Top 5 Mistakes of a Blogger
By Sujan Patel with 1 Comment
With fifty nine millions blogs (according to technorati) there are bound to be tons of mistakes. Here are some common mistakes from bloggers that I’ve seen:
1. Spelling and Grammar
Take the time to edit your post and if possible have someone edit it before you try to have your visitors view it.
2. Generic
Customize your theme, personalize your writing, and simplify your navigation.
3. Irregular publishing
Post everyday, Post every week, or at least be post on a regular basis. So if you like posting Monday and Friday… then stick with it.
4. Inconstant
If your blog is about ninja turtles then write about ninja turtles.
5. No Biography
Take some time to make an about page. If I’m reading a blog on SEO, I would make sure the author is an SEO specialist rather than some 14 year old.
Now that you know some common mistakes, make sure that you don’t make any of them.
3 Ways To Increase RSS Subscribers
By Sujan Patel with 1 Comment
Increasing your RSS subscribers is pretty simple: write informative content, post on a regularly basis, and use proper tracking.
1. Informative Content
“The key to increasing traffic or increasing RSS subscribers is good content.†What exactly is good content? Let’s face it, not everyone can write well, the key is writing informatively. People now-a-days are information hungry… so feed their appetite. If you are a blogger that doesn’t have the best writing skills, but feel you have knowledge that would be helpful to others, you can write your information in list format. Keep writing and eventually you’ll become a better writer, practice makes perfect. Remember that although people are information hungry, they want to be able to access that information with ease. Therefore, the easier you make access to your information, the more people are likely to come back or subscribe to your blog.
2. Post Regularly
Writing daily would be the best, but not everyone has time to do so. Do a little planning and try to set aside time to write. If you are like me and don’t know when you’ll have time to write, then when you do have the time, write a few articles in one sitting. Do not post them all at once. Make it a habit to be consistent when you post. So if you post every other day at in the evening, then keep doing so. This way your readers know you didn’t abandon them. Remember…there are thousands of blogs that come and go, make sure your readers know you’re here to stay.
3. Tracking
Know yourself your audience. In the perfect world, you would know exactly who you are writing to before you write. However in reality, you only have a general idea of who your visitors are. This is why tracking is so important. You can know who your audience is with analytics software and who your RSS subscribers are with Feed Burner. Feed Burner gives you all the statistics of your subscribers and even allows you to optimize your feed. So now you know everything you could know about your visitors and subscribers except for how many you actually have. With Feed Burner you know how many subscribers, but if you are a Wordpress user you may have more than it actually shows. Use the feedburner plugin and it will redirect all your feeds that Wordpress automatically creates to your Feed Burner RSS feed. For the longest time I thought I had 12 subscribers, after I used this plugin it turned out it was really a few hundred subscribers.
3 More Ways To Increase RSS Subscribers
By Sujan Patel with No Comments
So you’ve read the first three ways to increase your RSS subscribers, and you want more, as everyone should. When blogging, you get so carried away in having rich content and a unique design that you forget about the basics. Here are a few fundamentals that you may have overlooked:
1. Standard RSS icon
There are thousands of RSS icons, but does your blog have a standard RSS icon? In an earlier post, I said “know your audienceâ€. Part of knowing your audience is keeping in mind that not all people recognize what your fancy RSS icon is. I faced this problem a few weeks back. I had a fancy blue icon that looked more like a background image and blended in with the theme. There is a reason why the standard RSS icon is bright orange. Also make sure it is not too small so that visitors don’t just scan over your site and miss it.
Example: Sewj.com
Previous RSS icon:
Two weeks ago my blog made it to the front page of Stumble Upon (buzz.stumbleupon.com) twice. This brought me over 6000 new visitors in a two day period and a few hundred each day after that. This usually should result in a huge increase in my subscribers. Since the icon blended right in with the theme, visitors passed right by it.
Current RSS icon:
I changed over to the standard RSS icon and with only 500-800 visitors a day. My subscriptions went through the roof. I had the same content and my RSS icon was located in the same location, however I just used the standard orange icon instead of the fancy blue one. Due to this simple alteration, my subscribers went from 48 to 100 overnight (0.1% of the visitors subscribed before, now 6.5% of the visitors are subscribing).
2. Offer another way to subscribe
Remember that RSS subscriptions are new and a lot of people either don’t know about RSS or prefer the old fashion email. Offer your visitors a way to subscribe through email, there are quite a few plugins that will let you do this. If you have Wordpress, you can use Subscribe2. This way you get that extra bit of subscribers that would have otherwise passed you by. It will do better if you place this alternative by your RSS icon.
3. RSS icon in clear view
I have seen hundreds of blogs suffering from this problem. They have the standard RSS icon, but it is either cluttered with links and/or on the bottom of the blog. The key to increasing subscribers is to have your RSS icon easily accessible. Do not make the visitors think, that’s what your content is for. Have it in an open space somewhere towards the top of your blog. Make sure to keep it the same location for every page of your site.
Example: Pronet Advertising
The boys at Pronet Advertising have the perfect example of both having an alternate way to subscribe and the RSS icon in clear view. How many subscribers do they have? Around three thousand!
Traffic Comparison: Digg vs. Stumble Upon
By Sujan Patel with No Comments
The following data compares traffic from Digg and Stumble Upon using Google Analytics. The first website was on the front page of Digg, while the second website was on buzz section of Stumble Upon. Both articles were YouTube videos with very little content.
Digg
The article was called “Top 10 Useless USB Gadgetsâ€. It was merely a Youtube video embedded on www.scubasewj.com (blog).
It made the front page of digg around noon and drove about 4700 visitors in 1 hour. The amount of visitors dropped drastically after the first hour. The average pageviews were only 1.15 and time spend was approximately 2 minutes. At the end of the day digg brought 32 new RSS subscribers (data not shown).
Stumble Upon
The article was called “How Italians Tell Timeâ€, it too was a Youtube video, embedded on this very blog.It made the buzz page for the humor section of Stumble Upon late night on 12-7-06. It drove about 4100 visitors in a 5 day period. Average pageviews were 1.55 and the time spent was about the same as the article on digg, 2 minutes. At the end of the first day RSS subscribers increased by 50 and continued to increase throughout the days. It peaked at 403 RSS subscribers.
Conclusion
Digg brought a ton of traffic but it was very short living and with most of the visitors looking at only one page. While Stumble Upon brought ton of traffic but spread out throughout a few days and more visitors looked at more than one page. Stumble also increased subscribers by a great deal.
This is information to keep in mind before using Digg or Stumble Upon to drive traffic to your website.
