“Use Forums to Boost Your Blog’s Value” plus 1 more

---

Use Forums to Boost Your Blog’s Value Posted: 01 Aug 2012 01:01 PM PDT This guest post is by Michael Silverman of Duo Consulting. As bloggers, we're constantly obsessing over ways to extend our reach to more people. We hover over every scrap of information about promoting our blogs and expanding our audience. And we use social media channels to get the word out and go viral. There's no doubt that these are important parts of maintaining a successful blog. Still, what role do you assign to your existing audience? Most bloggers are appreciative of their readership, but many rarely consider that their existing audience can do more than promote content and keep the comments active. Why don't we spend more time inflating the potential of our existing audience? Tapping the hidden potential I'll answer that question with another one: do you think of your blog as a publishing platform with occasional interaction, or a full-blown community? For successful bloggers, it's quite probable that your readers have more to say than they post in the comments. Raise the value of your blog by giving audience members the means to connect. Consider the potential of integrating forums into your website. It worked for Dooce. Heather Armstrong's success promoting her unique brand of perspective came over ten years of blogging. Site analytics concluded more than a quarter of Dooce's traffic was made up of repeat visitors, some of whom visited hundreds of times per new post. They were begging for a home. They craved an identity. Working with an online community development expert, Heather integrated a Q&A forum into her website. Within the first day, nearly 16,000 loyal readers signed up for the Dooce community—a clear indicator that the community was already present, almost supernaturally, and was hungry for the interaction in which it subsequently engaged. How forums add value You can do more with your audience, too. Maximizing that potential requires a transition in perspective. In addition to positioning your blog as an editorial content machine, consider five ways more user-generated content can strengthen your site's value. 1. Empower your readers with ownership Everyone wants to be a part of the experience. When you offer your readers a place to interact, they become a catalyst for content. Elevating your audience from readers to contributors implies a newfound sense of ownership that can greatly increase loyalty to your brand. 2. Keep your audience on your site longer You're only one person, and you can only generate so much content. Bloggers with strong followings have found that readers visit multiple times per post. Without new content, you lose a golden opportunity to keep visitors on your site longer. Yet with forums, you gain a source of new content that won't require much day-to-day commitment on your end. 3. Improve search visibility In addition to all of the backbreaking promotional labor you perform, consider the continuous stream of new content that a forum can produce. Your site gets constant attention from search engines while gaining traction for new keywords. 4. Simplify how readers connect with each other Your blog is a valuable source of networking opportunity, but it's difficult to tap into if you're only employing the comments for reader interaction. Forums, on the other hand, create a channel for direct interaction between readers. You already provide your audience with valuable information; expand that value by offering them the means to connect. 5. Find new ways to empathize with readers Your content is successful because you understand the motivations of your audience and empathize with them. Forums open the conversation up, offering you valuable insights into your audience that you can turn into writing inspiration. You can also leverage these conversations to connect with your audience on a more personal level, in an appropriate venue separate from your blog's editorial feed. The right tools for the job How easy or difficult it is to plug forums in depends on your blogging platform. If you're on WordPress, you can integrate popular forum software like bbPress. Singletrack Magazine, for instance, couples article content with popular mountain biking forums (powered by bbPress). If you have a large content library powered by Drupal, you have options. Dooce's Q&A section was built in Drupal. Among the most popular of the modules available for Drupal websites is the Advanced Forum module. Sometimes, a strong blog or publication builds itself up on the power of user-generated content. AbsolutePunk, a popular online community for pop-punk enthusiasts, leverages vBulletin to get the job done. The software comes with a strong CMS to help power site and editorial content. Or, like some blogs and sites, you may decide to host the forum on another platform. No matter what CMS you use, you can build forums that mimic the theme of the website and link back and forth between the website content and forums. You have an opportunity in front of you to raise the value of your website. If you take advantage of it effectively, the rewards can be great. Do you have a forum on your blog? Are you a forum member on another blog? Share your experiences with us in the comments. In addition to founding and leading Chicago-based Duo Consulting, Michael Silverman has headed up a number of online community development projects for 15 years. He just launched the book on online communities, Capturing Community: How to Build, Manage and Market Your Online Community. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger Use Forums to Boost Your Blog's Value

