One Improvement Per Week: Sending Out Guest Post Submissions

By on May 14, 2012
This entry is filed under Improving My Business.

Each week, I commit to doing one thing to improve my business. Not something that just keeps my business going – like writing articles, or answering e-mails – but something that materially makes it better. I hope you will join me in reading about my experiences, and then, by writing down one thing that will make your business better – and doing it.

So, I’ve talked a bit about why I have decided to start accepting guest posts. I haven’t talked much before about guest posting elsewhere though.

I have done two guest posts since launching my honest answer a year ago. One brought me virtually no traffic, another provided a great spike in pageviews for a good few days.

Both of the blogs on which I was published approached me.

And that’s where I’ve been going wrong, I’ve been too passive. I always read that guest posts are important, but I have been put off by reading poor guest posts on other blogs. I equated a few bad uses of the guest posting idea with all guest posting opportunities. And I was wrong.

So, as of today, I am focussing on writing excellent quality articles, and then giving them away. Yes, it sounds counter-intuitive, but it works. Give away your best stuff, and it will tempt people back to your site.

So far I have submitted two ‘pitches’. Let’s hope something comes of them!

 

By on May 14, 2012
This entry is filed under Improving My Business.

One Improvement Per Week: Increasing Comments

By on May 9, 2012
This entry is filed under Improving My Business and tagged .

My traffic might be going up, but one crucial aspect of successful blogging has been evading me – comments.

Comments are crucial to a blog, because it shows your community is involved. People who comment take ownership of your site, your vision, and your brand. A lack of comments is a clear indication that your blog is not taking off.

And, with the exception of when I entered writing competitions, I wasn’t receiving regular comments. I had the odd one here and there, but I wasn’t consistently getting comments on every post.

Most of the advice you see about commenting says to end your post with a question to your audience. You know the stuff – the laziest manifestation of this is the ‘what are your thoughts?’ mindlessly tacked onto the end of a post. I really wanted to avoid that. I had tried asking questions relating to the post, but when no-one responded I felt as though I was talking to myself, so somewhere along the way I stopped asking readers for their input. That was a mistake.

This week, I reintroduced questions at the end of my posts. The first one was when I asked readers for their help answering a question, and for book recommendations to help a questioner. I received two comments! Over the next few days, I posed a question at the end of every post. And each time, I got comments!

So, all this to say that the received wisdom is true. Pose a question, and, when you’ve got enough of an audience, someone will take the bate.

Anyone else have trouble getting regular comments? (See what I did there?!)

 

By on May 9, 2012
This entry is filed under Improving My Business and tagged .

One improvement per week: What is this site ABOUT?

By on May 7, 2012
This entry is filed under Improving My Business and tagged .

Each week, I commit to doing one thing to improve my business: the blog my honest answer. Not something that just keeps my business going – like writing articles, or answering e-mails – but something that materially makes it better. I hope you will join me in reading my experiences, and then, writing down one thing that will make your business better – and doing it.

This week I’m focussing on making it clear exactly what my site is about.

I’m getting a lot of visitors – but most of them aren’t sticking around. For some reason I am not converting them into subscribers and regular visitors. And I realized I might be getting a lot of short visits (bounces) because it’s not clear what the site is all about.

When people visit your site, you have a few seconds to make them understand what you are doing, and buy into it enough that they stick around. People are conditioned online to click click click. They’re also used to lots of poor quality or irrelevant content. So to make them stay on your site, you need to show them – very quickly – that you have something worth staying for.

To that end I decided to write a little ‘about’ section to go in  the sidebar. My ‘elevator speech’ if you will – one or two sentences which summed up the whole blog. The way I would describe it to a random guy I met in the elevator.

I wanted to communicate the following things:

  • That it’s an advice blog
  • That it’s different from the advice columns you usually read in the paper that are written by dear old ladies, and pander to the writer, without offering real world, actionable advice.
  • That I can be snarky.

I worked on it for a while, changing words and phrases. And here is what I came up with:

my honest answer is not an agony aunt: it’s more of an agony sister. Ask me a question and I’ll answer it: minus the sugar-coating, plus a bit of sass.

