Being unique

All beings are unique by default. Seems pretty easy right? All you have to do is be born, and you’re unique – right there – instantly – on the stop –  for the rest of your life. Although some people try extra to separate themselves from others by getting a unique hairstyle or clothes combination and even if they fail at that, they are still unique.

So how do you do it on the Internet? How do you get a new hairstyle on your My Space page, your blog or your corporate website? Do you just learn how to be a professional web designer or is there something more to it? With all of the multilingual and multicultural differences, how do you communicate your message across the wire and staying unique and original in the process?

In my personal opinion, people lack the time and money to experiment – so they just go with whatever the know works. Why would I think of (and experiment with) a new blog layout when I know that a content column and a sidebar column works perfectly fine?

Tell me, how do YOU stay unique? Do you even try? What is more important to you, visual or intellectual uniqueness?

A while ago I come across a great posts from a blog-friend of mine called Bilal Rammuy (Rob) who wrote about “How To Stand Out As A Blogger” on his RobsWebTips blog, which you can check out on the link.

Are bloggers just recycling each others material?

When was the last time you read something you have never read before, anywhere else? It rarely to me but maybe I am not looking in the right places. Some people I know really have strong opinions and they express them frequently on their blogs. Those kinds of posts get a lot of attention, it seems. Being unique is something that could separate the success from the failure.

Is there a point where you could be trying to much? You want to be unique sooo bad that you are writing strange stuff, that people can not understand. You are writing curse words in your posts, making fun of people with jokes that often have questionable moral standards?

What I found particularly interesting is how people tend to read a blog post (or any text) somewhere in a foreign language, translate it to their own language and then post the exact article with some minor changes or just re-format the article where they would just write a summary about it. I imagine this is hard to figure out when trying to protect yourself against copy-writing, you would have to know the language. But this method is somewhat like a perfect crime, isn’t it?

Conclusion

I have asked a lot of questions in this blog posts hoping to get a lot of feedback and discussion from all my readers. Ping-back reply posts are welcome as well. Hope you have a nice Easter planed for yourself and your family. Have a nice (extended) weekend and don’t forget to share this post, if you like it!

Related posts:

1. Blogging On Autopilot During The Holidays

But now that Google Chrome has it’s own little extension directory, it has become even a bigger competition and the beauty of it – it’s still in beta! In this forum post, I am going to show and suggest to you 5 Google Chrome plugins that made my life easier.

1. Firebug Lite

This is one of the most popular plug-ins for web designers using Firefox. It is not available for Chrome as well, although it is a prototype version but still works very well. Firebug allows you to explore both the HTML and the CSS source code of any website. Very useful if you are debugging your own website or just want to learn how someone else programmed his.

Extension link

2. Chrome SEO

An absolutely fantastic plug-in! Everything you need SEO-wise, it has it. You get a little Chrome SEO icon and when you press it, it gives you all the SEO information for the website you are currently on. No more using third party Google Page Rank checkers and going to the Alexa website to check the rating or to see how many backlinks a certain website or blog has. This one is a must have!

Extension link

3. Resolution Test

If you are a web designer or developer you will look at this plug-in like it is pure gold. Making your website or blog look good on all or most resolutions always presented a great problem for me. There are websites that can screenshot your own website in different resolutions but that was a slow process and this plugin is just fantastic.

Extension link

4. Measureit!

A very simple Chrome plug-in that creates a measuring tool for you to use in order to determine the dimensions of certain images, placeholders, cells, blank spaces or any other elements on a web site. It is very useful for designers, when you are trying to squeeze something into that last pixel, especially on WordPress blogs in the sidebar.

Extension link

5. AdBlock

One of the most popular all-around Chrome plug-ins. It made Firefox work faster and it makes Chrome run at lightning speeds. It will get rid of all the advertisement on websites and allow you to surf in peace, giving you faster page load speeds.

