7 Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers

7 Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers

by: Fabian Lim

Blogging is IN!

And itกs here to stay!

Blogs are easy to set up and use.

And you can create a good blog by writing out the thoughts that roam in your mind and presto and youกll be blogging like a pro before you even know it!

Here are 7 essential habits you should develop if you want to be a highly effective blogger:

Blogging Habit #1 Determine Your Purpose

Highly effective bloggers blog with a clear purpose in mind.

So decide on a purpose for your blog.

Blogs exist to filter information, organize business information, share news and profitable content, establish professional identities and bonds, discuss social issues, or muse about life in general.

Beginning in a focused manner is one of the best ways to start a blog.

And knowing your กmissionก will help you accomplish more with your blog.

Blogging Habit #2 Define Your Audience

Highly effective bloggers understand their target audience.

Their wants, needs, likes and dislikes, and possible reactions and responses.

So always reflect on your anticipated audience.

You conduct yourself differently with friends than you will with professional associates, strangers, customers, or family members.

Knowing who you’re writing to beforehand, allows you to adopt acceptable and appropriate tones in your blog journals.

Blogging Habit #3 Blog With Passion

Blog with passion!

And the best way to achieve this is to write on a topic you are most passionate about.

And the more you’re passionate about a topic, the more itกll show in your writing.

Remember, a blog is the place for voicing opinions Your Opinions!

So, engage your readers with a passion and make your writing interesting.

Blogging Habit #4 Blog Frequently

Highly effective bloggers understand the importance of blogging frequently.

Your aim, as a blogger, is to get interested readers to return to your site to see the latest scoop, whatกs new and whatกs not, the กinsก and กoutsก.

To this end, aim to post several times a week.

If not, at least once a week.

Frequent posting creates dialogue that invites your readers to return to your blog.

It will increase the กstickinessก of your blog i.e. the ability to attract returning visitors.

And theyกll keep coming back if they like what you write about.

Blogging Habit #5 Blog Honestly

Credibility counts, so be honest.

Respect your audience and all bloggers.

Words can live forever on the net so be courteous too.

Manners never go out of style.

Ethics and integrity are necessary and keep your own standards high.

So stick to them!

Blogging Habit #6 Encourage Interactivity

Blogs should not be a กonewayก communication tool.

As far as possible, always encourage feedback by encouraging your readers to comment on your blog postings.

Allow your readers to air their own views.

Whether or not they agree with you.

Turn your blog into a virtual community and platform for exchanging of ideas, views and opinions.

Blogging Habit #7 Link to Other Blogs

Highly effective bloggers understand the importance and value of linking.

Linking to other blogs allow your readers to expand their realm of knowledge and experience beyond what you can offer.

Because you want your readers to have more than a กsingleก opinion of the topic in question.

And readers will appreciate your openness and reward you through return visits to your blog.

Bloggers actually amplify each otherกs voices when they crosslink with each other, forming a grassroots network of information sharing that can form social alliances.

Most blog audiences start with small numbers, but with frequent and regularly scheduled updates, your audience should grow.

Put into practice these 7 blogging habits and transform yourself into a highly effective blogger starting today!

Copyright 2005 BizSuccessOnline

About The Author

Fabian Lim is a Web Analytics & Internet Marketing Consultant.He helps organizations and individuals succeed online. Visit his website at http://www.BizSuccessOnline.com and blog at http://www.fabianlim.name.

This article was posted on March 13

by Fabian Lim

Aiming At The Home Based Business Bullseye

Aiming At The Home Based Business Bullseye

by: Kirk Bannerman

Traffic is one thing, but targeted traffic is everything.

You have no doubt seen dozens of offers similar to ก10,000 hits per hour driven to your website!ก. This type of website traffic is completely untargeted and will undoubtedly result in a very low conversion ratio. Itกs basically ‘throw it up against the wall and hope something sticksก. The big incoming numbers give the illusion of progress, but you will achieve better results with a lower volume of highly targeted traffic.

I speak from experience because in the early days of developing my home business, I went for the big numbers instead of focusing on targeting prospects. It took me a while to appreciate the importance of targeting (quality) instead of just going for the big numbers, but it was a lesson well learned.

Exchanging links has been an important part of generating website traffic for quite some time, but the vast majority of people looking to trade links don’t understand that just wildly swapping links with any willing webmaster is not the way to go.

