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Encouraging Comments On Your Blog

The next step after attracting attention is to encourage engagement. On a blog that is very easy to do since your readers can immediately add their comments to your post.

Neil Patel has a post on ShoeMoney called 6 Easy Ways To Increase Your Comment Count and Gyutae Park at Winning the Web recently wrote 9 BIG Methods to Pump Up Your Blog Comments. Both blog posts provide great advice on how to encourage people to comment on your blog. You will see that I implement many of those suggestions here on this blog.

One thing I would add to their suggestions is to disable “nofollow” on blog comments. If you do this then a commenter will receive some search engine love from links in their comment. Andy Beard has a lot to say about nofollow and provides this ultimate list of dofollow and nofollow plugins.

Posted 04 December 2007 † Nick Dalton § Blogging ‡ Comments (1)

The Constant Conversation

The same week as The Attention Age Doctrine Part 2 was launched, my friends Colin McDougall and Colin Arthur released their Constant Conversation report. It also focuses on using Web 2.0 techniques to attract traffic to your site, but with an emphasis on conversations.

Here are some of the topics covered:

  • Starting/seeding the conversation

  • Encouraging and promoting the conversation

  • Controlling and dominating the conversation

  • And last but not least: Monetizing the conversation

Interestingly both reports talk about fake blogging, but draw very different conclusions from their case studies. A perfect example of controversial conversations…

Highly recommended reading! You can download your free copy of the report at: www.ConstantConversation.com

Posted 03 December 2007 † Nick Dalton § General ‡ Comments (0)

Is It Futile To Ask Your Readers To Digg A Story?

I’ve written previously about how useless it is to have a large number of social bookmarking icons at the end of every post. In that post I also suggested that you occasionally ask your readers to digg or bookmark your story on a particular site. But that doesn’t always work.

Case in point: Rich Schefren’s announcement of his Attention Age Doctrine Part 2 being released. In his blog post he asks his readers to vote for the post on various social bookmarking sites. Despite a lot of traffic - more than 20,000 downloads of the report in the first 24 hours, and over 200 comments on the post - it looks like he only received three (3) Diggs.

You could say that you first have to give something before you can receive. But in this particular case Rich gave away great information big-time before he asked for the favor of a Digg.

I think it comes down to the fact that people don’t like being told what to do. This is especially true for Digg which portrays itself as a grassroots system that highlights news stories in a very democratic way. You also need to make sure that your story fits the profile of of the social media site that you’re targeting. Spend some time on the site and look at the types of stories that become popular. One of my favorite examples from Digg is this story from someone shopping at an Apple store at 3 am. The story consists of mostly photographs of an empty store. Huh? I’m not suggesting that you go down to your local 7-Eleven at 3 am and take pictures. But the type of stories that become popular are not always the ones you’d expect.

Have you had any success in asking your readers to Digg your stories? What do you attribute your success to? A real good viral story? A loyal readership? Comments are open.

On a related note take a look at this story on how one active Digg user thinks the Digg algorithm works. It provides a lot of insight into what happens after your story has been Dugg.

Posted 30 November 2007 † Nick Dalton § Social Bookmarking § Blogging ‡ Comments (0)

Piggy-Backing Attention

In the Attention Age Doctrine Part 2, Rich Schefren talks about leveraging the reputation of other people and piggy-backing on their attention.

I’ve previously written about how you can use Digg to piggy-back on the attention of already popular stories. Yesterday was a perfect example of this. A story was going around the news wires about Al Gore’s web site being hacked. I looked in to the issue and wrote a rather technical post explaining the hack and what you can do to protect your own WordPress blog. You can read the post on my other more technical blog.

After writing the blog post I found upcoming stories on Digg and Propeller covering the Al Gore hack. I simply added a small comment to the existing stories with the URL to my blog post. I’m now getting about 3 new visitors per minute from Digg and Propeller using this simple trick

Posted 28 November 2007 † Nick Dalton § Attention § Social Bookmarking ‡ Comments (0)

Use Digg Comments To Drive Traffic To Your Blog

To get on the front page of Digg is really difficult if you’re not a very popular blogger with a loyal tribe following. This is a popular story by Tim Ferriss.

Popular Digg Story

Here’s a small trick you can use to ride on the coattails of popular Diggs.