Extension link

6. Bit.ly plug-in

The most useful plug-in that I currently have installed. This one allows you to instantly shorten and share an address of a website to Twitter or to Facebook. Just click on the little bit.ly icon in the Chrome toolbar and it will do the job. Another fantastic feature of this plug-in is that when you are on Twitter.com you will get very little pop-up windows every time you hover your mouse cursor over a bit.ly (or most other shortened URLs) and you will be able to see how many clicks that link has, it’s full address where it takes you and a sentence or two of meta description. It also works like that when you hover over a persons @ name in the tweets – shows you a few sentences of description.

Extension link

7. Google Mail Checker

This plug-in displays a small icon Gmail envelope icon located right from the address bar (where all plug-in icons are implemented). Every time you get new e-mail, a number will appear next to the icon telling you how many unread e-mails you have. You could certainly live without this one but it’s very handy to have, especially for someone (like myself) that checks their e-mail every few minutes.

Extension link

8. Countdown & RemindMe

Not so popular but very useful little plug-in with a friendly interface. Countdown will let you set a countdown timer that will play a custom sound when it reaches zero. Very useful for people that spend a lot of time in Chrome and have a lot of work on their plate. I love this one!

The RemindMe plug-in is your simple note+alarm clock that is also useful if you have stuff to do, blogs to read, e-mails to send, RSS feeds to read.

Countdown extension link
RemindMe extension link

9. RSS Subscription Extension (by Google)

Official Google RSS subscription plug-in for which you will probably think: “Why isn’t this in Chrome by default?”. Well, maybe it will be in the future but for now it’s good to have it installed. It will show a little RSS icon next to the website addresses that have RSS and you will be able to subscribe to the feed by just clicking that single button.

Extension link

Conclusion

As far as I know, Chrome doesn’t notify you when there is an update available so be sure to update your browser. I had no idea I was a few versions behind and those versions didn’t have extension capabilities. Thanks for reading and don’t forget to share. The question of the week is: “What are your favorite Chrome plugins?”

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Spending additional time

If you are anything like me, you probably spend a few hours writing a blog post then another 30 minutes to up to an hour of submitting your new blog posts at various locations. The thing is, I don’t even use a lot of them and it takes up so much time. It would take up a lot more time if I decided to engage with the community a bit more, which I do as much as my free time permits.

Separating the good from the bad

Apparently it is easy to setup a social bookmarking website today. There are pre-made CMS systems and themese that can make it look very professional. Anyone can do it – but do you have what it takes to make it worth something on the Internet? Some people would say that there is no bad social bookmarking website, there is just exposure. Even if a social bookmarking website has 5 or 10 members, it’s some kind of exposure. So what is left to discuss?

The best way to determine if a social networking website is worth your time are the different categories in which you can submit an article. I find this hard to do on Digg – can never decide which category I want my submission in because they are so poorly segmented in my opinion. They definitely need mode categories.

Why are categories that important? Well they are – what good is your submission and millions of members if they can not find it. Picking the right category can mean the difference between your submitted article going viral or getting a few votes here and there. Don’t forget that next time you submit something to a social bookmarking website.

What’s so special about this one?

I’ve tried Digg and Reddit and they haven’t had a lot of good results for me. It is hard to get noticed on websites like that because there is so much good content moving around. My suggestion to you is to use less popular social bookmarking websites that are concentrated on your specific niche than on a bunch of topics. You have a better chance to get exposure and make new niche-buddies.

This is why I like Blogging Den. It’s small, simple and it’s like Digg but for bloggers! Another thing I like about it that is has all the right topics that I like to write about: Blogging, Making Money, Marketing, SEO, Design, Development, Content Management and even an Off beat section. Each topic is also segmented into more specific related themes.

Give it a shot

Why don’t you give it a shot and tell me how you like it in the comments? I hope you find it useful and thanks for reading!

You can give me your support on BloggerDen if you’d like. These are my articles that are currently submitted: http://www.bloggerden.com/user/history/McKnight

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Those are the kind of things that destroy social networks and communities in general. Alright, maybe the word “destroy” is a bit too harsh, but it makes me mad when I think of it. Today I am going to talk about traffic spikes and how to get them. I will try and teach you some of my methods and I hope you will benefit from my words.

My first traffic spike, ever!

