ROCKFUSE » Blogging

Does updating your blog more give you more visitors?

admin — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:36:15 +0000

I always wondered about this. And as any of you would think, I went for the seemingly obvious answer. That was of course before I tried investigating it myself. So did I change my perception about the whole thing? Did I end up with the conclusion that I was wrong? Well., to sum up my stand on this I would put it up this way.

Posting more definitely gives you more visitors, but it’s up to you to find out whether it’s worth the effort.

Before justifying my stand on this, let me tell you why posting more gives you more visitors.,

By posting more you’re creating content and the more content you have, more search engine traffic you will get. But it’s always not the best way to get traffic. Simply because, without doing sufficient seo, you’re not going to get much out of it at all. And creating good, quality content takes time, which can probably hinder your potential.

What if you can simply cut down your posting frequency and try promoting your content more prominently?

Let me give you a real life example. I used to post six or more times per week sometime before. My goal was to create as much content as possible. As a result I was putting aside good number of hours for this blog alone. But with time, I changed this approach and concentrated on creating content whenever I felt like I had something important to share. And I put that leftover time and used it to do more seo and social media promotion.

As the result, I’ve steadily improved my traffic and I did it within a fraction of the time that I used to commit to this blog, earlier than this.

But ultimately it all comes down to you. Like I said you should decide for yourself just how much is too much. Think about it and you just might save some of your valuable time.

Technorati Tags: posting more blog traffic posting frequency update blog blogging
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How you can Optimize your Blog Design to get more Subscribers

admin — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 16:12:52 +0000

Many bloggers have commended me for my blog design. Being a web designer myself, I have the privilege of quickly doing adjustments to my blog design, spicing it up from time to time. And this had proved to be extremely useful. And one of the major abilities a blog design can have is to convince it’s spectators to convert. Well, in this case, subscribe to my blog.

So, how exactly can you optimize you blog design to get more visitors? (Image Credit: Draggin)

Making the Blog Header as convincing as possible

I believe that the blog header in any blog plays the biggest role in giving out a first impression. And of course, first impression does the most when you’re trying to sell something.

As you can see, in ROCKFUSE, I have reserved a considerable amount of real-estate for the blog header. This is because I wanted to outline and highlight every major thing that I wanted my blog visitors to know in their first visit.

It is important that you give your visitors a clear view of your blog’s niche and what you blog about, in the most convincing method possible. So, I find it important mentioning a few pointers in the blog header that truly says what you blog is about.

However, the downside of nice blog headers is the amount of bandwidth it takes and the increased page load times. Of course, this can be improved to a certain extent if you just follow a few optimization tips.

Having the e-mail subscription form

More than half of my blog’s subscribers are e-mail subscribers. Which is really good. Why? Because, they have a solid subscription to ROCKFUSE and they are easier to be tracked.

I find that reserving the extra space needed to have an e-mail subscription form really pays off. It gives a straight-up impression that the visitor should subscribe by e-mail. And not to forget, some people barely have any knowledge of what RSS is so it’s really important you play it safe offering an e-mail subscription form too.

Of course, some would argue that having a simple button guiding you to the subscription form is enough. I do not disagree. But trust me, you’ll see better conversion rates with the extra effort you put into integrating a subscription form to your design.

Constantly reminding people to Subscribe

This really works. You may have seen the banner below all my posts. “If you find this post useful, why not subscribe?”. This can really get you those one-time visitors that came to your blog accidentally from a Google Search.

As if the subscribe buttons on my blog ain’t enough, you might say. True, but the secret of asserting something is to assert it until it registers in someone’s mind. Why do you think they run the same advertisement on TV multiple times?

Why Subscribe Section

I haven’t done this yet, but I do plan to in the future. It’s just a small simple page titled “Why Subscribe?” that people can click through and in which you can present your case – Why should you exactly subscribe to my blog.

I have talked to some bloggers who had great success with this. Basically, you should tell your audience the benefits of subscribing to your blog, in the minimum amount of words possible. Might seem like a bit out there, but, yeah, it works.

