Enrichment Depot – Profiting on the Net

Inspiration strikes in strange ways; in this case, I reached the end of Neil Patel’s excellent article covering 13 questions you should ask yourself while writing a blog post. In his discussion of the last question, he compared a blog post to a restaurant meal. Will your reader complain about your blog post because you’ve served them skimpy fare? Are you feeding people content so they are full when they leave your site…or are they hungry, looking for more? Patel asked. If they are still hungry, your readers probably won’t come back. So if your readers are devouring your blog content, th…
SEO Chat – Search Engine Optimization Tutorials

Tags: Blogs, Feed, Readers, Well

This is a guest post by Gregory Ciotti.

So, your content marketing and blogging efforts are falling flat on their face, are they? Your posts must be terrible. They aren’t getting shared or read by anyone, so they must be garbage…

Or maybe you just don’t know how to catch people’s attention.

When it comes to creating highly popular, viral posts for marketing and blog promotion purposes, we all know that the cornerstone is amazing content and excellent information. We also all know the importance of getting traffic to our blogs in order to convert people over to subscribers and potential customers. That’s nothing new.

But did you know that there are four ways to change your posts on-site to further fuel the viral fire?

Most likely, you are already writing awesome posts, and the only reason that they aren’t getting read is because nobody is enticed enough to click through.

Without a single additional guest post or traffic generating method, you can increase the virility of your blogs posts and content marketing efforts with the simplest of changes: what you name them.

Creating headlines that nobody can resist

The biggest change you can make on-site to get your posts to go viral is to make sure people are actually clicking on them.

That sounds basic, but so few bloggers and content marketers pay close attention to post titles when, in reality, it can be the most important part of the post … at least when it comes to getting people to read it.

Your headline is your first impression, and if you don’t get it right, people are going to pass over even the most excellent of content—all because you lost them at the start. As a blogger or an entrepreneur, it is time for you to stop letting that happen.

So what are the four best ways to structure your titles to ensure your posts go viral?

1. The “intrigue” style headline

This is the headline that makes people do a double take when they read it. That makes them wonder, “What is this guy/gal talking about? How can that even be possible?”

Intrigue is one of the most effective ways of creating a viral post.

Imagine this…

A person reads a post of yours that contains an intriguing title, and it gets them to click through.

Hopefully, you’ve backed up the post title with some really rewarding content (more on this later), and they read all the way to the bottom. Nice!

Now they share your post on Twitter. That same post title which you used to lure them in is now being spread across social networks, making followers everywhere wonder what the heck this post is about. They click through, and they read to the end.

Do you see where I’m going with this? The point is, intriguing titles generate clicks, and once they are shared, they create even more buzz and interest as people head over to your blog to see what the heck it is you’re on about.

ProBlogger Examples:

• How To Generate Massive Traffic, Excitement, and Even Jealousy with a Hollywood Style Launch Trailer
• The Best Blog Growth Strategy is to Say Thank You… a Lot!

2. The “finality” style headline

There are a few more great styles of headlines that generate similar levels of interest, beyond the “intrigue” style headline.

One of my favorites is the “finality” style headline. These are the headlines that consist of phrases like, “The Ultimate Guide,” or “The Only Guide You’ll Ever Need.”

Again, if you can deliver once a person has clicked, you’re almost guaranteed a share or a subscriber, because you’ve already conquered a huge part of the battle: getting the reader’s attention.

Using terms like “complete”, “ultimate”, and “essential” will inform a reader that hey, it’s okay that you passed on those other posts on this subject, because here is what you need to know.

The idea that they might be able to get everything they need from only your post is one of the most powerful forms of enticement in getting readers to click on your post. Again, when they read through and share it, your post title is already so dominant that people who see it will be hard-pressed to pass it up, and you’ll be primed for your post to go viral.

ProBlogger Examples:

• The Blogger’s Ultimate Guide To YouTube Success
• The Ultimate Guide To Professional Product Review Pitches

3. The “topic + hype” style headline

This is one of the easiest styles to follow, and it is probably the best one for SEO and getting ranked in search engines for tough terms.

This style is literally as it is described: put the topic first, preferably optimized for popular search terms, and then hype the post with a description.