It happened 5 days before Christmas 2009. and I was very excited about it. I woke up one morning and noticed the bandwidth usage on my server has gone from the average 10-50 MB per day to a few GB. First I thought I’ve been hit with some kind of virus, like the Black Plague or something. After checking my AwStats and Google Analyitics (like 5-6 times) I realized that I’ve been spiked! Thankfully, the server didn’t overload, lag out or anything like that.

It is important that I stress the satisfaction of this because you can draw motivation from my excitement. I know I did the same thing when I read about people freaking out about their traffic spikes on YouTube videos or single posts – posts that hit the front page of Digg or Reddit.

The “bad” news

I guess you can call it bad news because the traffic spike didn’t exactly happen on this blog but on another blog that I am admin of. Some of you might already know it as a Knowledge Reactor project, it’s called Cosmo’s Reviews and it is all about fresh news and new computer game reviews from the industry. Cosmo is the mastermind behind the content but things like blog infrastructure, marketing and promotions are my responsibility.

Which social network website was responsible?

It was StumbleUpon! There are a lot of people that think SU is useless because it is just so random. What I think is that there is a lot greater chance that someone will randomly stumble and thumb-up your article on SU than vote it up on Reddit or Digg unless directly linked. StumbleUpon is a great service you should definitely be using, especially if you are a newie blogger. With StumbleUpon, you would want to use their URL shortener called Su.pr which will display a SU bar on tool top of your article, making it easy to vote it up.

Important note: There is a rule on StumbleUpon where a user is not supposed to submit his own articles, only articles of others. I’m not sure how often they check that and ban people because of it but play it safe – find a StumbleBuddy!

What did I do?

Cosmo wrote the article and I submitted it to StumbleUpon. The interesting thing is, the article was submitted over a month before it spiked and received very little popularity until then. There is absolutely nothing special I did, just clicked the submit button and the content did the rest.

Contrary to what some people think, spamming social networks with your own content submissions is not the way to go. What is more important is, friendships, connections and communities. When you connect with people, they will help you out and Tweet your new blog post, submit your article to Reddit or Digg, submit it to StumbleUpon. When you have friends who care, you are free to spend less time on marketing and more time on writing amazing content!

Time for some tables and graphs

Another thing that might motivate you to write good content and do it the right way, like I’d like to believe I am doing is showing you some raw success stats – so here we go:

Google Analytics stats for Cosmo's Reviews from 13th Dec to 30 Dec

On this image you can see that before the spike, the average visitors per day was around 10 since the blog was only about a 2 months old and a new article hasn’t been posted for a week. On the 19th it started to spike up to 1,280 visitors and then up to 2,960 visitors on the 20th. After that huge peak it started to descend although what I found very interesting is that the number didn’t go back to an average of 10 but kept steady at 100 to 150 visits per day. Sometimes it even went up to 250, mostly when a new post was published.

Before I thought that spikes where pretty much useless because a lot of people that come to your site on a spike-day just “bounce” off it – don’t spend more than 10 seconds on your blog or website. I’ve always learned that a less related traffic is always better than more random traffic. Be as it may, some of the people stayed interested and started returning to the blog which was great.

Let’s see the traffic sources table next:

Google Analytics traffic sources table for Cosmo's Reviews

An absolutely huuuuge amount of visits from StumbleUpon – this screenshot was taken today. From looking at this table, I can safetly say that the spike was not just a spike but turned into a constant funnel of new traffic. The traffic spike from SU was only about 4,000 visits and it was 20 days ago. So I got more traffic from StumbleUpon for the next 20 after the spike than for the last 2 months of the blogs existence. I consider that as huge and I am happy about it even if I’m just the handy-man behind the scenes

The post that went viral on StumbleUpon currently has about 7,500 views from SU alone and it’s rising every day, still bringing in readers.

StumbleUpon Twitter hashtags

Next to the obvious #SU and #StumbleUpon Twitter has tags, there is also one I’d like to mention, promote and encourage my readers and their friends to use. The tag is called #USIS which stands for “You Stumble I Stumble”.

