Wanted: a guinea-pig blogger

And I don’t mean someone who writes about guinea pigs. (Necessarily. :) )

I’m fascinated by experiments. I love the way they reveal small-but-significant changes in inputs that make a big difference in output.

At the moment, I want to experiment with different “subscribe to this blog by email” options, to see which one results in the most engaged readers.

In order to test my theories, I’m looking for 3-5 bloggers who…

  • get at least 100 visitors a day
  • either use a basic subscription tool (like FeedBurner) or haven’t started using email subscriptions yet
  • are willing to let me add the necessary code to test the different solutions
  • will add me to their Google Analytics account or let me set one up so that I can see the results

Interested? Leave a comment or email me directly.

 
 

Why aren’t you guest blogging?

I’ve been seeing advice all over popular blogs about the benefits of guest blogging. Everyone seems to agree (and rightly so) that it’s a good strategy to get traffic, and more than that, name recognition.

But looking at the latest Problogger poll, the majority of Problogger readers haven’t written any guest posts. This is interesting to me, because that is the group of people I would most expect to be active guest bloggers—they know the benefits and have the motivation of growing a blog and going pro.

Some of the comments on that post hint at the reasons for not guest posting, and I’m curious to find out more specifics, so if you’re not guest posting, I’d love it if you’d take this quick poll.

 

Have any other thoughts on guest blogging? Leave a comment!

 
 

3 Easy Ways To Get More Mileage From Your Blog Posts

You’ve probably been there: you spend hours writing a great blog post, get some good feedback on it, and (justifiably) feel like a brilliant blogger. But then, a week or two later, the post has been replaced by newer entries on the front page, effectively relegating it to the dark corners where readers seldom venture.

Sure, you might still get a little Google traffic, and if it was a really good post, hopefully some other bloggers linked to it and you’re still getting a few visitors clicking through. But wouldn’t it be nice to keep the post alive and kicking on your own blog?

Fortunately, it’s not that hard, especially if you’re using WordPress (I mention some plugins below that are for WordPress blogs, but you might be able to find equivalent ways of doing these things on other platforms, too). Read on to discover a few tricks you can use today. Continue reading "3 Easy Ways To Get More Mileage From Your Blog Posts"

 
 

Getting Started On Twitter

If you’re not familiar with Twitter, watch this explanatory video, and then learn how it applies to your blog in two great posts called “9 Benefits of Twitter for Bloggers” and “A Quick Introduction to Twitter for Bloggers“.

Don't be the Cowboy
Creative Commons License photo credit: 顔なし

Since my last post about how I add followers on Twitter, I’ve received some questions about the metrics I use to choose who to follow back (or not). Then I posted a tweet that generated a much bigger response than I expected:

Can’t believe how many “Internet Marketing experts” follow me who obviously have no concept of Twitter etiquette. Not so impressive.

Continue reading "Getting Started On Twitter"

 
 

How I Follow People on Twitter

If you’re not familiar with Twitter, watch this explanatory video, and then learn how it applies to your blog in two great posts called “9 Benefits of Twitter for Bloggers” and “A Quick Introduction to Twitter for Bloggers.

My social Network on Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and MyblogLog
Creative Commons License photo credit: luc legay

Having been on Twitter for a while, I find that a dozen or so new people follow me every day. To be honest, I’m not sure why they follow me (I’m only moderately interesting and tend to talk about work too much), but still, they do, so I’ve had to decide what to do about it.

When people follow me, I like to take a moment and view their profile, and decide if I’d like to follow them as well. I have a pretty open attitude towards following people; if they’re interesting, I’ll follow. I use tweetdeck to organize people of particular interest into groups so I don’t get overwhelmed with general chatter, and then rely on serendipity for the rest.

The time management pit of managing Twitter followers

The haphazard nature of new followers makes it easy to waste a lot of time. If I checked out a profile every time I got a new follow notice, I’d never get anything else done—because if I’m being haphazard about it, I don’t just look at the profile… I also click links, follow @replies, and generally wander (delightfully but aimlessly). Continue reading "How I Follow People on Twitter"