Archives for 2007

The Web Professor hands out three great tips on making your [tag]blog[/tag] more successful.

1. Use images in your post. It engages the reader. I agree 100% I am guilty of not posting pictures sometimes, but I try. If I do not use an image, I will often post youtube videos that are relevant to the post. On this blog, I post original youtube videos. On the other blogs I manage, we generally use other people’s videos. Again, as long as they are relevant to the topic, we will use them in a post.

2. Post on a regular basis. This is the core of your success or failure. If you post randomly every couple of days or weeks, your blog will not grow. Period. Look at all the successful [tag]bloggers[/tag], they are posting engaging original content, usually daily. Some bloggers post several times a day, every day!

3. Publish your full [tag]RSS feed[/tag]. Stop making your readers click! I agree. It is very annoying when people do not publish their full feed. (Unless it’s a paid content site.) I have hundreds of blogs I subscribe to and read on a daily basis, using my browser feed reader. I use flock to aggregate all my blog feeds into one central source. If a site requires me to click out to read the full post, I rarely will. It really comes down to time. I am trying to get through a large volume of data and if asked to take an extra step, it slows the whole process down.

Think of the Visa commercials where everyone is paying for their lunch with their debt card and everything is running like a well-oiled machine. Then some one pays cash and the whole process comes to a grinding stop. I feel this way when sites don’t publish the full feed.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hXmyD9a4zg[/youtube]

Case in point, I came across the site copywriting.com and thought it was an awesome site full of excellent resources and advice. I liked it so much I added it to my daily feeds I read. Only to find out later they only publish a partial feed. The result is I rarely read his posts and almost never click out to his blog. It’s a shame because I really enjoyed his site. It’s nothing personal, it’s just a matter of time and effort for me.

I prune my feeds once a month and blogs that only post excerpts are short lived.