What does that hashtag actually mean? Well, when you tweet your new blog post title and link alongside this tag, other people using and monitoring it will see your tweet even if they are not following you. After they see it, they will click on your link (maybe) and submit your article to StumbleUpon. It is basically a small twitter hash-community of people who Stumble each others content since self-Stumbling can get you “banned”.

I am not the one that original thought it up, I’ve read it on a blog but I forgot which one (turns out it was http://www.sitesketch101.com/ ) - seems like a great idea and I’ve been using for about 2 months now. It has gone a bit inactive recently and that’s why I’m pointing you to it.

If you are still new to Twitter hashtags and don’t see the point in using them, or just don’t know how – check out my older post about Twitter hashtags!

Conclusion

Every topic that you write on your blog and which gets submitted to StumbleUpon has a good chance to go viral so be patient, write quality, don’t spam and you’ll strike your home run. I hope this article has helped point people to the right direction when it comes to promoting yourself on social networks. If you where doing the exact same thing as me for a longer period and you’ve not gotten any results so far, I hope this article has motivated you to work harder and be patient.

Hope you all have a nice week and don’t forget to share this post with your friends (and khm Stumble it khm ). Also, feel free to be my friend (aka subscriber) on StumbleUpon HERE.

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During all of my research I came to realize that the most successful headlines are the ones that:

1. promise a major benefit

Everyone is always looking for benefits. Whether they are material or intellectual, people want to better themselves and their existence. Writing a title that will let your readers know what kind of benefits they have if the read the article that is under it will give you good click results.

2. offer a solution to a problem

The Internet is like a all-in-one troubleshooting service where you can find solutions to almost every problem. People enjoy being independent, solving their own problems and not needing to pay anyone to do it for them. Some are just lazy and prefer to pay but a simple solution to a big problem is what people value the most.

Headlines that offer that solution are very interesting to a frustrated user that has spent hours trying to solve his problem. A lot of people would agree that problem solving websites tend to get the most traffic in the least period of time especially if they are free.

3. ask a question

Asking a simple question or your readers opinion can go a long way into building good a community around your blog or website. By allowing your blog to be a two-way communication conduit between yourself and individual users will help you build a stable following – even if they don’t subscribe to your mailing list or your RSS feed.

The kind of article titles will make your readers feel important and some might even take the next step by contributing with a guest post. A lot of good can come from discussions in comments and a lot of people draw inspiration from them.

4. quote a testimonial

There is nothing better to offer potential customer (or reader) than a quote from a previous satisfied customer. Although nobody can guarantee you that the testimonials that you read on thousands of sales sites are true, they still carry a lot of weight in the business world.

Be careful not to add any additional hype to your testimonial because although it can be a gold mine, untruthful and hard-to-believe testimonials can hurt your business and more importantly – your credibility.

5. call out a targeted crowd or profession

Starting a headline with a profession on which your customers or readers are based on will grab their attention because they will feel called out.

Headlines such a:

“Bloggers! Learn From Other People’s Copywriting Mistakes!”

“Freelancers! Check Out Our New Project Management System!”

“Single working moms! How To Find The Right Babysitter?”

let your readers know which user group you are basing your article on.

I like this one especially because it looks to me like it might improve the “Average Time Spent On Site”. It will clearly state that this article is mainly for bloggers (and anyone else who is interested of course) and if people are not interested in blogging, will not click.

6. announce some news

People using the Internet for a specific profession like blogging for example like to stay well informed. A lot of people have written popular posts based on some piece of news they have came across faster than other people and wrote about it.

A recent example would be the release of WordPress 2.9 “Carmen”. You saw hundreds of blogs writing about it, the news, features and fixes. But the ones that profited most are the ones that where first to publish their posts. This works in very much the same way in most professions that deal with any kind of information.

The great thing about writing a fresh piece of news is that most readers won’t bother to write about the news themselves but will rather just re-tweet your own post spread the news. This will help you get a lot of exposure, maybe even more than with a regular non-news post.

Conclusion

A combination of a few of these techniques will spark the flare of interest in your readers. Make sure you stay as original as you can and don’t make EVERY post a spotlight grabber as it will look cheap and kinda hyperactive.

