design? Do you have user and usage stats that can help to drive the technical specifications you provide to a designer?

Work out what you reckon you want, and why, before you start thinking about who might do the work.

2. Make it measurable.

The word ‘measurable’ really gives the game away — if the first step in this process was to define specific objectives, the next one is to make them measurable.

Some tasks are hard to measure — the “success” of a new homepage design might seem like one of them. But look a small closer and, whatever the task you’re setting, you’ll likely find ways to assess the results. Perhaps you’ll assess your current traffic metrics and set new goals that you expect the new site design to help meet. Perhaps you’ll require the designer to show you the results of usability testing.

Alternatively, your goals might be internal — related to your time or operations. Maybe you want to save time — say, two days a week — by outsourcing some of your blog post research and writing tasks. Fine. But make sure you’re prepared to track the time you spend managing your contractor, to make sure that you haven’t simply replaced two days’ writing with two days’ contractor management!

As part of setting measurable goals, don’t forget to apply a timeline to each! This is the most basic way for you to assess whether your outsourced work is on track.

3. Set a budget.

Now that you have an thought of what you want, and what benefits you need it to bring, you should be able to translate those benefits into a dollar value, and choose on the investment you’re willing to make to achieve that goal.

You might want the new design for your blog to increase average per-session pageviews by 1.5 within the first three months. Fantastic! What will that do for your advertising revenues in that time? And how much can you afford to invest to generate this return?

Setting a budget is an essential step in the process. This will help you to qualify candidates early in the process, and save you from spending time talking to “prospective” contractors who really aren’t in your market at all.

4. Seek recommendations.

Unless you have experience in a given market space or discipline and believe you have the skills to select excellent talent off the bat, you might consider asking peers and colleagues for talent recommendations. Whether you’re outsourcing blog content production or your accounting tasks, personal recommendations are the best way to have some assurance that you’ll get what you expect.

Alternatively — or additionally — you might call for expressions of interest through your blog, your social networks, your professional networks, and other likely sources. To me, these approaches are still better options than advertising blindly on freelance networks, or scouring the web in an effort to find that needle in a haystack — excellent help that you can afford and trust. Recommendations are best.

5. Research the provider.

But you obtain recommendations, research the provider before you contact them. Conducting your own research is vital — you never know what information a quick web search will turn up. Hopefully it’s the same information the contractor in question will provide to you, but if it’s not the kind of detail they’d likely share, you’ll be glad you looked into their work yourself.

If the contractor is local, your peers or colleagues may know them, so again: question around. Encourage people to be candid and to give you their honest opinions, but also be sure to find out the bases for those assessments. Try to remain as open-minded and objective as possible at this point, so you can make a shortlist of at least two — but hopefully three or four — providers you believe might suit the job.

6. Make contact.

Make careful observation of each shortlisted candidate from the moment of your first contact. Everything they do and say will provide clues as to how well you may be able to work with them. If something makes you uncomfortable, try to work out what it is and why it’s a problem.

Again, it’s vital to try to remain reasonable and objective at this point. The fact that your potential designer is wearing a suit and tie doesn’t mean he’s not as creative as the previous candidate, who rolled up to the meeting in ripped jeans and cool runners.

Try to get all the information from the candidate that you’ll need to make your outsourcing choice. The things I want to have in hand when it comes time to assess my options include:

• contact details
• competent past work examples
• a pitch, brief, or written document that clarifies what they’ll provide, for what value, and shows that they know and agree to my expectations, goals, and time and budget constraints
• fantastic references from current clients
• personal experience with the candidate (it doesn’t matter whether I’ve met them to discuss the job over coffee, or over Skype: I want to meet them one way or another!).

Now, the hiring choice is all yours. To make sure you’re protected, though, you might want to ensure:

• you both sign a legally binding written contract that clarifies the work and the work arrangements
• your contractor has any insurances you feel are necessary
• you’ve discussed and agreed upon any copyright and intellectual property considerations
• you’ve had the contractor sign a non-disclosure and/or anti-competition agreement if you feel that’s necessary.

These steps aren’t substitutes for excellent research and gut instinct, but they may help you if your research and instinct don’t pay off for some reason.

Have you outsourced any aspects of your blog? How did the process work for you?

About the Author: Georgina has more than ten years’ experience writing and editing for web, print and voice. She now blogs for WebWorkerDaily and SitePoint, and consults on content to a range of other clients.

This Post is from: ProBlogger Blog Tips.

How to Outsource Your Blog… Or Part of It

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Ever run out of things to write about on your blog?

In this video screencast I want to show you how I came up with over 6000 thoughts to write about on my blog using two tools – an Auto Responder (I use Aweber (aff)) and a Simple Survey.

Setting this up took me all of 15 minutes work – after that it’s just been a matter of sitting back and watching the thoughts roll in.