It summed up everything the site was about. Clear advice, from a young writer, without being patronising, with a bit of snark.

But instead of just putting it in a text widget in the sidebar, I really wanted it to stand out. So I designed a little ‘button’ of sorts. I used to use picnik for this kind of editing, but it’s closed. I found an excellent (and very similar) alternative called PicMonkey. Using that, I designed this:

#

As I have done here, I linked the image to my About page. With pictures or buttons like this, never leave the link as the WordPress default – all that will do is take your readers to a new page with nothing on it but the full-size image. If people are going to click on it, you want them to go somewhere useful.

By on May 7, 2012
This entry is filed under Improving My Business and tagged .

Monthly Blogging Report: April 2012

By on May 1, 2012
This entry is filed under Blogging Reports.

April was a fairly uneventful month. I had no guest posts published. I did embark on a blog training course though (more details towards the end of the course when I will do a full review for you all). The main thing it taught me was that I needed to focus on writing quality, helpful content.

So April saw an increase in time spent writing, and a decrease in time spent promoting my blog by commenting elsewhere. Consequently, my referral traffic was down. Overall traffic, however, continued on the upward trend for a sixth consecutive month!

This month I’ve decided to add commas to mark thousands in my stats reports, to make them more readable. This was never necessary before, so that must be a good sign.

WordPress Statistics

Page Views: 2,568 (Previous month: 2114 )

Best Day: 250 views (Previous month: 159 )

Best Week: 959 views (Previous month: 647 )

My best day was the best day of all time, save for that initial launch peak in June 2011. It even beat February’s huge guest post!

I have no idea why I had one week that was so great. Unfortunately I just cannot pinpoint a reason for it, so I’m unable to replicate it.

Google Statistics:

Page Views: 2,908 (Previous month: 2376)

Visitors: 1,631 (Previous month: 1340)

Unique Visitors: 1,156 (Previous month: 912)

Page Views per Visitor: 1.78 (Previous month: 1.77)

Average Time on Site: 2:26 (Previous month: 2:16)

Every single stat up!

48.25% Search Traffic

25.94% Referral Traffic
19.37% Direct Traffic
6.44% Campaigns (6.44% Campaigns)
Search traffic was up again, both as a proportion of total traffic, and also in absolute terms. Referrals, though falling in significance, also grew slightly in number.
Click throughs from my feed however (shown as campaigns), were down. Interestly though, combined with my direct traffic they made up just over 25% of total traffic. In March, direct traffic had been 13% and campaigns 11% – which puts their combined total at 24%. It was as if people weren’t clicking through, but coming directly.

Other stats:

Best Alexa Ranking of the month: 471,969 (Previous month 621,169 )

Worst Alexa Ranking of the month: 562,905 (Previous month: 986,192)

Page Rank: 1

Moz Rank: 4.58

Subscribers: hovering between 30 – 40.

The most important take away from this set of stats is that though my traffic is rising, my subscriber count is static. And that is a problem. It means people are coming to my site, but I am not convincing them to stick around. And the only way to do that is to provide high quality content. That has to be my main focus.

Targets

My main targets were:

  • Beat March in terms of pageviews.
  • Break 2250 views in a month if I can.
  • Hit 80 views per day, every day, Monday – Friday, for one week.
  • Reach 700 views in a week
  • Stay in the top 1,000,000 in Alexa rankings

I hit every target! Which I am really shocked by because it hasn’t felt like a great month. I think it’s because I had an exceptionally busy week at the beginning of the month, and in comparison the following weeks looked slow. Actually, they were just average, so combined with the good week, all the stats are still rising.

Targets for April

  • Beat April in terms of pageviews.
  • Break 3000 view in a month.
  • Hit 90 view per day, every day, Monday-Friday, for one week.
  • Hit 1000 views in a week.
  • Stay within the top 500,000 Alexa rankings

To be honest, I’m not sure I’ll meet any of these targets. Apart from the one good week, the remainder of April was fairly flat. If things carry on in that vein I will not reach any of these targets, except for maybe the Alexa rankings.