I hope this article helps you attract many more clicks in your future copywriting endeavours. As always, I would love to read about your results in the comments. If anyone has any other good advice, feel free to share!

Related posts:

1. 6 Ways to Write Better Than Chuck Norris

Default WordPress scheduled publishing

Most bloggers that use WordPress already know about the post scheduling option. Most CMS platform have this feature as well, like for example I know Joomla has it.

In addition to explaining the obvious post scheduling option in WordPress I am going to give you some advice on how to do it with Twitter as well. Twitter and blogging have become an inseparable couple and you should definitely be using it if you’re not already.

WordPress post publish box

Every time you add a new post in WordPress, you will see a standard “Publish” box on your right sidebar at the top – unless you have moved it somewhere from the default location. This box allows you to save your currently written text in a draft for further editing, preview your post, change your post visibility and tell WordPress whether to publish your post immediately or at a scheduled date and time.

By clicking on the Edit link, you will be able to change the date and time when you would like your post to be published. Lets say you want to publish a post on the 25th of December at noon. You would set “Dec 25, 2009 @ 12:00″ and press the blue Publish button.

Shortening your post URL before it is published

After your post is published you will want to tweet it on Twitter as well. I don’t like to use auto-tweeting plug-ins for WordPress because I always prefer looking at my post after I publish it and before I tweet it so that I am sure everything looks OK. Another reason why I don’t use auto-tweeting plugins is because I like to add hashtags to my tweets and customize them a bit every time.

Before your post is published, you know exactly what it’s URL address will be by looking at the permalink option above the post editing toolbar. You can also click on the “Edit” button if your permalink is longer to see it’s structure.

WordPress permalink

In order to shorten your post address you will need a URL shortening service such as tinyurl.com, bit.ly or my personal favourite su.pr – the shortener that StumbleUpon uses.

Su.pr can also allow you to schedule a tweet right after you shorten it although it only has the option to schedule a tweet for within the next 13 days from the current day.

Su.pr URL shortener and poster

Scheduling tweets via Twitter browser clients

The best method for scheduling tweets and re-tweets would be various Twitter browser applications such as HootSuite and CoTweet. I am a big fan of CoTweet, I use it quite often to manage a few Twitter accounts that I own. What’s so great about it that it’s very simple without a lot of fancy features (unlike HootSuite) and allows you to have more than one person access and tweet from the accounts at the same time.

CoTweet "Post Update" box

Don’t forget that you CAN schedule more tweets about the same blog post. There is a fine line between marketing and spam and you have the right to advertise your content. Scheduling 1 original “New Blog Post: link” tweet along with 2 follow-up tweets about the same post only with hashtags and a different sentence structure is just fine.

Summary of the scheduling procedure

- Write a blog post
- Schedule the post for publishing
- Shorten the future post URL
- Schedule the tweet a few minutes after the post publish time that you have set
- Schedule a few more tweets of the same post (it’s link) with differently structured sentences and hashtags. (I usually write the first tweet as “New Blog post: link” second re-tweet is the same, third is “In case you missed it: link”, forth is “Read something about link”) Variety will make it look less like spam.

That’s about it! Repeat the process for every blog post you want to scheduel and enjoy your holidays! The only thing that you need to do is visit your blog once every few days and reply to some comments, let people know that you are still there.

The bad side of this method

It might look great and some people probably use scheduled publishing extensivly. But no matter how good your posts are and how great people think of them, it will hurt your credibility if they find out that your blog is just an automated robot. An automated robot that is programmed once a month with 5-6 posts and 10-20 re-tweets. Posting consistancy is important but so is social interaction with your readers.

Share this post with your bloging buddies and let them have some free time for these holidays as well! Have a great Christmas!

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What is branding?

Branding is basically the process of assigning an identity to your product or a single individual and then later using that identity in various marketing campaigns and promotions to build up credibility.

A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another. If the consumer (whether it’s a business, a buyer, a voter or a donor) doesn’t pay a premium, make a selection or spread the word, then no brand value exists for that consumer.

- Seth Godin’s definition of a brand

What are the benefits of branding?