Find a story on Digg on a topic that is related to your own blog. The story should already be popular or upcoming. Then write an interesting and intelligent comment on Digg and include a link to your site in the comment text. Getting your comment on the first page of comments is going to get you more traffic than if you are commenter number 295. To be able to comment early you will have to gamble on which stories will become popular.

The Digg link is a nofollow link so you won’t get any search engine benefit from it, but due to the massive amount of traffic Digg gets, you will see traffic coming from your Digg comment.

Your comment is your “sales letter” for your link so you need to make it good enough to entice people to click on your link. Don’t make it a five page sales letter. Comments on Digg are usually very brief and it’s not difficult to stand out from the crowd. Here’s a comment that worked well for me.

Example Digg Comment

Don’t just link to your home page. Link directly to a blog post that is related to the Digg story. If your blog post is good, it will get Diggs too from the people clicking on your link.

How do you use Digg to drive traffic to your blog?

Posted 26 November 2007 † Nick Dalton § Social Bookmarking § Blogging ‡ Comments (0)

What Attracts People’s Attention On a Web Page?

Here’s a great list of 23 actionable lessons from eye-tracking studies.

Do all the 23 lessons apply to your web site? The right answer is as usual to test it. Without investing in large focus groups and eye-tracking equipment you can get similar results using heat maps. A heat map tool measures where people click on your web page and presents the results in a colored map overlaid on your web site. It then very easy to see where most people click, and more often than not it’s not where you think they click.

Crazy Egg offers a heat map service for your web site. All you have to install is a small piece of JavaScript on the pages that you want measured. They have a free starter plan that you can use to check out their service.

Another alternative is ClickHeat. This requires that you install some PHP on your web site so the installation effort is slightly higher, but in return ClickHeat is completely free.

I know that clicks are Actions which are further down the AIDA path than Attention, so the comparison is not entirely accurate. But both tools are very useful in improving your web site design.

Posted 20 November 2007 † Nick Dalton § Attention ‡ Comments (0)

Networking With LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the social network for business professionals. You won’t find any wacky home pages or vampire widgets on LinkedIn. What you will find is the top people in almost every industry, and they’re on LinkedIn to network. Here are eight tips to make best use of LinkedIn:

Create a Profile

To start networking you need to crate a profile. It’s free and quite simple. To begin you should at least fill out the experience and specialties sections. Also pay attention to the headline. The default is probably something like “Owner at Your Company, Inc”. You can change it to something more catchy like “Internet Marketing Expert” or “Best Selling Author”.

Upload Your Picture

In a sea of names a picture stands out. And if you’ve only met somebody briefly at a conference a picture of yourself will help them remember who you are.

Add Your Websites

You can add up to three websites to your profile. You can select from categories like “My Website”, “My Blog”, etc. I recommend that you chose Other because then you can add your own description or keywords that you want your site to be associated with.

The links to your websites show up on your public LinkedIn page. Currently the links are not marked with “nofollow” which means that you get full search engine credit for them. Powerful!

Edit Public Profile

For privacy reasons you may not want to display all your information on your public profile page. Use the check boxes on the edit public profile page to limit the information displayed.

Make Your Profile Public

LinkedIn’s public profile pages rank very high in search engines for your name. This is a good reason for making your profile page public.

You don’t want your public LinkedIn URL to be something like /pub/0/a22/908, edit the URL to something meaningful like http://www.linkedin.com/in/nickdalton

Start Networking

With your profile in place it’s time to start networking. Just enter the name of a person in your industry that knows you. If it’s a common name you may get several potential matches. Click on the name to view their profile and then click on Add to your network.

An email is sent to that person inviting them to join your network. Add a personal note to the email so that the person receiving it is sure to recognize who you are.

Important: Only invite people this way that you know well and who know you. The LinkedIn application trusts you initially to not abuse the network. But if a recipient of your invite indicates that they don’t know you, then you’ll have to enter the recipients email address for all your future invites.

Once a person is in your network you can see their contacts. See who you know directly and invite them to your network. Keep growing your network this way.

Recommend People

If you’ve done business with someone and it was a good experience, write a recommendation for that person. Click on the Recommend People link and then select a person in your network or search for the person by name and email address.

Write something specific, short and sizzling. The person you’re recommending is likely to be flattered and immediately add you to their network. You will also build up some goodwill that you can use when in the future you need help with connecting to someone in their network.

Connect With People in High Places

If there is a person in your industry that you want to approach for a joint venture or employment you can use LinkedIn to get connected.