I’m sorry to sound disheartened – I shouldn’t when everything has gone up again for another month. I guess it’s just not happening as fast as I would like. my honest answer is coming up for a year old, and from everything I’ve read, this is when sites really start to take-off. It doesn’t feel like that is happening yet, or will be any time soon.

 

By on May 1, 2012
This entry is filed under Blogging Reports.

Advertise your Subscription Options

By on April 26, 2012
This entry is filed under Step By Step.

So, you should have already burned your RSS feed. Now you need to let people know it’s available so that they subscribe!

I advertise my various subscription options in the sidebar. You can see them at the top over there —–>

To do this, I designed a small logo in PicMonkey. It was a simple case of coloring a background, cropping it to a cirle, and then adding a . and some brackets )) as text. I used a logo available in PicMonkey for the e-mail version. I also used a t for twitter, and an f for facebook (only on my honest answer, I don’t use it on Grow a Blog). Here is what the finished logos look like:

 

 

To put them in the sidebar, I use a Text Widget. In your dashboard go to Appearance, Widget.

The code you need to put into the text widget is as follows:

<a href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/YOURFEEDNAME”><img src=”URL OF YOUR RSS PICTURE”></a>

<a href=”http://feedburner.google.com/FULL ADDRESS OF YOUR E-MAIL FEED”><img src=”URL OF YOUR EMAIL PICTURE”></a>

<a href=”https://twitter.com/#!/YOURTWITTERNAME”><img src=”URL OF YOUR TWITTER PICTURE”></a>

To get your feed address, go to http://feedburner.google.com and select ‘Edit Feed Details’. Then copy and paste your feed details into the above code.

To get the address for your e-mail subcription option, go to your feed address, and then select ‘Get [your feed name] delivered by e-mail’. The copy the URL from the address bar and paste it into the code above.

To get the URL of your picture, once it is uploaded, go to Media, Library, and click on ‘Show’ next to the relevant picture. You will see a URL which you need to highlight, and copy and paste as above.

Click save, and your pictures should appear in your sidebar! Make sure to click on the links and check that your readers are directed properly. And if you haven’t already, subscribe to your own feeds, so that you are the first to be aware of delivery or formatting prolems.

 

 

By on April 26, 2012
This entry is filed under Step By Step.

How to put Links into your Posts

By on April 23, 2012
This entry is filed under Quick Blogging Tips and tagged .

There are two ways to add a link into a WordPress post.

The link wizard

The easiest option is to use the button in the WordPress post editor. Highlight the text that you want to form the link. Then click on the linking button in the editing bar (it’s the chain picture highlighted gold here):

This will bring up the wizard. You can copy and paste an address into the URL line, and give it a title below. The title is what will show when people hover over the link with a mouse.

If you are linking from within your own blog, you can use the search otpion. If you don’t type anything in the box, it will simply show recent posts – just click on the post title and it will fill in the URL and title for you. Then click add link, and you’re done! The text you highlighted is now a link to the chosen URL.

Before publishing a post, be sure to Preview it and check that your links work. Nothing will lose you visitors as quickly as making the amateur mistake of having incorrect links.

Manually adding links

You can add a link quickly simply by adding code. However, you must be in the HTML view of your WordPress editor. This is the code you need:

<a href=”URL OF THE INTENDED DESTINATION”>WHAT YOU WANT THE LINK TO SAY</a>

You need to copy and paste the full URL of your destination in between the ” “. You must include http://

In between the > < put the words that you would like to create your link. Often this might be ‘here’ as in click here with ‘here’ as the link. I’d don’t recommend this. I find people are more likely to click on descriptive links, that tell them where they are going.

 

By on April 23, 2012
This entry is filed under Quick Blogging Tips and tagged .

Why I Finally Started Accepting Guest Posts (that aren’t really Guest Posts)

By on April 12, 2012
This entry is filed under Improving My Business.

Over the Easter Weekend, I took some time off from blogging.

I’ve only done this twice. Ever. And both times I have had an epiphany. So, what I’ve saying is, take a break. It’s so good for your creativity.

I did quickly check in on my post to make sure it had published correctly. It was a question from a reader about whether to follow their dreams of a career in journalism, or to do as their parents wanted and go to med school.