Every company, both offline and online, should strive to make the perfect identity for themselves. Other than just working hard to improve their product or service, branding can go a long way into improving sales even if your product is not as good as the competition.

The most important thing in branding is being consistent. Using the same colors, the same fonts, the same logo, the same catch-phrase. You want your identity to be recognizable by just looking at the color combinations and not even trying to read the text.

When you manage to turn your company logo, your personal name, surname or photo associated with the words “quality” or “success” – then you know you have done a good job.

Branding and blogging (example)

Let’s say you have a blog with great branding done on it. You continue to write good blog posts and you gain more and more readers/subscribers every day. Readers that trust you, that like and share your opinion. When they see your blogs name somewhere else on banners or they meet you on a forum and see read your name or signature links, they will associate you with quality and helpful content.

They will easily forgive you

One of the best benefits of having a recognizable brand is that your users/readers will easily forgive you if you make a mistake such as writing a low quality blog post or having some kind of manufacturing error on your physical product. They will not reach for the unsubscribe button as easily as they might when you are just somebody random and unknown without a recognizable identity. Having a excellent brand will not make up but a useless product or poor quality blog though.

Two types of online branding

When talking about existing online, there are two basic types of branding you can choose:

• personal branding
• personal branding with an alias
• company branding

Personal branding

When doing personal branding, an individual business owner or blogger chooses to brand his name alongside a photo of himself. He uses this name while commenting on other blogs, participating on forum and various other social networking websites.

Personal branding with an alias

Some bloggers or website owners that like to remain anonymous or if they have been using a certain alias for a long time, they might want to use that alias for branding. In some situations using an alias can be a good decision but it’s always better to not be anonymous. Check out my last post about The Importance Of Not Being Anonymous and find out why I think it’s better to use your read name instead of an alias..

Here are some examples of personal branding with and without aliases:

Head of the webspam team at Google, Matt Cutts (his blog) is a great example of personal branding without even having a logo, just the name itself.

Robb Sutton has a great thing going on with transforming his name into a stylish logo. Best way to do personal branding in my opinion.

Another blog I read is the David Shaw Blog which is another great and simple example of personal branding with your real name. Maybe not as stylish as Robb Sutton but still very effective.

Another simple and effective example of personal branding from my friend Ileane. I like this blog title because, compared to the other examples, the title is really a sentance that looks like an announcement: "Ms. Ileane Speaks!" that subconsciously demands attention.

18-year-old student and blogger Melvin Dichoso has another great example of personal branding with even a nice associative logo by his name. This is also a variation of using only your first name and not your entire name.

An "extreme" example of not using your entire name and maybe kinda going into the alias party of branding.

It is important to know that you don’t have to be a graphic artist to do good branding. Most of it is based on research and a good  and consistent catch-phrase can go a long way into improving your brand.

Company branding

If you have a business website or one which is run by a few people or a blog with a few friends, you will want to choose a name and logo that will represent your site online. I’ve came across some great examples in the last few months that I have been interested in branding and some of them have really WOW-ed.

So here are some examples of company branding that I would like to share with you:

One of the best, if not THE best example of online branding I have ever come across. This "Fat Cow Hosting" company has it all. They have this great cow mascot and an entire virtual world build around it. They invite visitors to join The Herd, they promise "good hosting, no bull", etc. Really a great job!

Brian Clark's Copyblogger is a simple and associative brand that everyone knows about. It is a blog about writing copy on blog and you can't miss it when you see the typewriter font even if it doesn't have a vector logo.

An excellent example of a clean and simple blog branding with a logo along with a 2-color scheme. This is great because even without the text, the logo itself would represent the blog.

An example of a sentence-like, color-scheme branding method with a nice catch phrase that makes it clear what the site is about.

It’s great to see an evolution of a brand. Jack Curtis from “Sequence Hosting” is doing a great job with the branding and re-branding of his hosting company website and I’m looking forward to seeing his results.

Branding and marketing

After a successful branding operation you will want to use your new brand for marketing as well. Like i mentioned before, it is very important to stay consistent with marketing material by using the same or similar color schemes. When each of your banners looks like it could represent a different company, then you know you have to go back to the drawing board.