I did this exact thing on my guide for Facebook marketing, which targets that specific term, but gets people to click by giving a detailed example (that is, how I got 6,683+ Facebook fans).

Typically speaking, you are going to catch people’s attention with the topic, then guarantee the click with an exciting, descriptive line that is magnetic for clicks.

For instance, if I wrote an article about guest blogging, I could name it, “Guest Blogging: How I Got 1,000+ Subscribers From Nothing But Guest Posts.”

This aims to rank for the term guest blogging, shows readers what it’s about, and after the colon, builds excitement: people are going to wonder how I got 1,000 subscribers from nothing other than guest blogging, and will click through to find out.

Just make sure you deliver on the hype, or you’ll leave readers disappointed!

ProBlogger Examples:

• AdSense Tips For Bloggers 3: An Equation For Success
• Introduction to Autoresponders – How To Use Them to Drive Traffic and Profit

4. The “list post” style headline

Ah, the infamous “list post.” A huge majority of the most viral posts are list posts, and it’s no wonder why: lists posts are easily browsed, enticing to read (because they guarantee order and a cohesive list), and the most shareable type of post in the blogosphere.

List posts subconsciously promise readers that they will be able to get through the post easily, and if not, they can bookmark and come back later, because hey, it’s an easy-to-follow list!

Lists posts are powerful both as posts on your own blog and for when you pursue guest blogging, because of this accessibility.

As an example, you are obviously reading a list post this very instant! I knew that readers of the ProBlogger blog would appreciate being able to browse my post just in case they didn’t want to make the full investment to read all the way through. I wrote it in the list style to make it more accessible to readers who haven’t heard of me before.

Rounding off your numbers seems to work well with list posts, especially when you get into bigger numbers: if you can, try to hit 10, 25, or 50, and if applicable, include the +, such as “25+ Ways To Guarantee People Will Love Your Next Guest Post.”

ProBlogger Examples:

• 10 Tips For Using Affiliate Programs On Your Blog
• 10 Writing Mistakes That Will Guarantee Your Blog’s Failure
• 3 Ways to Reduce Bounce Rate and Increase Conversions

Over to you

What is your favorite style of post to draw attention? What types of posts do you feel have the most “viral” potential? What is your favorite type to write on your own blog? How about for guest posts?

See you in the comments!

Gregory Ciotti owns Sparring Mind. Are you using WordPress in your content marketing efforts for your blog or business? You definitely need to check out Sparring Mind, the content marketing blog that shows you it doesn’t take a tech geek to build an amazing WordPress blog with outstanding content.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

4 Post Headlines that are Guaranteed to Get Readers Excited

ProBlogger Blog Tips

Tags: Excited, Guaranteed, Headlines, Post, Readers

This guest post is by Bnonn of Attentionthievery.info.

You may not realize it, but the font settings on your blog can have a huge effect on how many people read your content.

And how many people read your content has a huge effect on whether a post goes viral.

How huge? Well, by some accounts I’ve read, just one common mistake with colors could reduce readership by a factor of five. And if you’re not making that mistake, you’re probably making at least one of four others. So in this article, I’ll give you the five most important best practices for presenting text to keep readers glued to your content, and away from the old back button.

Font size—16px minimum

At the very top of the the pile of legibility problems is font size. Back in 2005, Jakob Nielsen reported that in a survey of web design problems, bad fonts got nearly twice as many votes as the next contender—with two-thirds of voters complaining about small font sizes.

Sadly, nothing has changed since then. A random sampling of new blog designs at SiteInspire (a web design gallery showcasing the best of the best designs) shows that the average font size for body copy is 12 pixels. Some as low as ten pixels. None over 14 pixels. Similarly, if you randomly sample offerings from the popular Elegant Themes or ThemeForest, you’ll find that every single theme sets post content at 12 or 13 pixels.

And of course, other theme creators tend to follow the lead of the bigwigs.

