Archive for Blogging Tips

How to gain RSS subscribers

Getting more subscribers to your blog is something that will occur if you are successful with all aspects of what are considered good blogging practice. If you have good content, and you get a lot of traffic, you are going to get more subscribers. However, here are a few tips that will help you improve your conversion rate:

Have an RSS button, and place it in an obvious location “above the scroll”.

Always offer a full feed, excerpts are annoying.

Use a subscriber count only if you have over 100 subscribers. A feed burner subscriber counter is a great way to show the visitors how many or how few readers you have.

Avoid putting in too many buttons, it may become annoying. Make sure it is obvious, but don’t rub it in your reader’s face.

Offer bonuses to only feed subscribers. Have a link to something free…

Google is receiving a lot of negative publicity in the blogosphere recently, mostly relating to the god-like status which it holds in the search market, and in particular for its hypocritical attitude towards paid links. I agree that much of this criticism is justified, but I also feel that Google make some great applications that are well worth using. Here are all of the Google tools which are useful to bloggers:

Google RSS Reader is a very good tool for following the feeds of your favorite blogs. It’s fast, and because feeds are cached on Google servers you can assess the content even if the a blog’s server is down. It does take a while for content to appear on Google reader after it is posted for smaller blogs, but overall it is a great app for organizing your feeds.

Google Analytics is a tool for tracking statistics on your blog. How many unique…

Looking back at the lessons you have learnt from blogging, if could give yourself advice when you were starting out, what would you say? That does sound like a very teacher-ish question, apologies. Darren from Problogger is celebrating his 3rd birthday….I mean the blog is celebrating its 3rd birthday. He is giving away a lot of cool prizes, and all you have to do is write about blogging tips. Seeing as that is one of my main focuses here, that is not too difficult. You may have read some of these before.

Advice:

Write articles not blog posts. I try to create as much timeless content as possible. I like the thought that all the work I do is ultimately creating a resource. If you have 50 articles which are all a resource in their own right, then you have something that is of value. Where as, if you have 50 blog posts…

This article is a summary of some of the best articles and content I have read recently.

Taking a look at the subscriber count of “I love Typography” I am one of many people who are loving this fresh new blog. Great stuff:  15 Excellent Examples of Web Typography.

Tara from Graphic Design Blog also posts about Typographic Inspiration.

Blog Strom discusses Why “Real” People think Digg Sucks. This article is interesting stuff. How often do you find dead links on the homepage of Digg. Lately digg’s success seems to be it’s worst enemy.

Dosh Dosh gives advice on How to get repeat visitors to your website. Some useful points taken from the article:

Is your site populated enough to encourage participation?
How does your site feel to 10 random people who have never visited it?
Are you providing information that is coherent with your search keywords?
Does your website project a unique, familiar and identifiable voice?

Sarah from Bluejar.com gives a…

_{Sources of icons: IE & Firefox}

After reading Donna from Blogging Tips article about how it is Ok to be a StatsAHolic, I have decided to embrace my stat watching habit and post about one of them, reader’s browsers. What browser are most of your users using?

Pingable Browser Percentages

81.62% - Firefox
12.67% - Internet Explorer
03.43% - Safari
01.19% - Opera

 

What Might Browser Stat’s Suggest About Your Blog?

More technical savvy users are more likely not to be using Internet Explorer. So if your topic is related to a technical subject, you should expect that most of your readers will be using a Non-IE browser. If your stat’s show a different picture then maybe your readers aren’t who you thought. Although you should be careful about reading too much into these sorts of figures, it may give you something to think about.

Why Should You Use Firefox?

After looking at the figures above I feel like I am preaching to the converted, but…