Blog Tipz

Your readers hold a lot of faith in you and your properties (your blogs). If they find that you aren’t living up to their previous expectations, they’ll stop subscribing to your feed, un-follow you if you have a Twitter account connected to your blog, and stop visiting your blog for updates.

The people who hold the most faith in you are also the first to admit when you go wrong, and they will admit this either through a remark in your comments or email, and then by taking physical action (oversubscribing) when you don’t correct or amend your errors. Taking advantage of your readers can also have the same adverse affects.

When many people talk about leveraging your readers, they talk about sending them links to other products and pages that they may be a sponsor of or affiliated with. This is the incorrect way of doing it if you want to maintain your current level of subscribers. These affiliate landing pages don’t really work when you are trying to promote promote yourself in a good fashion.

No matter how you go about making money with your blog, you have to think about the effects of dong it for a long period of time. Thanking your sponsors (through any form of promotion) is being sent out to your readers, who either have to decide:

1. Will these links/this post benefit me?
2. Am I being targeted because I subscribed to or follow this blog?
3. Will this site continue doing this, and should I take advantage of this time to unsubscribe from the site?

All these thoughts are made within a matter of moments after a reader sees this type of material flooding their inbox, RSS reader, or Twitter feed. They don’t spend a whole lot of time looking over these choices – they are made rather abruptly.

Without readers, we’d all pretty much exist as we did ten, maybe fifteen years ago. There were websites. Few “blogs” existed, as what we now call RSS wasn’t really popular and few people had ever heard about it. In reality, most website owners had no idea how many people returned to their site unless they slowed down updates and looked at how their traffic dropped or remained the same. Many had no way of communicating with their most frequent visitors, as there was no way of determining this unless they created some type of newsletter or a “reader” sent them an email.

Today, through various social networking sites, it is more than possible to “take advantage of” your readers. But, this all has to be done in moderation and in a way that makes it possible to maintain your own reputation.

Take for instance, a promotion that you are running on your blog. Rather than sending out hourly updates, send out a single update once a day (or so) to inform your readers that time is winding down. It should be written in a friendly manner, rather than in a method that indicates that it is “spam” and should be avoided.

A mistake that I made recently when promoting my posts through Twitter was using an automated method to publish post links. It didn’t give followers any idea what the post was linking to other than the date, which could have left some followers wondering whether it was linking to spam. Now, I dropped the plugin that was allowing me to do that, and now I have full control of what goes out through the Twitter feed.

Finally, even though you are free to place a long list of ads in your feeds, this is also negative in your appearance. When a new subscriber sees 10% content and 90% ads in your feed, what will they think? Perhaps that you are trying to make the most money/revenue per feed subscriber as possible?

Ideally, you need to think ahead as to what the results could be when you relate yourself to particular advertisers and how you go about promoting items that your readers may think are “useless” e-books and related offers. You have to be sensible and realize that what you publish may be seen by thousands of different people who each have a different opinion.