Here are some useful links that can help you with branding:

Graphic Leftovers

Graphic Leftovers is a great stock site where you can buy among a lot of other graphic stuff, a great logo that can help you brand your product or website. The prices are quite low and if nothing else, some logos there can give you an idea to make your own. Besides logo designs, Graphic Leftovers can help you with hundreds of banner designs.

Graphic River

Graphicriver.net is one of the most popular stock graphics places on the Internet being a part of the also popular Envato marketplace chain. I’ve came across some fantastic and professional banner designs for affordable prices that can make a great difference in your branding. There are dozens of categories worth scrolling through so check it out!

Thanks for reading and sharing this post on your favourite social networking sites. I hope branding goes successful for you and that you have fun doing it! Feel free to ask and questions about branding in the comments because there is probably something I’ve missed.

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A laughing matter

I have always been a fan of humor and promoting stuff through it. It has proven to be very motivating and refreshing for me and people tell me I’m good at it. Next to teaching people, making them laugh is something I enjoy.

It is another great way to reach out to people and show them that you are also human like them. That you do not have any super powers that helped you succeed online or in any activity you are blogging or teaching about.

Humor is like fire, if you control it well, you won’t get burned and everything will be nice and warm. Letting yourself run out of control will make people frown upon your jokes and generally think “Who the heck does this guy thing he is?”. You do not want to turn yourself or your blog into a joke!

“Selling is a deadly serious business. So is buying. Always remember that your reader is on your site to do business. Not to be entertained.”

Make Your Words Sell! – Joe Robinson and Ken Evoy

Anonymous or not

There are tones of blogs out there and some of the authors might not be comfortable revealing their real photo or their name. I think it all depends on the subject and if you have a good reason to stay anonymous, you should, but it is a lot more beneficial if you don’t.

During the summer I have read good posts about anonymous blogging and there are two posts I’d like to share with you right now. Some of you may already know the author of the blog because she is a great inspiration to a lot. The first blog post is Being Anonymous Can Hurt You where Lisa talks about a woman with a blog about depression and how she didn’t want to reveal her real identity so that her family doesn’t find out about her problems from the Internet. The other one is more of a discussion about Should This Woman Blogger Be Anonymous?.

Both posts are a great read, especially the first one that shows the difference of before and after being anonymous. What’s your story?

Forum and blog-comment avatars

What kind of image should you use when commenting on a blog or participating in discussions on a forum? If it is a highly controlled, moderated or paid community, you should definitely provide an image of yourself.

It doesn’t have to be the one that you took on the beach with your belly sticking out or the one where you can make out your license plate number or home address from – there are nice ways you can make your photo secure but still be able to show yourself. Things like blur filters, black and white filters, gray scale filters and other monochromatic techniques.

If you are not yet using the fantastic service called Gravatar you should! What is Gravatar? It is short for Globally Recognized Avatar and it is basically an avatar (which you assign) that you can bind with your email address and every time you use that email address when commenting on a WordPress blog, your assigned avatar will appear next to your comment. There is a possibility to assign more avatars and bind them to different email addresses.

Those are just the few steps you can take to start being a member of your community and engaging with your readers.

We don’t need to know that about you, okay?

Now we address the issue of people being too informative about their personal lives. Some bloggers like to take a sharp turn away from their niche now and again and talk about their life, parents, family, travels … Ok it’s nice to know that your daughter just got her first tooth. But is your Internet marketing blog the right place for that information?

Having a 5-page “About Me” link will also make you look quite egocentric in my opinion.

The best approach for this would be just making another blog about yourself. Give people a chance to choose if they want to read about you or not. As much as being anonymous can hurt you, so can providing too much information about yourself. Learn how to balance it out and you will be one step closer to success.

Conclusion and question

I would like to finish this up with a question directed to the readers. The question is:

How do you deal with providing people information about yourself?

Having spent some time surfing and commenting on blogs in the last few months I have noticed that people usually pick one image of themselves and use that image EVERYWHERE. Is that good or is variety better?

No related posts.