But as usability and typography expert Oliver Reichenstein of Information Architects points out, 16 pixels is the font size that browsers were intended to display by default—and it is not big. 16px text on an average screen looks about the same size as 12-point text in print. That’s the default size for most magazines, as well as all word processors, because it’s the size people find most comfortable to read. Many people—especially those over 40—find it very difficult to read smaller text. As Reichenstein observes:

There is no reason for squeezing so much information onto the screen. It’s just a stupid collective mistake that dates back to a time when screens were really, really small … At first, you’ll be shocked how big the default text is. But after a day, you won’t want to see anything smaller than 100% font-size for the main text. It looks big at first, but once you use it you quickly realize why all browser makers chose this as the default text size.

Use dark on light text—reversed is no good

Fortunately we’ve pretty much moved past the days when content authors thought that fuchsia on blue text was cool. But white on black text, known as reversed type, is still pretty common. As are variants like white on some other dark color.

Reversed type reduces not only the number of people who’ll bother to read your content, but also their comprehension of it. This is because it strains the eyes. Staring at reversed text for an extended period tends to create a kind of “glare” effect, where you feel like the letters are too bright to look at. Depending on what research you consult, studies show that light on dark text reduces your readership between 50% and 400%.

Why risk losing so many readers? Black or very dark gray on white looks clean, and there are plenty of great themes that use those colors.

Line width—45 to 75 characters

Here’s another little-known rule that a lot of blogs break. In order for your eye to easily follow one line to the next, you want no more than 75 characters in each line. This is called the line measure. Beyond a measure of 75 characters, it’s hard to track the end of one line to the beginning of the next without getting lost.

On the other hand, if you have a measure of less than 45 characters your eye will get fatigued quickly, because you’ve barely started to read one line when you have to jump to the next. You feel like you never get a chance to rest.

For this reason, your ideal post content area will have lines of text about 60 characters long. Of course, you do also have to take aesthetics into account. On many blogs, the “ideal” measure leaves a huge gap on the right margin, or makes the text seem squished into a tiny area. I use a measure of around 70 characters on my own website for exactly that reason. But if you’re pushing past 80 characters, you’re reducing your readership—guaranteed.

Line height—130% or more

Fortunately this is a less common mistake. If you’re using a professional theme, you probably don’t need to worry.

To give you an example, I’ve set this paragraph at the default line height (also called leading, after the strips of lead used to separate lines of text on old printing presses). It feels cramped and uninviting to read, and it’s hard to follow the lines from one to the next because they blend into each other.

On the other hand, this paragraph is set with a line height of 200%—equivalent to double spacing in a word processor. I’m sure you’ll agree that the lines here feel way too disconnected from each other, and unless you’re submitting a research paper this is not the way to go.

Finally, this paragraph is set with a line height of 150%. That means that for every pixel of font size, there’s one and a half pixels of distance between the lines. This turns out to be pretty reliable sweet spot for most fonts you’re likely to use on a blog—but feel free to experiment between about 130% and 160% to see what works best for your own content.

The left margin—don’t break it

This last tip isn’t exactly a font issue. But it fits into the same general category. Bloggers routinely include images in their posts. Whether or not that’s really a good idea is a topic for another time—but for now, let me just give you one piece of advice.

The left margin is sacred. It’s how we track text down a page in the Western world. It’s the “ground” out of which the lines grow (often to quite different lengths), and it’s the foundation for our eyepath as we read down the page.

But if you break the left margin, that all goes to hell. Your eye has to scan around to try to pick up the new margin, so you can keep on reading.

In other words, every time you left-align an image, you put a speed-bump in your reader’s path. And you’re compounding the problem by dragging his attention away from the text with your visually dominant image. Needless to say, readers who keep being distracted and having to relocate the left margin often don’t read to the end of a post—so they often don’re share it or comment on it.

Bonus tip: drop caps increase readership

By “drop caps” I mean initial capitals, where the first letter of the first word of your post stands out much bigger than the rest. According to research conducted by Ogilvy & Mather, this increases readership of a piece by an average of 13%.

Drop caps aren’t built into most blog themes, and they can be tricky to do on the web, but if you’re up to a little coding, check out this tutorial on how to create them.

Five mistakes: which ones are you making?

Now is the time to head on back to your own blog and see which of these five important best practices you’re not practicing. Then, fixum! But don’t forget to share the changes you’ve made in the comments below!