Search for the person by name and company, then view their profile to make sure that you found the right person. The profile will show how you are connected and how many degrees there are separating the two of you. If it’s more than 3 degrees then you probably need to do some more networking before you can get a good introduction.

When you are ready to connect click on the “Get introduced through a connection”. Enter a message to the person you want to contact. Make it a very good message because you only get one chance. You also have to include a brief note to the person who needs to connect you. Make sure that the person acting as the intermediary is someone you know well. You want them to forward your note with a warm recommendation.

Keep in mind that the object of networking is to establish meaningful relationships, not to collect the most names.

What are your best tips for networking using LinkedIn?

Posted 16 November 2007 † Nick Dalton § Social Networking ‡ Comments (0)

The Attention Age Doctrine Part 2

Get ready for another attention grabbing product launch. Rich Schefren is about to release part 2 of his Attention Age Doctrine.

Part 1 is no longer available for download but you can refresh your memory with a summary and a mind map that Rich posted on his blog.

Part 2 of the Attention Age Doctrine will also have a limited distribution. You can reserve your copy and watch a sneak peek video here.

Posted 11 November 2007 † Nick Dalton § Doctrine ‡ Comments (0)

Better BlogRush Click-Through Rates

Select the BlogRush category that best describes your blog

You want your blog posts to show up in the BlogRush widget on other blogs that cover similar topics as yours. This will reach an audience that is more likely to be interested in your blog. Be sure to revisit the My Blogs page on the BlogRush site since many more categories were added in the Phase 2 launch.

Write compelling headlines

The headline is the only advertisement for your blog that is shown in the BlogRush widget. There is no other context or related information that will help a potential visitor decide if she should click on your headline or not. So you better make the headline a good one. The web is full of advice on how to write powerful headlines, here are a few good ones from Copyblogger, Instigator and Lorelle.

If you’re like me - copywriting challenged - then I highly recommend the statistical copywriting software Glyphius.

Keep the 40 character limit in mind

Only the first 40 characters of your blog headline is shown in the BlogRush widget. Make sure that your headline makes sense and is still compelling when you chop it off after character 40. If you use Glyphius it will automatically count the number of characters as you type.

Use the dashboard to improve your headlines

The BlogRush dashboard helpfully displays the number of clicks each of your blog posts has received from the BlogRush network. Take the top scoring headlines and use those as templates for your future headlines. Use this feedback loop continuously.

Feed BlogRush special headlines

You may not want to limit yourself to 40 character Haiku headlines on your blog. With the BlogRush Click Maximizer WordPress plug-in you can create a special headline just for BlogRush and have your longer headline be displayed on your blog.

Be a good BlogRush citizen

John Reese, the creator of BlogRush, keeps talking about making the BlogRush network fair for everyone. If all participants in the network act fairly then the network will work better for all involved.

The first wave of weeding out “bad citizens” was to manually remove all splogs from the network. I’m sure that more “improvements” will follow.

One obvious action to contribute to the overall click through rates on the network is to display the BlogRush widget in a prominent place on your blog. Hiding the widget at the bottom of your page is just not fair. John Reese has hinted that there will be performance bonuses to those that follow this advice.

Don’t assume that BlogRush is good for your blog

Track the number of new readers and sales generated from your BlogRush traffic. Just counting the number of clicks generated from the BlogRush widget is too crude of a metric unless you’re selling advertisements per impression on your blog.

Make the BlogRush widget earn its real estate on your blog.

Use BlogRush on all your new blogs

BlogRush has a “Robbin Hood sentiment” in that it gives bonus credits to smaller blogs. Here’s an example from one of my newer blogs.

BlogRush Credits

When your blog is new you don’t have as many opportunities for monetizing your real estate. In the beginning it is all about getting more readers and the BlogRush widget can be a good tool in your arsenal.

How is BlogRush working out for your blog?

Posted 11 November 2007 † Nick Dalton § Blogging ‡ Comments (0)

Keep It To Five Sentences

If you find that the email response you’re writing is approaching the length of a novel, then email is probably not the most efficient form of communication. I just came across five.sentenc.es which has a radical approach: all email responses regardless of recipient or subject should be five sentences or less.

Try it for a week.

And with this fifth sentence I end this blog post.

Posted 09 November 2007 † Nick Dalton § Writing ‡ Comments (0)