No matter how much (or little) blogging you do, you should always be on the look-out for ways to improve your posts. Improving your posts means more visitors will actually read it instead of just skimming through your text. They might even subscribe to your feed as a result!

Here are 6 ways you will make even Chuck Norris scratch his head:

1. Learn to think like your reader

Whether you are writing a post on a blog or a landing page for your business website the single, most important thing you need to focus on is thinking like your reader.

Does your reader want to read more about you or about the product he is thinking of buying? Is he going to value hype or fact, theory or testimonials? Put yourself in his shoes and serve the right appetizer, main course and dessert.

2. Transform features into benefits

Readers visit your blog because they want to read something or download something that will benefit them. It can either be a piece of information or a freebie Photoshop brush, your visitors are looking for value.

The best way to show them that value is to saturate your posts with benefits. You don’t have to … but if you do write about a product or service, make sure you turn features into benefits.

I have found this to be especially useful for business websites promoting their products or for affiliate marketers.

If you are writing about a WordPress plug-in that will automatically delete spam comments – a feature for that would be “This plug-in will delete your spam comments automatically!” Try changing that into a benefit, like for example: “By deleting spam automatically, this plug-in will give you 30 extra minutes per day to work on your blog!”

You can do the same with any product, just focus on what the user gets from it and how it would change the way he or she lives/works/blogs/etc.

3. Poke readers in the eye with your headline

Use your imagination and try to combine unusual words that might make your post headline catchy but not obscure.

Here’s an example:

• Instead of “10 Mistakes That Bloggers Make” try using something like “10 Crimes Committed by Bloggers”

What is the main difference between the two blog titles? Which one would you be more likely to click?

Everyone knows that the first title is about mistakes that bloggers make. The mistakes could be while writing posts, making their blog templates, using copyrighted images.

The second one, on the other hand, can seem like a headline from a newspaper where someone got killed by an angry blogger right? People get excited, curious and really want to check it out. It’s as simple as that!

Another example you can learn from is the title I put together for this blog post. Chuck Norris has nothing to do with the world of blogging and copy-writing but he has become a synonym for being hardcore. It is that association that drove some people to this post.

You might even be one of those people that clicked the blog post link because you wanted to find out what Chuck has to do with writing copy. Turns out, nothing – but you learned something new didn’t you!?

NOTE: These headline tactics should never be used to mislead or trick your readers into visiting and seeing something TOTALLY unrelated! Overdoing it could be seriously counterproductive for your business or blog.

4. Make your text easy to scan

It is a busy world we live in and often people don’t have time to read through your entire blog post. Your job is to setup some sticky terrain for them to get “trapped” in and attract their interest.

Aside to writing eye-poking headlines, make sure your subheadings are also catchy. Pay special attention to the beginning of each of your paragraphs. Does the first sentence spark any interest in the reader? No? Think of what attracts your attention when scanning a blog.

A reader should be able to get the point (punchline) of your post by just reading your headings and subheadings.

Reveal just the right amount of information in your subheadings to interest your readers and they will stay!

5. Fragment your text

Reading text on the computer screen is half as fast than reading it from a piece of paper. How do you compensate for this? You split your post text into fragments with noticeable subheadings, then you split each fragment into 5-sentence paragraphs.

Splitting your text up into paragraphs and putting noticeable blank spaces between them will make your readers job easier.

Vary the length of your paragraphs and keep your sentences short! It makes it easier to read and navigate through the text.

Another thing to avoid is using justified text because nobody likes reading boxy chunks of text.

6. Keep your language simple

You want to provide useful information to your readers not stun them with your fabulous excessive knowledge of using superfluous verbs that will short circuit their neurons.

No!

The last thing you want to do is make your readers feel like they (or you) are from a different planet. In fact, you don’t want them to feel like that at all! Try to keep your blog posts formatted as a simple one-on-one conversation. One where you want to explain something to your friend and in which you are using the simplest examples and language.

Stick to the point and deliver your message!

If you can manage to follow these 6 simple steps, Chuck Norris won’t stand a chance – He might knock you out though…

Related posts:

1. 6 Most Successful Types Of Headlines