I advised that the reader should follow their dreams. It’s my default position. Living the life of our dreams is rarely as impossible as we make it out to be in our minds.

As I reread my answer, I lingered on a controversial sentence I had, in the end, decided to include. It was about living your life for your parents, and then, when they die, realizing that you are the one stuck living out their dreams. It read:

“sad as this is to say, one day they [your parents] will be gone. How will you feel if, when that happens, you are twenty years into a medical career you didn’t want, and there is no-one there to commend you for sticking at it?

I thought that forcing the reader to think about this scenario would make them realize how futile it is to live out other people’s ideals. Because, at the end of the day, you are all you have.

And I thought, wouldn’t it be great if I could illustrate this with an example. Someone who did exactly as their parents wanted, and then, after their death, was left hollow on two counts: firstly, because of their loss, and secondly, because their ‘victory’ in doing the right thing didn’t mean anything now their parents were gone.

Or what if I could find someone who had travelled their own path, in the face of parental dissaproval. Was it worth it? Would they do it again? Did their parents eventually come around?

S0, the idea of reader submissions was born. I would ask readers to share their experiences, their story. They could pick any question and answer I had written, and write their own response to it.

It ticked all the boxes: compelling content, a fresh perspective, community involvement. And, in return, I would link back to the writers blog, or publish anonymously if they wished.

I will bill these posts as responses to my current content, rather than completely independent guest posts. In fact, I wouldn’t even call them Guest Posts. That’s the biggest mistake people make.

In short, I wasn’t filling up my blog with free content. I can write enough by myself. I was engaging readers in a conversation. Opening things up to other view points, and real-life examples of how my advice might play out.

That’s the crucial thing about guest posts: they need to be adding more to your blog than they are taking away. Is that true for you?

By on April 12, 2012
This entry is filed under Improving My Business.

The Hidden Dangers of Guest Posts

By on April 11, 2012
This entry is filed under Quick Blogging Tips. | 1 Comment

I have very strong views on Guest Posts.

They can be a really good thing.

But they can also be a really bad thing.

On Guest Posting Elsewhere

This is almost always good for your blog. However, you should only be giving away free content to sites that are doing better than your site. A guest post is a way of marketing your site to new readers. Make sure all that effort is rewarded. Guest posting on a site with little or no traffic is a waste of time.

When you are offered a guest post on a site that is bigger than yours, remember, you have one chance to convert their readers, into your readers. Your article must be brilliant. Really. You should give away your best stuff, because that is what will bring you readers.

Common Mistakes When Guest Posting

People misunderstand the purpose of guest posting. It is to bring you traffic. So, on the day that you guest post elsewhere, don’t send all your regular readers over to that site. ‘Hey, I hope you’ll drop in a say hi, I’m guest posting today at…’.

That totally defeats the point. You’re trying to get their traffic to you, not the other way around.

Your blog should carry on as before. If anything, you definitely SHOULD post on the day your guest post is published, because when those new readers click over, you want them to have lots of great stuff to read.

So, don’t publish a short and poor quality article on your site the day your guest post is published. Especially not something about how you’re posting elsewhere. What’s the point in that?

On Accepting Guest Posts

I have just recently started to accept Submissions.

Notice I call them submissions, not Guest Posts. These people are contributing to my site. They are not taking over my site for a day.

I request good quality articles that relate to my content. It’s a way of starting a conversation, and promoting community involvement. It should also provide some great content – because even though I give lots of advice, illustrating that advice with real life ‘case studies’ will make my point more powerful.

Only accept guest posts if they are genuinely relevant to your site. If you can embed a link in the content to another article of yours, all the better. Don’t just let your friends have a field day on your site so you can have a day off. It’s better to publish no new content than to publish bad content, or off-topic content that dilutes your brand.

Common Mistakes When Posting Other People’s Work

The biggest mistake I see is so simple. In the title, people will write “Guest Post:” and the name of the other blogger.

When these articles land in my Reader, I delete them straight away. I didn’t even really realize I was doing this until recently, but at some point I must have decided that reading all these guest posts was a bad use of my time.

I have a micro-relationship with every single blog in my reader. So do your readers. They value you. They trust you. If you send them over to a different site that isn’t very good, you erode a tiny bit of that trust and good will.