Bnonn is the author of 25 free video lessons on how to turn visitors into customers—part of his conversion-optimization course ‘Attention-Thievery 101’. Known in the boroughs as the Information Highwayman, he helps small businesses sell more online by improving both their copy and design. When he’s not knee-deep in the guts of someone’s homepage, he is teaching his kids about steampunk, Nathan Fillion, and how to grapple a zombie without getting bit.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

5 Simple Font Changes to Boost Readers, Comments, and Shares on Your Blog

ProBlogger Blog Tips

Tags: Blog, Boost, Changes, Comments, Font, Readers, Shares, Simple

This guest post is by Kirsten Simmons of Personalized Productivity.

Imagine your dream customer.  The person who comments on every post, and opens every email you send.  The person who replies to your tweets and tells their friends about you on Facebook.  The person who immediately scrolls down your sales page to hit “Buy Now” without even reading through the pitch.

One of the best ways to cultivate these sorts of relationships (once you’ve got the whole write epic shit thing down) is to seed your posts with Easter eggs—obscure references that aren’t apparent to anyone who doesn’t know what you’re talking about.  The people who don’t get the reference are none the wiser, and the people that do love you all the more for including it.

“But Kirsten,” you say, “I don’t have an endless well of obscure knowledge to create my Easter eggs with!  Must I give up on ever using this valuable tip?”

Of course not!  The idea here is to connect with some of your readers on a higher, more personal level and help them relate to you as a fellow human instead of an untouchable expert.  Your Easter eggs don’t have to contain obscure references; you can use references to a common problem among your readers that you also struggle with yourself.

Let’s take productivity (unless you’re a productivity blogger, in which case you might want to go with something else).  If you’re like the vast majority of people, you’ve tried a boatload of different theories and systems, and most of them didn’t work.  You have difficulty finding the motivation and time to maintain your system, and you often let pieces of it slip until it’s so far off track that you have to scrap it and start over.  Your productivity is a niggling source of frustration, but you don’t really know why and you’re not sure how to go about fixing it.

(The reason you’re having trouble is because you’re working against your personality type and you need a system that’s in harmony with how your brain works.  But that’s not the point of this post.)

Guess what?  If you’re having so much trouble, that means your readers are likely having the same trouble.  So if you sprinkle your struggles into your blog posts as Easter eggs, your readers will respond just as if you’d made a reference to a 90s British anarchist punk band.  You’ve just proven you have something in common with them and hinted at a very human flaw to boot.

The result?  Instant connection and adoring fans.  And you didn’t even have to dig through Wikipedia to get there.

Nine months ago, Kirsten started wondering about the connections between personality type and productivity strategies.  She started digging through the library, and came out with a business on her hands!  Interested in learning more about the Productivity Personality theory?  Come visit Personalized Productivity and take our free quiz.  You’ll learn about your type and get specific tips to begin customizing your productivity strategies to your personality.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Add That Special Something That Makes Your Readers Adore You

ProBlogger Blog Tips

Tags: Adore, Makes, Readers, Something, Special

This guest post is by Ben Harack of the Vision of Earth project.

Regarding readers as fish, and bloggers as fisherman, might seem strange. Bear with me as I show you part of why I like the idea of blogging as being similar to fishing.

Those of you who are familiar with fishing know that getting the fish to bite the lure is only the first step of the process. A good yank from your end is often advisable in order to “set the hook”, ensuring that the fish will be less likely to escape.

A new reader to your page doesn’t have the hook set yet, in fact, they might not have bit at all. They might just be moving closer, perhaps to sniff the lure.

Modern media speed and information overload has caused readers to be more cautious with the way they spend their time reading or browsing. The fish might just swim in a bit closer to see if the lure looks tasty. If the lure looks dead or unappetizing the fish will likely swim on to find something more interesting.

Lure readers in

One of the major topics on ProBlogger lately has been social media. While search engines have been very important in the development of the Internet, social media has led a revolution in how we interact with content.

I feel that the onslaught of social media has exacerbated the short attention spans of Internet readers. Social media information tends to come in small bites. I feel that this evidenced by the naturally short nature of Facebook statuses, tweets, and news headlines on Digg, Reddit, and others.