Traffic Technique 4: Subscriptions Posted: 01 Aug 2012 07:02 AM PDT From the marketers’ point of view, subscriptions are a loyalty mechanism—they’re the first technique we’ve looked at that’s most often used to build repeat traffic from people who have already visited your blog, and like it. If they like it so much, why do they need to be reminded to come back? Well, we’re all forgetful—and we know it! By subscribing, we can make sure we never miss a post from our favorite blogs. We stay up to date on all the news, perhaps even becoming part of a community, making friends, and connecting with people. Subscriptions can take a number of forms, but the three most common are probably these: email newsletters (which, as I’ve mentioned, have been invaluable to me in growing my blogs and making money from them) email autoresponder sequences (for example, a course broken into instalments and emailed weekly) a forum or membership area of your site RSS feeds. Of course, subscriptions aren’t just for loyal readers—they can also be used to engage brand new readers, which makes this traffic tactic very versatile. The one thing that you will need, though, if your subscription call to action is going to work, is that the reader has to see it, and to do that, they’ll need to be on your blog. Your blog: the proof of your subscription’s value Whether you attract would-be subscribers to your blog through search, content marketing, advertising, or some other technique, it’s important to remember that your blog is the most common reason those people will subscribe. Sure, they might like what you have to say on Twitter, or enjoy your pins on Pinterest, but they don’t need to subscribe to your blog to stay up-to-date with your news on those platforms. When you think about it, asking a subscriber to add a new subscription to their list—given the plethora of memberships we all have these days—is a pretty big deal. So we need to treat it as such. As we’ll see in a moment, a subscription is a great opportunity for bloggers to meet audience’s specific, deep needs. That said, if your site doesn’t already deliver on those needs—or their precursors-in some way, you may have trouble gaining those subscribers. Your first job is elementary: make sure your site looks professional, trustworthy, and responsive to would-be subscribers. Does it reflect their values, interests, and needs? Does it speak to them clearly and directly? Can they see at a glance the kind of value they’ll get from your blog? If so, you’re onto something. Your next step is to get that subscription call to action in front of them, and make sure it touches on those needs you’ve already helped them identify. This comes down to copy lines and subscription boxes—but don’t overlook tactics like providing informational pages about your subscription offering, and sample content from the subscriber material, to further entice users. Remember: you want to make it a no-brainer for them to subscribe. Don’t leave them guessing the value they’ll get from you. In my experience, your best bet is to show it to them. My latest project, SnapnDeals, is a really simple example. The home page header tells you the site’s purpose—what it offers you. A little scrolling shows you a sample of the details of that offer. And at the page’s bottom, you see this subscribe box. It’s very simple, but as you can see, when you get to the subscription box, there’s no doubt as to what you’ll get in the subscription. The call to action just drives that home. On the other hand, the dPS site offers two kinds of email newsletters, and we’ve developed a brief informational lightbox to explain the differences between them. Within the context provided by the homepage, this information gives a clear idea of what’s included in the subscription. For this reason, in-context signup CTAs tend to do very well on my sites. But if you’re having trouble converting readers to subscribers, see our series on conversion optimization for help. Beyond the signup Many bloggers focus heavily on getting the subscription. That’s fine—it makes sense—but to grow your list, you really need to deliver consistently outstanding value through the subscription itself. Moreover, to generate blog traffic from those subscribers, you need to give them no-brainer reasons to click those links you’ve included in the email or RSS feed and come through to your blog, or spend more time clicking around your forums and engaging with the others they find there. When we look at subscriptions from the blogger’s point of view, that’s what we see: subscription packages give us the opportunity to deliver content that’s really outstanding. It needs to be outstanding to make the subscription worthwhile and meaningful for your readers in the first place. But a subscription offer gives you the chance to get more deeply into topics that are particularly important, deep, complex, or interesting to your readers. To take this one step further, if you want your subscribed users to actively use that subscription, your subscription material needs to continually reward them for subscribing. It has to anticipate their questions, preempt their needs, and solve problems they don’t even know they have. That sounds like a big challenge, but if you’re the kind of blogger who loves engaging with readers and knows what they want, this will become almost second-nature to you over time. The easiest way to fulfil those needs is to encourage your subscribers to look at more of your content—through links, cross-references, and ongoing discussions through your posts and in the comments (if you have those turned on). Subscriptions give us a forum to reformulate and recast our existing content by showing readers how it meets needs they weren’t aware of, or, together with other pieces from our blog, provides insight they seek. Finally, if the subscription is time-limited (for example, your offer is a series of four emails that teach subscribers how to do something), you should really aim to follow it up with something that’s even more compelling at the end of that timeframe. Don’t just let readers languish after the subscription material ends: you have an engaged audience at your fingertips. You could: send them a survey asking for feedback on the subscription up-sell them to a product or service that relates to what they’ve just learned cross-promote another subscription product or offer that may interest them. Don’t be satisfied with the fact that you know have this person’s email address on your list—keep rewarding them for subscribing with more and more value, and they’ll keep coming back. In this way, those valuable subscribers can form the bedrock of traffic from which you can build new visitor numbers, and traffic growth, upon. Do you use subscriptions to grow traffic to your blog? Tell us how in the comments. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger Traffic Technique 4: Subscriptions

You are subscribed to email updates from @ProBlogger To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email delivery powered by Google
Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610