Creating Buzz for Your Blog

Categories: Writing

When it comes to blogging, content drives traffic, leading to profits.  If profits are in your list of motives, then your main goal each day is to write and promote what you have published.  In some cases, simply writing content won’t help your blog expand and reach new levels.

One of the main things to remember is that content never comes free.  If you receive most of your traffic from Google, you obviously put time into creating links to your site or added keywords and content-rich information to your site.  On the other hand, if a large percentage of your traffic is direct, then you worked on branding, had content, and reached out to other “high profile” bloggers to help spread word about your site.  In all these cases, time was the leading method for growing your site.

Alternatives to taking this approach and promoting a select number of posts can help gain more for less time, and when time is valued higher than money for many people, spending cash to promote posts can be a good idea.

  1. Use traffic-generating widgets (Entrecard, Spottt, etc.) and use individual posts instead of your main blog URL in order to potentially gain more comments.
  2. Advertise on other bloggers’ blogs using a link back to the post, which may lead to a lower bounce rate - people who click on the ad may want to see a list of recent posts, so they travel to your homepage.  Disadvantage: Higher cost and lower return if visitors don’t find the post interesting, plus the ad may be running for a full month instead of a shorter period. 
  3. Purchase ads through AdSense, especially for posts that can lead to a good return (e.g. reviews of products, services) that wouldn’t normally receive a lot of traffic.  
  4. Uniqueness equals traffic and new subscribers.  Applying this principle to your posts, try something different, whether it simply be in the style that you write or the graphics you use when trying to get your point across.  When I look for qualities in blogs worth subscribing to, one of the main things I look at is the design of the site, number/quality/uniqueness of posts, and what character the author puts into his or her site.  
  5. Push your posts to other web services including Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, FriendFeed… and the list goes on.  The main point is to involve people who “follow” you, to let them know about your recent post.  
While there are dozens of alternatives ways to market individual posts, these are some of the best ways, some of which will drive thousands of new visitors to your blog should your post be worthwhile to other visitors.
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Good Language Doesn’t Determine Your Success

Categories: Writing

While I may be countering previous posts about the importance of knowing good English and writing, in this post I want to describe a few of the key benefits of being able to communicate in any language and form of communication.  No matter what region of the world you are from, you are given the opportunity (should you have access to it) communicate to the rest of the world through the Internet.  

Let’s apply this principle to businesses for a moment.  Each year as more businesses move into the worldwide market, they each must endure dramatic changes in both their audience and workforce; needing to cope with any challenges.  Their main struggle may not be finding new customers, as the need for custom-produced goods will always be there, but trying to have everyone work together in an efficient way, and when all language barriers and communication barriers have been broken, the company comes out just as strong and leads more innovation.  

Back to the blogging front, there is no need to blog in English or be good at it.  With language translation tools, people that are interested in the subject that you are blogging about are able to access it, or do so automatically by the blog system, browser, or search engine.  In addition, keeping your language local to your area of origin allows you to target your audience to people that speak in your language, so there is no need to learn another language.

While it may seem that there are more people that want to access your blog in a different language (such as English), that misconception does not always hold true.

Blogging in any language (English, German, French, etc.) allows you to:

  • Blog about your passion.
  • Reach any audience.
  • Blogging natively means that you truly care about blogging, and aren’t in it for the incentives involved if you blog in the mainstream language.

Some of the world’s most popular blogs were started in other countries that do not have English as their main language, but are able to spread the popularity to English countries due the content or discussion that has surrounded the blog in mention.  Popularity and content outweigh the language barrier that is created.  

On an ending note, remember that just because you feel that blogging in English is the right decision, think about the audience and community that you may build by keeping your language native to your country.  Is the community more important or a slightly higher stream of traffic?  

Even the “best” writers have points in their careers where they stumble, and that doesn’t mean that you have to exhibit perfect writing/language skills in any language unless you are publicly viewed as a key speaker.

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Capitalization in Post Titles - Necessary or Cumbersome?

Categories: Writing

It isn’t uncommon to see bloggers that don’t show consistency in the way they write and construct their post titles or follow the standard rules of grammar and capitalization.  I do not always adhere to these rules, but try to stay as consistent as possible whenever writing post titles.

Writing a post title can sometimes be the most daunting tasks of finalizing your blog post to be published.  The process for writing a great title that draws people in to read the content, even if there is very little substance, involves thinking about what readers are looking for, involving trends, and then relating any “brainstormed” ideas into the title.  Before you can hit the publish button, the capitalization should be correct or your work put into creating the post and title have been all but diminished. 

The Correct Way to Capitalize Post Titles

from What Words Do I Capitalize in a Title?

Capitalize: The first and last words of the title, all nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives.  In addition, conjunctions or prepositions five letters or more in length are considered option.  Either route is considered correct.

Do Not Capitalize: Articles - the, a, an unless the article is the first or last word of the title.  Prepositions of four letters or fewer, unless it is the first or last word of the title and conjunctions of four letters or fewer.  The particle “to” should not be capitalize when used as an infinitive (unless the word “to” is the first or last word of the title).

Applying Post/Blog Title Formatting to Your Blog

The rules for capitalization of titles is fairly straightforward and simple, but can be a challenge when you must deal with editing or naming posts with questionable words.  One thing to remember is that the way you format your post titles should remain consistent or your blog will begin to look sloppy and as though you don’t care about the time you do spend creating and developing your site.

Stick with one format throughout the lifespan of your blog.  You should either utilize the sentence case - capitalizing proper nouns and the first word of the title or title case - capitalizing the first and last words and any other words that should be capitalized (from above).

Different Examples of Headings

  1. Sentence-style Capitalization: The Siamese cat jumped over the lazy St. Bernard
  2. Poor Capitalization (all lowercase): the siamese cat jumped over the lazy st. bernard
  3. Title Format: The Siamese Cat Jumped Over the Lazy St. Bernard
  4. All Capitals: The Siamese Cat Jumped Over The Lazy St. Bernard

Examples of Different Styling in News Media

From these two examples, you can clearly see a difference between the usage of sentence case and title case.

CNN Capitalization PracticesCNN Home Page Sample

New York Times Capitalization PracticesThe New York Times Home Page Sample

Conclusion

Usage of the capitalization rules vary throughout the world, however in most locations the rule is based off the English language.

Find what works best for you - looking back, most of my posts use the “Title” format, in which many articles and words less than five letters are not capitalized, while I feel the usage of all capital letters presents a more clean, bold look to your blog, especially when using larger post titles.  

These tips discussed can be used for anything on your blog, heading titles, post titles, blog titles/tag lines, and even sidebar areas.

For additional information, there is a Wikipedia article - Capitalization which includes a more in-depth look at ways to form publication titles and a brief history of the different capitalization types.

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