How is it best to lure people in with social media? This website is absolutely full of tips on this subject. To capture the power of social media, I can honestly recommend reading about:

• Social media in general: The 5 Foundations of Social Media Success that No One Talks About
• Digg: 4 Ways I Compose Posts to Drive Millions of Pageviews to Blogs Through Digg
• Facebook:5 Ways I’m Using Facebook to Drive Traffic, Build Brand and Increase Reader Engagement
• LinkedIn: Top 10 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog Using LinkedIn
• Twitter: Top Ten Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Small Business Blog Using Twitter

In a recent post about the small size of tweets, Darren raised the idea of a possible swing towards long-form content. From his post, and my own experience in the area, I have concluded that social media tends to facilitate the creation of connectivity, conversation, and community around content of value.

For bloggers, the hub of our content tends to be our blogs and websites. Social media can be regarded to some extent as the cloud of human interaction around a website. Darren illustrates this well in his post Home Bases and Outposts – How I use Social Media in My Blogging.

It is important to note that social media is not just another outlet for your standard content. If you only use it to link directly back to your blog, you are missing out on most of its potential. Social media is primarily a conversation created around you and by you. Without your interaction, conversations will still happen, but they will progress without you being involved. A megaphone isn’t a good conversation partner. To create a strong following, you need to connect with the people who are interested in what you do.

In the world of social media, quality of communication is key. Being restricted to about 30 words per unit of communication means you have to make each one count. With practice and care, it is possible to show that brevity does not preclude quality. It is possible to convey great meaning with even a single tweet.

We live in the age of the sound bite, the slogan, and the catch-phrase. In order to tame the beast of social media, we need to master its language.

Set the hook

You can’t force people to read what is on your page, but you can certainly encourage them. You can’t force them to come back, but you can provide some good reasons why they might choose to.

The specific techniques that I try to use are:

• Blog titles: 15 Ways to Rework Your Next Blog Title
• Opening lines: 11 Ways to Open a Post and Get Reader Engagement
• Scannable text: Writing Blog Content – Make it Scannable
• Lists: 8 Reasons Why Lists are Good for Getting Traffic to your Blog

These tools cater to the tendencies of Internet readers. The intent is to grab their attention so that they will actually consume your content more fully rather than scanning it.

It is hard to set a dull hook. Sharpen your hook by making your website easier to navigate. Highlight your social media connections, and provide clearly visible ways for people to subscribe to your content or newsletter. Provide interactive elements such as contests and polls to generate additional interest.

I experimented recently with the creation of my own blog carnival called the Renewable Energy Review. Unfortunately as I found out, there is extremely little in the way of quality writing being pushed around the blogosphere on this topic. Our standards at Vision of Earth are high enough that only one article submitted thus far merited a link from us. This might sound harsh, but we have established standards of editing and fact-checking that are not matched outside of professional periodicals.

So what did I do? My team and I simply transitioned into creating a high-quality periodical of our own. Even with the publication so early in its life, we have noticed that it has already begun to draw some substantial interest. As a fledgling volunteer project/blog, we have been happy with the results.

More commonly, bloggers will write a series of posts on a topic to generate interest and subscribers. When people like what you write, and know that you will have more of it soon, they have an incentive to come back. All of the techniques for setting the hook eventually depend on you having content that is of value to readers to such an extent that they will come back again to experience more of it.

Eat your readers

Analogy taken too far? I think not!

Your readers consume your content, but you are the one who is attempting to make a living off them. If you are a Professional Blogger, the number and quality of your relationships with your readers are what literally put the food on your table.

Try to understand your readers and cultivate respect for them. Understand, because you may be fishing with the wrong lures or in the wrong part of the lake. Respect, because a genuine conversation requires some degree of shared positive regard.

Ben Harack is the leader of the Vision of Earth project, which attempts to study the key challenges facing society today. They publish on topics as wide-ranging as nuclear energy, ending poverty, and deliberate social change.

Post from: ProBlogger Blog Tips

Setting the Hook: Fishing for New Readers with Social Media Lures

ProBlogger Blog Tips

Tags: Fishing, Hook, Lures, Media, Readers, Setting, Social