Never ask your readers to do anything that won’t be of benefit to them. If you link them away from your site, you have to reward them with excellent content for the trouble. If you allow average writers to guest post on your site, your readers will value you slightly less.

However, despite my general dislike for guest posts, there is one site where I continually read, and in fact, look forward to guest posts: A Practical Wedding.

Why didn’t I delete these guest posts, like all the others? Because for over a year, I didn’t realize they were ‘Guest Posts’. I just thought they were article contributions from the APW community.

That is what you want. A committed community having a conversation on your blog.

So, don’t bill them as Guest Posts is what I’m saying. Make them a part of your regular content.

Finally, beware the Guest Post merry-go-round

I’ve mentioned before how much it annoys me when a small band of people incessantly guest post for one another.

It’s great that new bloggers out there are building little communities of friends. But, if you’ve already got someone on your blog roll, and you regularly comment on their articles, you will find that a lot of your readers already frequent both of your blogs. So the gain from doing a guest post on their site is minimal.

And don’t forget, guest posting, when done incorrectly, can be detrminental to a blog. It can look as though you can’t be bothered producing quality content. It can confuse readers as to who’s blog is who’s (especially if a group of you consistently guest post within one circle of blogging friends).

Don’t dilute your brand. Only allow guest posts if they really contribute something to your site and your readers.

By on April 11, 2012
This entry is filed under Quick Blogging Tips. | 1 Comment

Monthly Blogging Report: March 2012

By on April 10, 2012
This entry is filed under Blogging Reports.

With February showing my fifth consecutive month of growth in traffic, motivation was a lot easier to come by in March.

Whereas in October I had been trying a couple of new things, but only publishing 3 articles a week, now I wasn’t finding it hard to hit my goal of four – most weeks I was even exceeding it and publishing five questions and answers per week.

With a bit of momentum, everything seemed easier. My graphs showing traffic were so encouraging, for once. For months, my WordPress dashboard had only showed how I would never live up to the initial promise of June. Now, they were decidedly positive.

This bar chart shows weekly blog traffic. Each bar is one week. You can (finally!) see a clear upward trend.

The first third of the chart was in September, my worst month. You can see the week in October (week 43 I think) when I first started using an RSS reader to help me comment on other blogs. The stats for that week were easily double what I had acheived previously.

 

In March, I took a week long vacation. I knew that this would affect my stats, because I wouldn’t be able to comment elsewhere and promote the blog at all whilst I was away – we had no internet connection.

I set up posts to pulish each day whilst I was away. I can’t stress enough how important this is. I wasn’t particularly worried about missing comments as I was usually only getting a couple a week unless I entered some kind of writing competition (which I wouldn’t do whilst I was away).

I did manage to check in once, from a cafe with internet, and saw that my stats were thankfully holding quite steady. I had one comment, which I responded to.

Overall, I’m very glad I took a proper break from blogging, because inspiration really struck whilst I was away.

WordPress Statistics

Page Views: 2114 (Previous month: 1784)

Best Day: views 159 (Previous month: 217)

Best Week: 647 views (Previous month: 601)

All up except for Best day (but that due to a popular guest post in February).

Google Statistics:

Page Views: 2376 (Previous month: 2175)

Visitors: 1340 (Previous month: 1054)

Unique Visitors: 912 (Previous month: 712)

Page Views per Visitor: 1.77 (Previous month: 2.06)

Average Time on Site: 2:16 (Previous month: 2:45)

Page views per visitors was down, and I’m not sure why. I’ll be looking into that, but everything else was rising, so that’s good.

44.33% Search Traffic

30.82% Referral Traffic
13.36% Direct Traffic

11.49% Campaigns (11.49% Campaigns)

 

March was the first month that my search engine traffic overtook my referral traffic. This was really significant because it meant that search engines were respecting my quality content, and rewarding me with a higher ranking in their results.

I was initially worried that the search engine segment was growing because of a fall in referrals, but when I checked the data, absolute numbers of referalls were a little higher than February, and search engine traffic was way up.