For the last few years, most webmasters have been in a กpleasing Googleก mode since Google had such a dominant position. Now that challengers are emerging, most notably Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves, the search engine ranking landscape is becoming much more complicated than just marching to the tune Google played.

Many website owners seem to be of the opinion that the sole purpose of exchanging links is to try to improve the search engine ranking position of their website. While it is true that links pointing to your website can help your search engine ranking, the reason for obtaining inbound links goes far deeper than that.

In my opinion, the targeted traffic that relevant links pointing to your site will bring can be as important as the traffic that comes to your website from people using search engines. This is where linking philosophy comes in. If you limit yourself to exchanging links only with websites that have a theme highly relevant to your own, the traffic you receive from those links will be far more targeted (valuable) than traffic you might receive from links with websites that have nothing to do with your theme.

Not only do highly relevant links bring you more highly targeted traffic, but they also play a กcustomer satisfactionก role for visitors to your website who arrived there as a result of a search engine query. If someone arrives at your website after performing a search for, lets say กwork at homeก and then finds your website full of links to a bunch of off topic sites (Viagra, online casinos, hotel reservations, sports betting, etc, etc) the impression is often not favorable and may actually drive your visitor away before they consider whatever it is that your website itself is offering.

Keep your eye on the bullseye and develop highly targeted traffic by having good content on your website and exchanging links with highly relevant sites that also offer good content. Remember, traffic is one thing, but targeted traffic is everything.

About The Author

Kirk Bannerman operates a successful home based business and resides in California. For more details, visit his website at http://businessathome.us

This article was posted on March 08, 2004

by Kirk Bannerman

The Miraculous Conversion

The Miraculous Conversion

by: Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.

http://www.ideavirus.com

The recent bloodbath among online content peddlers and digital media proselytisers can be traced to two deadly sins. The first was to assume that traffic equals sales. In other words, that a miraculous conversion will spontaneously occur among the hordes of visitors to a web site. It was taken as an article of faith that a certain percentage of this mass will inevitably and nigh hypnotically reach for their bulging pocketbooks and purchase content, however packaged. Moreover, ad revenues (more reasonably) were assumed to be closely correlated with กeyeballsก. This myth led to an obsession with counters, page hits, impressions, unique visitors, statistics and demographics.

It failed, however, to take into account the dwindling efficacy of what Seth Godin, in his brilliant essay (กUnleashing the IdeaVirusก), calls กInterruption Marketingก ads, banners, spam and fliers. It also ignored, at its peril, the ethos of free content and open source prevalent among the Internet opinion leaders, movers and shapers. These two neglected aspects of Internet hype and culture led to the trouncing of erstwhile promising web media companies while their business models were exposed as wishful thinking.

The second mistake was to exclusively cater to the needs of a highly idiosyncratic group of people (Silicone Valley geeks and nerds). The assumption that the USA (let alone the rest of the world) is Silicone Valley writ large proved to be calamitous to the industry.

In the 1970s and 1980s, evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins and Rupert Sheldrake developed models of cultural evolution. Dawkinsก กmemeก is a cultural element (like a behaviour or an idea) passed from one individual to another and from one generation to another not through biological genetic means but by imitation. Sheldrake added the notion of contagion กmorphic resonanceก which causes behaviour patterns to suddenly emerged in whole populations. Physicists talked about sudden กphase transitionsก, the emergent results of a critical mass reached. A latter day thinker, Michael Gladwell, called it the ‘tipping pointก.

Seth Godin invented the concept of an กideavirusก and an attendant marketing terminology. In a nutshell, he says, to use his own summation:

กMarketing by interrupting people isn’t costeffective anymore. You can’t afford to seek out people and send them unwanted marketing, in large groups and hope that some will send you money. Instead the future belongs to marketers who establish a foundation and process where interested people can market to each other. Ignite consumer networks and then get out of the way and let them talk.ก

This is sound advice with a shaky conclusion. The conversion from exposure to a marketing message (even from peers within a consumer network) to an actual sale is a convoluted, multilayered, highly complex process. It is not a กblack boxก, better left unattended to. It is the same deadly sin all over again the belief in a miraculous conversion. And it is highly UScentric. People in other parts of the world interact entirely differently.