You may not be able to generate 6000 thoughts (and the reality is that I can’t use that many) but this technique can be used on even a smallish blog.

Video Notes

• Watch the full sized version (which may help with picking up all the detail in the video) at Become a Playful Blogger
• Video shot on a Panasonic Lumix DMC GF1 (aff) – here’s why I use that camera to shoot my videos.

How to Generate Thoughts to Write About on Your Blog – Transcript

I’ve had this video transcribed below for those who prefer to get it that way. The transcription provided by The Transcription People.

Today I want to show you a technique that I’ve been using just for the last few months, on how to come up with thoughts to write about on your Blog.

A lot of blogger face this problem – after a few months of blogging you run out of all those fantastic thoughts that you had when you started your blog, and you want to come up with more.

This is a technique that will work best on a blog with lots of readers, but even just some readers that, particularly readers that are subscribing to your newsletter, it can be used quite effectively, even in small numbers over a longer period of time.

So, you can see on the screen here, I’ve opened up AWeber. AWeber’s my email newsletter tool that I’ve talked about numerous times on ProBlogger.

What I’ve opened up here is the auto responder sequence for my Digital Photography School (I have a number of them).

This is an auto-responder that I’ve set up for DPS and one of the newsletters, and you can see here that on this particular one I have seven different messages that go out once someone subscribes to my newsletter. These are automated messages that go out at pre-determined intervals. You can see here the intervals on the left, they get a Welcome to DPS message straight away on the first day they sign up. Then they get a series of informational newsletters including one promotional one. So they really hear about he products that we have and get offered a discount, but they also get emails that are purely informational that give them quality links back into archives on the site.

Number seven here is the one I want to talk about today. “What would you like to learn about Photography Next?” is the title of it.

I’ve already opened it up here. Now, they’re getting this email, you’ll see there, it’s around four months into their sequence. So they’ve already been subscribed for a while, they’ve been getting our weekly newsletter updates, which is in addition to this auto-responder.

So they’ve got some connection with DPS, and then get this email. Basically thanks them for joining, and introduces the thought that we’re doing some plotting for the site which we’re always doing, and at the time I started this auto-responder, I was really doing a week of intensive plotting, and introduces the concept we want it to be, DPS to be as helpful as possible and we’ve got a survey to help us to improve the site and to come up with topics to write about. And then it gives them a link to click. When they click on that link, they are taken to a survey.

Now, I’ve set it up in SurveyMonkey. SurveyMonkey is a fantastic tool, I reckon you get a certain amount for free. I’ve signed up for the premium edition, because I’m sending so many people to this as part of my newsletter. This is the back end of SurveyMonkey where you set up your questions, but here you can see the questions that I’m asking.

I introduced the topic again, and talk about why I’m doing the survey. Then I get them to start to describe themselves in terms of the level of photographer that they are.

Then I question the question, “I want to see Tutorials on DPS on the following topics,” and get them to choose all that apply. Now, these are pre-determined topics that we do write on from time to time. The thought of this question is just to work out what the priorities of people are.

Then I question them which topics would you like to see a more comprehensive guide to? So here what I’m asking is, I’m trying to get a feel for what people might pay for information on, because I want to develop eBooks. So here I’m doing a bit of a survey on that. One of the largest ones was Travel Photography, so we developed an eBook on that. Then I questioned them a question about the post-production tools they use, Photoshop, Paintshop, you know, LightRoom, Aperture, that type of thing.

And this is the golden question, this is the one I want to talk about today. Apart from those listed above, what topics would you like to see covered more on DPS? Feel free to be as specific as you’d like. So anything from a general topic like underwater photography to more specific – like slow-synch flash, or how to sharpen images in Photoshop.

So I’m giving them permission there to go beyond those broad categories we covered earlier in the survey, and to question specific questions.

Now, SurveyMonkey gives you some fantastic analytics, and so you can see here the answer to that first question, I’ve graphed people. I’ve really got 71% of readers who say they’ve had a camera for a while, they’re honestly confident, but they want to get more advanced. And we get same sort of stats on these other ones. But what I want to go do down here below, is this last question that I’ve talked about.

You can see here, I’ve had this survey running for a couple of months now. I’ve had 6,369 people tell me what they want to get more information on. Specific questions. Now this is gold. This is really gold.

You get a download button here, and you can download it as a PDF or as an Excel, whatever you’d like.