Other stats:

Best Alexa Ranking of the month: 621,169 (Previous month 1,028,908)

Worst Alexa Ranking of the month: 986,192 (Previous month: 2,276,281)

Page Rank: 1

Moz Rank: 4.58

Subscribers: hovering between 30 – 40.

Note: Because the subscribers count is so erratic, I decided not to track it daily. It can be really disheartening to see how many you’ve lost! Instead, I check it regularly, and just note if I hit a new target – 20 subscribers, 30 subscribers, 40 subscribers etc.

The Alexa rank was this month’s big news. I broke into the top million on the very 1st of the month, and stayed there all of March! The top 600,000 also has a somewhat mythical status among bloggers as where the advertisers really get interested. But I’ve had nothing so far.

Targets

My main targets were:

  • Beat Febuary in terms of pageviews.
  • Break 2000 views in a month if I could.
  • Hit 70 views per day, every day, Monday – Friday, for one week.
  • Reach 600 views in a week again (I knew I was unlikely to beat that, since my weekly views had consistently been in the 400s since the guest post

I hit every target! Breaking 2000 views a month was a big milestone. June’s record month had felt like a millstone around my neck, so to have finally exceeded it was wondeful.

I only just made it – and wasn’t even sure I would until 29th of the month.

70 pageviews a day for a week Mon-Fri also only happened at the very end of the month.

But given that I had had one week away I was really pleased with March’s progress.

Targets for April

  • Beat March in terms of pageviews.
  • Break 2250 views in a month if I can.
  • Hit 80 views per day, every day, Monday – Friday, for one week.
  • Reach 700 views in a week
  • Stay in the top 1,000,000 in Alexa rankings

I these are quite ambitious, especially 2250 views in the month, which means as average of 75 per day, every day. Given that weekend are much slower, this means some consistently high stats are required for weekdays.

We’ll see how I go!

 

By on April 10, 2012
This entry is filed under Blogging Reports.

Creating an Archives page the Easy Way

By on April 9, 2012
This entry is filed under Quick Blogging Tips.

So, at the moment, I’m concentrating on improving access to my previous posts. I talked at length about WHY it’s important for people to be able to read your previous posts, so if you haven’t read that article, go and do it now, I’ll wait…

…OK, so now you know why you should do it, the question is how you should do it. I’ve already showed you how to order posts from old to new, so that people can read your whole blog in chronolical order, if they wish. But today I’m going to be talking about creating an Archive landing page.

A static page is just that – one page that doesn’t move. Remember your posts on your blog will gradually move further and further down the front page of your blog, and the onto the second and third pages and so on. A static page is one that never moves. Usually, they are also ‘tabs’ on a blog, although that depends on the theme you choose.

I wanted to have one dedicated ‘Archives’ page where people go to explore my older content. But how?

I came up with a quick workaround. It might not work for every theme, but it worked for mine.

Have you see your 404 page? It’s where your blog takes you when you try to go to a page or post that doesn’t exist. And it’s often full of useful information. Just to try visit a non-existant page in your blog, and see what happens. Here’s what happens at my honest answer: you get a ‘nothing found’ page.This is called a ’404′. It’s where every broken link and mistyped address on your blog will send readers.

As you can see, mine is packed with useful information – a search box, and the ability to click archives by month, category, or tag:

I checked this page out, and decided it was pretty much ideal as an ‘Archives’ page. So I found the part of my theme that generated this content, and I just copied it.

In my Dashboard, I selected ‘Appearance’ and then ‘Editor’ so that I could view my theme’s stylesheet. On the top left, I saw the page that controlled my 404 page – helpfully called 404 template! Every theme should have something similar:

I copied all of the text beneath ‘get_header’ and then pasted it into the HTML view of a new page document. It’s important to do it in the HTML tab, rather than the ‘Visual’ tab, or it won’t do anything. You might need to play around with it a bit. I deleted the text, ‘An error has occurred…’, and I also added in a bit of text with a link to sort my blog posts from oldest to newest. This is how my ‘Archives‘ page now looks:

I’m really pleased with the page – it has everything I need it to, and it didn’t involve working out how to code it all! Win.

 

By on April 9, 2012
This entry is filed under Quick Blogging Tips.

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