You can get them to visit and you get them to talk and you can get them to excite others. But to get them to buy is a whole different ballgame. Dot.coms had better begin to study its rules.

About The Author

Sam Vaknin is the author of กMalignant Self Love Narcissism Revisitedก and กAfter the Rain How the West Lost the Eastก. He is a columnist in กCentral Europe Reviewก, United Press International (UPI) and ebookweb.org and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory, Suite101 and searcheurope.com. Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.

His web site: http://samvak.tripod.com

This article was posted on February 2, 2002

by Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.

Make Your Navigation Highly Visible

Make Your Navigation Highly Visible

by: Jamie Kiley

Effective navigation stands out. Itกs clear, obvious, and highly visible.

Youกll need to have a clear section of the page designated for navigationone that a visitor will immediately recognize as the navigation area when he arrives at the site. Navigation should not necessarily be the prime focus, but it must be highly visible.

On many sites, the main navigation is overly subdued. It sort of กlurksก on the page, but itกs not the kind of thing that really gets to a visitorกs consciousness. It gets drowned out because there is too much color or excitement in the rest of the page.

Occasionally, this is ok. You may have some navigation options, such as a privacy policy, that need to be available, but don’t need to be emphasized.

However, aside from those few exceptions, youกll want your navigation to be used. So it will need a voice loud enough to be heard above the excitement of the rest of the site.

Here are 4 tips to make sure your navigation stands out:

1. Put it in a prime spot

Itกs all about positioning. Give your main navigation good placement at the top or left of the page.

When visitors arrive at a page, they scan in an orderly pattern from left to right, starting in the top left corner and working down the page. So if your navigation is at the top or on the left, itกs going to be seen fairly quickly. Also, this is where visitors expect to find navigation, so theyกll be primed to notice it there.

2. Use color

Besides size, color is the best way to get something noticed on a page. You can use color very powerfully in drawing out your navigation.

A very common technique is to place navigation options on a colored field, on a horizontal bar or a sidebar. This is effective because it creates a strong contrast with other elements on the page.

Just remember, the brightest, most vivid, most saturated colors will stand out the most. You don’t necessarily need to use a strong color for your navigation, but you do need to look at how your navigation color mixes with the rest of the page.

If you have a very bright site, pale colors in your navigation won’t cut it. But if the site is fairly subdued, even a hint of color to draw out your navigation will be plenty of contrast.

3. Give it space

If your navigation has a lot of clutter around it, it stands a smaller chance of getting noticed. In a busy situation, people do not notice detail. Itกs very hard for them to pick out specific items. Think about the difficulty of trying to find somebody in a crowded room.

Visitors will pick out the elements of your page that have the most breathing room. So be sure to leave plenty of space around your navigation. Don’t let other elementsespecially other textget so close that the navigation is crowded out.

4. Separate it from ads

If want your navigation to be noticed, keep it away from ads.

People on the web are highly suceptible to กbanner blindnessก. Thatกs a real condition in which people ignore anything that is associated with an ad. Since most people are not fond of ads they try to avoid them. So keep ads and navigation physically separated. Don’t let them get mixed together.

Two key pointers: never put navigation above the logo. Since banners are frequently located in the center of the top of the page, thatกs a prime spot to be ignored.

Also, if you have a blank, empty white space between your logo and something on the right side of the page, be very careful about filling it with navigation. It will be confused with banners simply because of guilt by association.

In addition to physically separating ads and navigation, you should make sure that your navigation doesn’t LOOK like an ad. Square or rectangular buttons and images at the top and sides of the page are especially problematic.

For example, take a look at http://www.sendfree.com. Notice that the member login button is not very obvious as navigation. It has an adlike appearance and itกs in an area of the page where visitors would expect to see an ad.

Critically evaluate all of your buttons and images to make sure they won’t be mixed up with ads. Don’t leave any confusion in a visitorกs mind about where ads stop and navigation begins.

Position, color, space, and separation from ads. There you have itfour tips for making your navigation stand out.

About The Author

There are 605.6 million people online. Can they find your business? Jamie Kiley creates powerful and engaging websites that make sure YOUR company gets noticed. Visit http://www.kianta.com for a free quote. Get a quick, free web design tip every two weekssign up for Jamieกs newsletter: http://www.kianta.com/newsletter.php

[email protected]

This article was posted on January 29, 2003

by Jamie Kiley