Yesterday I posted “Why did you start blogging?” and it was the best post I’ve written to date (in my opinion of course). It was interesting, it was easy to write, it got the attention of other bloggers and it brought in a decent amount of traffic. Here are a few tips on writing a great post.
Think of Something New
In my post I went around and asked bloggers why they started blogging. I got a few responses and compiled them into a post, but what’s so new about this? Well I hadn’t seen anything like it in the blogosphere. There have been many posts about how individual bloggers started and even more posts listing things that other bloggers have said (interviews and such), but I hadn’t seen a single person compile a list of how a bunch of bloggers started blogging.
Thinking of fresh things to write about will bring in new readers and keep your existing ones satisfied, its a win-win situation. Thinking of new things is also hard. It’s kind of like movies, most movies are remakes of old ones, but the really great movies are all original creations. Try to think of things that haven’t been done, be creative and I’m sure you’ll be able to think of a few things. Taking something thats been done and adding your own twist on it can also work if you’ve run out of your own new ideas. Either way doing something that has been done a million times will push readers away.
Get Your Readers Involved
The best thing you can do is get your readers involved with the post. I sent out an email to a bunch of people telling them what I was doing and asking for their input. I got a lot of responses and wrote the post. The great thing was, once the post was done I was guaranteed at least as many visitors as there was responses. Because I got some of my readers (or soon to be readers) involved they wanted to come back and see what they said and what others said.
If you’re readers blog this can be helpful in another way. Ben Cook took the time out of his busy schedule to write “What an Interview Can Do For You“. The post was awesome because it gave tips to his readers and it gave some link love to me (thanks Ben). Getting your readers involved means that they’ll be more likely to write about what you did. This will help increase your reputation and get a few links back to your site.
Work Hard
A great post takes a lot of work, plain and simple. You need to think of an idea, execute it and write it. Generally the last two actions are easier but in this case executing it was the hardest for me. Coming up with the idea of asking people why they started blogging was fairly easy. I was sitting down one Sunday morning and it came to me that is what I should do. Executing the plan was by far the hardest post of the entire thing.
I emailed over 40 people individually, which is important, if you do a mass email you probably won’t get any responses. Of those 40+ emails I got 11 responses (10 yes, 1 no). For each of the responses I then sent back three replies, the first reply was a thank you for responding type of deal. The second reply was after I had written the post, I told them when it would be released (because I had a backlog), and where they could find it. The third reply was after it had been released telling them they could now view the post. All-in-all I wrote over 80 emails and it took probably 5 hours (finding peoples addresses, emailing, responding, etc…). I think it was well worth the time.
Results
After a few days of preparation and then a week or two of wait until the post went live I think it went extremely well. Here’s a few of the statistics from my site for yesterday.
Yesterday (Average)
Unique Visitors: 170 (54)
Page Views: 347 (83)
Visit Length: 2:08min (54sec)
Bounce Rate: 44.27% (72%)
Wow look at all those numbers, but what does it all really mean? Well basically because of my post yesterday I brought in 3x the number of unique visitors and on average each visitor visted 0.6 pages more than before. They also stayed on the site for an extra minute and only 44% of the people left without doing anything as oposed to 72%. Basically it means that people were looking at my stuff more than before.
Other things to note: The number of RSS subscribers also increase from 14 to 18 (and I hope it continues to rise), and the post also received the most amount of comments I have every gotten for a single post.
Conclusions
Overall, getting bloggers input was a great idea. Asking people why they started blogging brought in a lot of new readers, and was great. Would I do it again? Definitely not in the near future. Things like this get old quick, people get bored of them and don’t want to read any more. I’ll definitely keep in touch with the people that responded and I think it was a great adventure for my relatively new blog.
I’d like to thank Neil, Randy, Tony, Matt, Henry, Matthew, Caroline, Ben, Lorna, and Daniel for their participation. I’ve had a lot of fun and I hope everyone of them had fun responding and reading the other responses.
Entries (RSS)
October 18th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
Pleasure was all mine Adam, would be happy to participate in anything else you do in the future.