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Add Social Proof to Your Blog With TweetBacksYesterday

In this post Dan Zarrella tells us about a new tool he’s created for bloggers - TweetBacks - a tool that allows you to add instances where your blog has been mentioned on Twitter to your blogs comments section.

A few days ago, I created the first implementation of TweetBacks (see the WP plugin here), which is a porting of the idea of trackbacks to Twitter. By first reverse engineering a bunch of the most popular URL shortening services, it then searches Twitter for Tweets that link to your post. These Tweets are then displayed under your original post (either above or below your comments section).

Beyond simply adding a new layer to the conversation and allowing your readers greater flexibility in how they choose to respond to your content, it also adds an important factor in “going viral”: social proof. By showing your readers how many other people have also liked your post enough to share it, you tap into a powerful human tendency towards imitation.

I’ve written about the power of social proof in viral and social marketing before, but this is one of the mo

5 Steps for Planning the Direction of Your Blog in 2009Yesterday

Last week I shared a series of questions for bloggers to ponder as they look back on their last year of blogging.

The point of the questions was not to engage in a navel gazing exercise but to look back with the objective of identifying how a blog has been performing in order to improve it moving forward.

Today I want to suggest a process for thinking about the future of your blog.

I’m not sure that this process appears exactly like this in any strategic thinking books or teaching but it is the process that I use when I periodically look at how my blogs and business is going.

Here’s a quick visual with some questions to explain each step in the process:

Hopefully the diagram speaks largely for itself but let me extrapolate slightly on each step.

Step 1 - Define your Mission

This is fairly big picture stuff and for me actually goes wider than just why I blog and more fits with my overall life mission. I guess it’s about looking at your overall purpose and direction - what you want to achieve etc. Having this firm in your mind then enables you to work out how blogging fits into that overall purpose.

Step 2 - Paint a Picture of Your Vision

This is still pretty long term and looks beyond the coming year t

How to Create Great First Impressions on New Readers and Convert Them Into Loyal ReadersJanuary 7

This video has been around for over a year now (I made it just after ProBlogger was last redesigned) but I think it’s particularly relevant for this time of year when many bloggers are looking at refreshing the look and feel of their blog.

First impressions matter both in real life face to face interactions with new people that you meet AND the first interactions you have with new readers. In this video I examine 5 ways you can improve the impression that you leave on first time readers and give three questions to ask when thinking about how to leave good impressions on readers.

Of course overarching all of what I mention is that your content needs to be of the highest quality to create a good first impression. Your design, titles, tag lines etc can all be amazing but unless you’ve got something useful and unique to say - the first impression will not be as good as it could be.

Further Reading:

• Run a First Time Reader Audit on Your Blog - mentioned in the video.
• How to Craft a Blog Post - a series that covers how to create content that makes good first impressions and that particularly focuses upon crafting titles and opening lines as mentioned in this video.

The Essential Guide to Growing Your Blog on Minimal TimeJanuary 6

This is a guest post from Leo Babauta of Zen Habits, author of the new best-selling book, The Power of Less.

If you’re like most bloggers, you probably want to grow your readership as quickly as possible, but don’t have much time.

Unfortunately, blogging usually takes a lot of time — writing blog posts takes up a fraction of most bloggers’ time, as they also check their stats and earning multiple times a day, customize their blog design, try out new blog ad systems, comment on many different blogs, spend a lot of time doing email, and so on.

If you let it, blogging can become two full-time jobs. But get this: you can grow your blog quickly on very minimal time, by setting limits and focusing on the essentials.

I’m just one example: I grew Zen Habits into a Top 100 blog within its first year even though I was working a full-time job and doing free-lance writing on the side — giving me only about an hour a day to work on my blog, total. I probably could have spent more time blogging by working in the evenings or on weekends, but I have a family that’s more important to me than blogging.

So how did I grow Zen Habits so quickly on so little time? Well, I figured out through experimentation what gr

Two Tips on Landing Interviews for Your BlogJanuary 5

Last week on Twitter I had a discussion with a number of followers about landing interviews with other bloggers as a way to generate interesting content for your blog. One of the responses I had via a direct message from a follower was:

“I’m too shy to approach big bloggers for an interview - do you have any tips?”

Two ideas come to mind:

1. Don’t just approach ‘big’ bloggers

While many successful bloggers are willing to do interviews you might find you have more success if you target mediums sized blogs initially. While there is nothing wrong with aiming high - some bloggers are more likely to do an interview with you if you can show them a few other interviews you’ve done you might have more success.

2. One question interviews

One of the best ways to get even larger bloggers to respond is to keep your interviews very simple. The fewer the questions and the easier that they are to answer the more likely you are to get a response. Take this to the extreme with a ‘one question interview’ - a single question that is answerable in a few sentences.

You can then present the answers in a couple of ways:

1. As a single post - combine all the answers to the same question in one post. In this way you get a post that is quite long and explores the topic in a variety of ways (hopefully).

2. As a series of posts - I’ve done this a couple of times whe