Now, 6,000+ people have told me what they want to get information on, and they’ve given me specific questions. Now, some of these questions aren’t very helpful, some of the answers aren’t very helpful, you know, I’ve got someone here that says, “Fashion.” Well, we kind of figured that they probably would have ticked the Fashion Photography box above, but here we go, look, fixing problems like blown out skies, or wrinkle removal or skin softening. There’s three topics that I could go away and write on. Fish-eye photography, taking pics of babies and pets. You’ve got a lot of quite fascinating stuff here. A lot of these questions are very specific, they’re post-type questions. Some of them people joke and they give you crappy answers and stuff that they’re just trying to be amusing. But this is gold. There is 6,000 responses here.

Now DPS has a honestly large audience and so we are able to get 6,000 responses and that’s fantastic. But even a blog that may be getting only a small number of people signing up to it’s newsletter every day, what happens is, as an auto-responder, remember, I’ve set this up as the seventh thing, so they’re getting all this quality information first, but after a few months of being subscribed, they’re really still got questions, and they’re answering them.

We have around eight or nine hundred people sign up a day for this. So eight or nine hundred people are getting sent to this survey every day. You may have only eight or nine people getting this information every day, but you will find over time, if you have this as part of your auto-responder for a year or two, you’ll start to build up a bank of questions that you can then draw upon later.

So if I’m ever wondering, you know, “What should I write about today on my blog?” I tell you, that file, that Excel file that I opened up before is one of the first places that I go, because it is just gold, it’s got so much fantastic information.

Hope this has been helpful for you. It’s a technique that I’ve been using over the last few months on my blog and it’s really helped me to come up with a lot of fantastic things to write about on my site.
End of Recording.

This Post is from: ProBlogger Blog Tips.

How I Generated Over 6000 Thoughts to Write About on My Blog in 15 Minutes

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This column is written by Kimberly Turner from Regator (a fantastic tool that gathers and organizes the world’s best blog posts) – Darren

I went tandem skydiving for my birthday in June. As the small plane packed with adrenaline junkies climbed, my blood pressure did the same. The air felt thin in my lungs. The fields below grew smaller and smaller, turning into a patchwork quilt of greens and yellows. At 14,000 feet, my instructor and I shimmied to the doorway and shoved off into the nothingness. During the thirty seconds of freefall, the noise and power of the wind were overwhelming. The ground flew up at us. As my instructor pulled the parachute, we jerked upward for a moment before I heard him say the last thing you want to hear from your tandem skydiving partner: “Oh no. Oh no. Oh no!” Our chute had tangled and we were falling past those who had jumped before us. He shouted for me to “kick to the right like your life depends on it!” I did. A few seconds later, he yelled, “Look up!” I did. The chute flapped uselessly above us, a crumpled yellow napkin on a background of blue. “Keep going!” he ordered. I did. Eventually—what must have only have been 60 seconds or less but felt like far longer—our kicking and spinning paid off. The chute’s lines spun us quickly in one direction and I felt the wind catch us, slowing us to a bone idle pace as we drifted to the ground.

Why am I telling you all of this? Because today, we’re going to use the weekly blogosphere trends from Regator to talk about the importance of storytelling in blogging. I could have reported the facts: When I went skydiving, our parachute got tangled, but we were able to straighten it out and land safely. And that’s the route that many bloggers take, but the straight facts aren’t always your best bet. Telling a tale in a more narrative form adds emotional impact, suspense, interest, and imagery. People communicate in tales every day and, used sparingly and appropriately, they can add a lot to your blog. Let’s see how some bloggers used storytelling to enhance posts about this week’s top tales:

1.  Ground Zero Mosque

Example: Huffington Post’s “My Whole Street Is a Mosque”

Lesson: Excellent tales have enough details to help readers form a visual. Mira Schor’s description of the streets of New York uses specifics such as the type of fake fashion accessories being sold on the street, the sort of people passing through the neighborhood, and the kind of prayer mats being used to paint a clear picture.

2.  Ken Mehlman

Example: The Seminal’s “On the Luxury of ‘Coming Out’ When You Feel Like It”

Lesson: Use your own personal experiences and tales to connect with readers on an emotional level but be sure your tale ties in with your post’s goal, as this one does. The dread and rage conveyed in this post are used to effectively contrast the writer’s coming out experience with Ken Mehlman’s.

3.  Tiger Woods

Example: Devil Ball Golf’s “The complete Tiger Woods timeline, from Escalade to divorce”

Lesson: Tales are essentially a sequence of actions that make a plot. This post presents those actions in the form of a timeline but a narrative still forms—complete with conflicts, resolutions, and dramatic plot. Remember, something should happen in your tale.

4.  Afghanistan

Example: Bors Blog “Haircuts in Herat”

Lesson: Make your tale captivating and fascinating…in other words, not something that your readers experience in their everyday lives. This tale is dramatic, engaging, and puts readers into a situation they are unlikely to experience on their own.

