While I have taken a break, I haven’t been inactive in reading lots of great posts from the community. This week, I share some of my favorite posts from the past week, including some that you may have missed.
I suggest you check them out or share your own posts in the comments area – all are much appreciated!
1. Blog Like a Cartoonist – Six Stunning Secrets to Help You Break Through Bloggers Block
Rather than using a lengthy post to describe this process, this post covers the main points in a cartoon format – very nice and creative!
2. Five Dimensions for the Growth of Your Blog (Series)
A great series of posts that you should check out if you want to become serious about blogging, covering numerous topics surrounding blogging.
Few would have been able to predict the growth of social networking sites like Twitter. Ultimately, they helped bloggers by bridging the gap between the site, the writer/publisher behind the site, and the community, or the readers who enjoy the site. When these sites were much smaller and more rarely used, the main method of communicating with the writer of a blog was through email or by leaving a comment. Now, with the social networking factor built in, you need to market to these sites, in addition to promoting your own site.
Like increasing subscribers, you’ll want to use a natural approach to increasing the number of followers you have. For example, you won’t want to simply follow everyone and hope they follow back, as you’ll have a low “engagement rank.” In other words, relatively few people will actually read your tweets and connect to you.
There are the dos and don’ts of web design, then there are the annoying aspects of site designs that make you simply want to cringe. They are all around us, and even I have occasionally forgotten about my visitors, and have resorted to using any of these tactics of increasing conversion rates. No matter what type of site you run, even if it is a blog, you should try to avoid these practices, as they drive traffic away from your site, and will result in lower conversion rates in the long-term.
A Background: Why These Are Used
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with making a little money from the time you spend developing your site. However, what’s wrong is when you plaster large call-to-actions across your site, destroying the focus of your website. Instead of grabbing the attention of your visitors to purchase whatever you may be selling or promoting, these vibrant “graphics” do nothing more than entice visitors away from your site—many will never return.
WooRank is a new service which will generate reports for your site. While there are plenty of services that can do this quite well, this one combines all the information into one convenient listing for your site. The service is completely free at this point, although premium services will become available in the future.
What may separate the service from other similar services is that the site will display a number of tips to help you improve your search engine ranking, on-site SEO, as well as the usability of your website.
It combines traffic information from Google Ad Planner, Google Trends, and Alexa, with figures that aren’t accurate (to say the least). Like many of the other tools like this, you might want to revert to the tracking methods already implemented on your site like Google Analytics or similar services.
The Structure Theme, designed by Muku Solutions and Jeff Milone I recently came across, and I instantly became a fan of it before even beginning to use it. I’ve been using it on one of my other sites, and I believe, with some minor CSS changes, it makes a great theme for bloggers who are interested in promoting their content. While it also features a clean and structured design, it may be “too simple” for some bloggers, despite featuring a back-end panel and different theme styles.
In order to use the theme, all you’ll need to do is provide your email address to the designers. Some may hesitate to do this, but you’ll need to provide it in order to get access to the theme – it is sent to you through your email address provided, and any new updates/new themes will be provided through the theme. It’s completely free, so this is a small cost to begin using the theme.
