Tag Archives: plugin

Tips for Becoming a Good Blogger

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From MPDailyFix.com.

Tim Jackson at MPDailyFix.com wrote an article back in November titled “What Does It Mean to Be a ‘Good Blogger’?“that I just stumbled upon. In it, he provides five tips for better blogging. Here they are with my take on them; you should read Tim’s article for his take.

  • Know your topic. You really shouldn’t write authoritatively about a topic when you don’t know enough about the topic to do so. Opinion is one thing, but if it’s based on facts, get the facts straight. That means doing your homework. These days, that’s easy — you’re sitting in front of a computer connected to the Internet, aren’t you? Use Wikipedia, Google, or your favorite search engine to find articles that explain things you aren’t sure about. This really hits home with me today because just yesterday I was blasted for not knowing off the top of my head that Apple sells a “two-button” mouse. I was familiar with the Mighty Mouse product but did not know all of its features. I corrected myself in the very next post, but that wasn’t enough for some readers. Ouch!
  • Know your audience. This one is extremely difficult for me, primarily because this site covers so many topics: support for my books and articles, stories about flying, information about writing, opinions, articles about travel, and stories about the things that go on in my life. Exactly who does this blog appeal to? I have no idea. But I can use stats or metrics to learn more about what people are reading when they come here. For example, yesterday’s article “Apple’s ‘Two-Button’ Mouse” was a huge hit with visitors, getting hundreds of page views and nine comments in a matter of hours. (Huge numbers for this site.) Articles about blogging and statistics also seem to do very well. Is that what my audience wants? Perhaps I should deliver more. But I’ve also decided to install polling software that asks readers which topics interest the most. That might help, too.
  • Read other blogs and leave comments on them. This is something I’ve been working hard to squeeze into my schedule. I’ve found that RSS reader software (I use Endo) is very helpful because it delivers articles or summaries of articles right to one central location. I can spend a few minutes browsing through the inbox, then follow links to the original articles. That’s how I found the article I’m discussing here. This is time consuming but it has three major benefits: (1) I learn a lot about the topics I’m following, (2) I get fodder for articles on this blog (or at least links for my automated del.icio.us links posts (see This just in…), and (3) I’m able to become part of the blogging community. (More on that in a moment.)
  • Follow the links. This isn’t a huge deal for me, since I don’t have many incoming links. Yet. But it is important to see who is linking to your site. Sadly, many of the incoming links appear to be from sites trying to up their Google ranking by linking to other sites. But when I do follow a quality link, it’s good to see that someone else has appreciated what I’ve written. And that brings us to Tim’s last tip.
  • Say thanks. This is a great way to become part of the blogging community. When someone has linked to one of your posts, it’s always nice to say thanks. Not only does this make the person on the other end feel good about sharing your work with other readers, but it builds community. This morning provided a great example of this in my e-mail inbox: I had a thank you note from the author of one of the articles I’d blogged about yesterday. She’d spent a few moments on my site and had some positive things to say about the Contact Me page, which has always been a sore subject. It was nice of her to take the time to write and even nicer to get some positive feedback about my rather strict contact policies.

Again, this is my take on Tim’s five tips. To read Tim’s take and the comments left by readers on his site, read his article.

And I’d love to get some comments about this topic here. Use the Comments link.

Getting Regular Blog Readers

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What good is blogging if no one reads what you write?

The Zero Boss has written a good article about how you can attract and retain readers for a new blog. Lots of good advice.

Read it here: http://thezeroboss.com/2006/11/05/so-i-have-a-blognow-what-how-to-get-people-to-read-

what-you-write/

In the same vein, Connected Internet has a great article specifically for WordPress users that lists four “engagement” plugins — that is, plugins that engage the reader and encourage visitors to read more of what’s online. I’ll be adding at least one of these plugins to my site soon.

You can read it here: http://www.connectedinternet.co.uk/2006/11/04/1022/

Reader Engagement Site Improvements

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I add a few “engagement” features to this site.

Blogging is more than just using blogging software to create and edit posts. After all, if someone shouts in an empty room, does her voice make a sound? An important part of blogging is to attract and retain readers. That’s where content, SEO, and site design come into play.

I’m a strong believer that once you get a visitor to your site, the site’s overall design can help keep them there, at least for longer than the average 30 seconds. (Read Jakob Nielsen’s books for the sad truth about site/page visit lengths.) You can do this by making sure the site is legible and by including navigation features that make it easy to find interesting content.

I read an excellent article on Connected Internet today: “Best WordPress Engagement Plugins: Make Users Read More Posts“. The author lists several plugins — some of which I already use or have tried in the past — that’ll help keep site visitors on your site, reading more content. I added two of them today.

Readers Posts

Readers Posts is a plugin that offers three features:

  • Within The Loop, indicate how many readers have read a post before you.
  • List the most recently viewed posts.
  • List the most viewed (i.e., popular) posts.

I installed the second of these three options in the sidebar of aneclecticmind.com. It began working immediately, drawing information from the WordPress database to list the ten most recently viewed posts. Refresh the page after a few minutes and the list changes. This site has, on average about 5 visitors online at any time and they don’t always come to the site’s Home page. That, of course, is the drawback of any plugin that lists recently read posts — it only lists the posts that have been read on their own page — not on the Home page or archive page. In a way, that’s a good thing. It means the person reading a post is reading it because he found it via a search engine or used a link on the site to read it. He’s reading it because he wants to read it (or thinks he does; as we all know, search engines don’t always display desired results). That’s more meaningful than Home page reads, which could include lots of articles that the visitor just isn’t interested in at all.

The benefit of this: site visitors are shown a list of articles that other visitors have found interesting. I love this feature because it shows me what people are coming to the site to read and it helps me write more content of interest to visitors.

If you try this plugin, don’t be alarmed when you click the link above and arrive at a German-language site. Scroll down on that page and you’ll find an English-language translation. Although it isn’t perfect grammar (what is?), it’s certainly good enough to understand the installation and configuration process.

Landing Sites

Landing Sites is a very cool plugin that does a bunch of things, when installed correctly:

  1. It checks to see if the visitor was referred to the page from one of several popular search engines. It the visitor has not, it stops working.
  2. It displays a message with the name of the search engine and the search word(s) or phrase used to find the page.
  3. It displays a list of links to posts on your site that also match the search criteria.

What I like about this plugin is that it only displays content if a visitor has arrived at the site by clicking a link in a popular search engine’s results list. I put it at the top of the sidebar, where visitors are most likely to see it when they arrive at the page.

Installing the plugin isn’t difficult, although you really do need to follow the instructions on the page you download it from. If you copy and paste the code right from that page, you’ll need to modify all the single and double quote characters so they’re straight quotes when pasted into your template file. (I didn’t notice this at first and got PHP errors. It was an easy enough fix.) The result is what you see if you happened to arrive at a page on my site via popular search engine results link. You can try searching for Hermosa Ranch Insanity (the test link I used) and clicking the link to content on my site to see what I mean.

The benefit of this, of course, is that if the article the visitor came to read isn’t enough for him, he’s given other possible articles to try. He may or may not follow the links, but at least they’re there for him. You could keep him on the site longer.

Conclusion

Read the Connected Internet article. It tells you more about these two plugins, as well as others I currently use or have tried in the past. You might find overlap among features; pick the plugin you like best. Give them a try and see how they affect your visitor stats.