5.  Facebook Places

Example: Ad Age’s “How to Nearly Sabotage a Dinner Party With Facebook ‘Places’”

Lesson: Depending on the purpose of your tale, it may or may not be necessary to give a fantastic deal of detail about the characters. Keep your focus on what’s relevant. In this post, it’s vital to know that the friends involved are “20-somethings, a bunch of typical iPhone-toting over-sharers” because it directly relates to their reactions and helps make the author’s point. In my skydiving tale above, it wasn’t necessary to go into detail about the instructor in order to make my point.

6.  Home Sales

Example: Jalopnik’s “I Sold Everything To Buy A Lamborghini And Drive Across The Country”

Lesson: Use quotes and images where appropriate to add detail to a tale. This post’s well-placed quotes and carefully chosen photos work with the text to make a fascinating tale.

7.  Emmy Awards

Example: TV Squad’s “Oops! Most Embarrassing Emmys Moments”

Lesson: Tales don’t have to be long. These anecdotes from the Emmys tell the tales in just one brief paragraph each, yet each has characters, conflict, and resolution—condensed yet appropriate in this application.

8.  Pakistan

Example: Journeys to Democracy’s “Personal Note: Flood Relief in Remote Kohistan”

Lesson: The best tales have their honest share of suspense. Readers feel nervous to know the outcome and, therefore, won’t stop reading until the end. This post’s account of a “grueling 20-hour journey” uses tension well.

9.  Miss Universe

Example: PopWatch’s Miss Universe: Help me convince myself to watch

Lesson: Tales can be used to establish camaraderie with readers rather than to make tension and suspense. The introductory paragraph of this post isn’t particularly dramatic but does establish common ground with any other readers who were snarky with girlfriends in junior high or who grew up watching pageants. It also allows the blogger to share a bit of her personality.

10: The Walking Dead

Example: Warming Glow’s “Oh My God, ‘The Walking Dead’ Trailer Is Incredible”

Lesson: Go beyond text to visually tell a tale. Videos are, obviously, a fantastic medium for storytelling and while this blog didn’t make the video included here, it is very appropriate for the readership and one heck of a excellent tale.

Your turn! Have you recently used a tale on your blog? Please share a link and any tips you may have in the comments. If not, give it a try this week and report back.

Kimberly Turner is a cofounder of Regator.com and Regator for iPhone as well as an award-winning print journalist. You can find her on Twitter @kimber_regator.

This Post is from: ProBlogger Blog Tips.

Blogosphere Trends + Storytelling

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Is your blogging getting a small dry? Perhaps it is time to become a bit more playful as a blogger.

One of the things that I’ve learned over the years is that the more I ‘play’ and experiment with my blog the more I learn that helps me to make my blog better.

Experimentation helps you not only learn what works in the blogging medium – but also what works with your audience.

Notes

• Watch the full sized version at Become a Playful Blogger
• Video shot on a Panasonic Lumix DMC GF1 (aff) – here’s why I use that camera to shoot my videos.

Become a Playful Blogger Transcript

I’ve had this video transcribed below for those who prefer to get it that way. The transcription provided by The Transcription People.

Today I want to talk about being playful. I’m standing in front of some of the artwork that my four year ancient has done at Kindergarten. It’s been fascinating to watch the progression of his artistry over the last couple of years. He’s a very artistic, creative small guy and he likes to paint and he likes to make things and he likes to basically make stuff.

But, the development in the quality and intricacy of his work has been fascinating to watch over the last few years.

What I’ve noticed is that the more he does it, and the more he experiments with different mediums and different ways of holding a brush and using his fingers and different types of paints and cutting up stuff and sticking them on, the more he experiments, the more he learns and the more he develops.

I reckon this is really right for blogging as well.

One of the things that I’ve learnt over the years is that the more I try and use stuff, the more I learn what works and what doesn’t work for me in my style, but also for my readers, for blogging and the medium itself.

So, I’d like to question you today:

• how have you played on your blog?
• How have you experimented?
• What have you tried?
• What has worked and what hasn’t worked?

I’d like this to be a discussion. For me, I’ve tried lots of different styles of writing over the years.

For example, I’ve done a few rants on my blogs. I learned that, you know, me ranting doesn’t really work. Occasionally it does because, I guess I really believe in what I’m ranting about, but as a rule, ranting doesn’t really work for me.

I’ve also tried writing in the third person at times that sometimes has really worked for me. It’s had a real impact upon people.

I’ve also found asking questions like this video post itself works for me.

It’s just about experimenting with different ways of communicating. With using images, with your design, it translates across your blog in lots of different ways.

So, what have you played with on your blog? How have you been a bit playful? How have you experimented? What have you learnt? What has worked for you in your style and what doesn’t work for you in your style?

I’d like to hear your comments in the comments below this video.

This Post is from: ProBlogger Blog Tips.

Become a Playful Blogger and Inject Some Energy into Your Blogging

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