You really can’t expect all of your visitors to read that page. But, you have an opportunity to convert a good number of people that do.

Making your blog’s content more accessible

Although a good part of this article is focused on getting subscribers through methods that are merely assertive, the ultimate question at the end of the day – that a subscriber might ask is, how can I possibly benefit from subscribing to this blog? When that question is asked, you have to agree, so little can you justify with having an e-mail subscription form or a good blog design. People do not just subscribe because your blog design rocks right?

I believe the word I’m looking for is ‘content’.

Just think, of all the times you actually subscribed to a blog, have you ever done it without going through the blog’s content, or at least the most popular posts? At the end of the day, subscribers are after content and if you don’t deliver what you should, you will not convert new subscribers, nor would you keep the existing ones engaged.

To serve this purpose and this purpose only, I’ve done a few major things in my blog. I have put my categories on the top alongside the popular posts, and I have used excerpts in the homepage to make sure I can display more recent posts. And these things are really easy to do provided that you have some html/php knowledge to play around with your template.

I guess at the end of the day, you can’t sell anything without showcasing what you are selling.

Technorati Tags: rss subscribers e-mail subscription blog design optimize blogging
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24 Productivity Tips for Bloggers

admin — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 02:58:33 +0000

I often hear bloggers saying – “I have three blogs but I barely have to to even update one frequently”. Well, if you have a 9-5 job, it’s understandable. But sometimes, we just tend to think to ourselves – “Gosh! I’ve been in front of the computer the whole day, and I haven’t even done anything productive”.

So, do you have productivity issues with your blogging? Do you think you can do much better and much more with your time if you know how to do it? Well, today, these 24 Productivity tips for bloggers might help. They can save your time, energy, sanity and your money! In a nutshell, they can help you to become a more productive blogger.

Try to write a more than one post at once, as much as you can.
Moderate your blog comments at a specific time. Not every 5 minutes a comment gets posted.
Automate things that need to be frequently updated. Like Sitemaps.
Workout your blog posts’s structure before starting to blog.
Keep your IM Client, E-mail notifier and etc., offline while blogging.
If you’re a person who gets easily distracted, try blogging from a place where there are less disturbances.
If you can, have a specific time on your day to post to your blog/moderate comments and etc.
You can’t be on top of every social media site. Choose a specific number of communities you want to be a part of.
Don’t get carried away while creating content for your post. If you care about your time, be specific and concise.
Take enough time to analyze your blog statistics. But don’t do it 5 times a day.
Maintain a daily to-do list with realistic goals, and stick to it. We lose our time when we are trying to figure out what we want to do with our time.
Do the hardest thing on your to-do list as the first thing. Temporary motivational boost awaits…
The easiest way to get something done is to nuke it. Know which thing you can nuke to make more time when you’re short of it.
No matter how tempting reading RSS Feeds might be, don’t get carried away.
You don’t have to read every post that comes up, although you can learn something new from most of the things you read.
Let things slip-away if times become extremely rough and make up your mind. People can’t be 100% accurate.
If you feel like the juice is not worth the squeeze, throw away the fruit and get another.
Have a list of specific things you want to achieve within a specific week/month. Your daily to-do lists will be largely influenced by these.
If you look for images in your blog posts, use creative commons searches. Saves you time and gives you necessary permission to use them.
Do not multitask. You will lose the focus of both tasks at hand.
Do what you need to do. Not what’s fun.
Do frequent value assessments on your doings. If something doesn’t create value – to the extent that you’d like to, it’s better left undone.
Be specific in your blog chores for the day. Instead of saying I will do 2 posts today, try to incorporate the length, the title and when you’re going to do it.
If you’ve got a great idea for a post, write it somewhere visible and look at it from time to time. This will give you more ideas to further improve a great idea.

Please contribute if you’ve got any more productivity tips. If you picked up something new, good luck with implementing that. Let me know how it went.

Technorati Tags: productivity, bloggers, blogs, posting, batch processing, moderate comments, automate,analyze, read rss, accuracy, blogging
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