21 Days to a more profitable blog – Day 2! Enhance your blog to compel word-of-mouth

21 Days to a More Profitable Blog21 Days to a More Profitable Blog Tutorial > Day 2!  Enhance your blog to compel word-of-mouth

Why hello there!  Glad to see you back! 

Hope your day is treating you most spiffy-like (over here in LingLand, it’s 3:59am and my beloved TwitterBudgies are actually (get this!) NOT imitating feeding time at the Serengeti Plains!).    I just heard Paradise Emerge from the kitchen (ie, my coffee maker dinged) so give me a sec to grab me first cup of the day….

(tick tock tick tock tock tock)

Alrighty, I’m back again and let’s now dive into:

Today is Day 2 of my series, 21 Days To A More Profitable Blog!  And for today, I’d like to talk about…

Carts, horses and the location of such.

Got that mental image in your mind? Alrighty now….imagine the following.  You have piled into that cart gold bullion that would make Daffy Duck swoon in joy, and Gabrielle to scribe in Linear B, and Indiana Jones to offer his whip to the Smithsonian and and and …you get the idea. 

Let me now ask you:

Would you prefer the horse to be AHEAD of the cart….or behind it?

Hmmmm?

Think about it.   Lots of make-your-blog-superDeDuper-profitable lessons begin by diving you headfirst into Pay-per-clickees and Adsense and affiliate programming and all of those yummy goodies, right?

But let me now gently drop the following clue upon the landscape!

And it’s this:

Doesn’t it make sense to FIRST enable your blog to COMPEL visitors to tell their friends about it…prior to embedding all the money-generating stuff?

In other words, why put the cart (making money) in front of the horse (your blog) from the get-go?  After all, it’s kinda sorta common sense – your visitors can reach their friends ‘waaaaay faster than you can!

But for them to tell their friends, not only should your content be stellar, but your blog should also welcome your visitors, make them feel at home, and when they do decide to leave, gently remind them that hey!  Your friends might enjoy this site too!

And the good news is, it doesn’t take a lot of time at all to add some lovely tweakies to your site that enable the above. 

So! With coffee in hand (okay, coffee in cup that’s in hand), let’s turn to:

NOTE!Before You Begin – Know how to install WordPress plugins.

The goodies I’m going to reveal to you shortly are WordPress plugins that you’ll need to install on your blog.  If you need help for doing so, check out:

Wasn’t that fun?

Ready to continue?  Wondrous!  Move smoothly now to:

NOTE!Step 1 – Install CommentLuv and Linky Love and….

"CommentLuv" is a WordPress plugin that grabs the last post by a commentor and appends it to their comment, thus giving them a backlink to their site.  

This is a goooood thing!  And Lucia’s Linky Love is a plugin that let’s you turn on the DOFOLLOW (good for search engine stuff) on comments after a prescribed number of contributions (for example, here on my site, DOFOLLOW is turned on after people comment 3 times).  Did I mention how much I enjoy reading comments by readers, by the way?  🙂

Let’s stop for a second and think what this does.  When you offer CommentLuv and Lucia’s Linky Love, you’re proactively showing the "What’s in it for me to comment on your blog?" question many readers possess – why, you get a direct deep link back to your site!  That’s a pretty good return on the few minutes it takes to write an insightful comment, right?

Other great comment-related plugins you can investigate include:

Next, it’s time for:

NOTE!Step 2 – Install Social Bookmarking Plugins

Adding cute little social bookmarking buttons after your posts make it very easy for people to tell their friends about your posts…and thus encourage more and more visitors and page views.

Here’s what I use:

And here’s others you can use:

Some neat articles to learn more include:

Remember your goal here.  You want to make it as easy as possible for people to tweet about your articles, to tell their friends via email/IM and the like!

Social bookmarks can really assist you here.

And finally, for my last step in Day 2 of 21 Days to a More Profitable Blog, I’d like to ….

Lose the technology entirely (eeek!) and talk about:

NOTE!Step 3 – Add simple post closes.

Have you noticed something about my blog postings?  Besides the fact they’re monetized by eBay and are  infused with kind of zany humor only raising 4 kids, 15 Twitter Budgies and worshipping coffee can produce, they almost always end up with:

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#BEGIN highlights of this blog writing post:

Beginners blogging tips

Intermediate and/or Advanced blogging tips

#END highlights of this blog writing post


Like this post? Please feel free to tell your friends and Digg It – I very much appreciate your time!

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Would you believe, this is not hard-coded in my WordPress php code?  And it’s not a plugin either?

No indeed – awhile back, I simply created a test post with the above, viewed the source, and copied/pasted it to a file entitled "close_post.txt" that’s on my computer.   Whenever I write, I have that file open…and once I’m done with the post, I simply paste it at the end.

See, you don’t have to rely on new-fangled plugins to enhance your blog…you can do it the old-fashioned way by copying and pasting. 

Voila!  End result?  Every one of my how-to posts are uniform and (again!) remind the viewer that wow!  You might want to tell your friends about it too.

Nice, eh?  The above is part of my Critical Blog Checklist series I wrote back in March.  Please do feel free to check it out – I think you’ll enjoy it greatly!

See how it works?  Remember what I had written in Day 1:

FIRSTYou tweak your blog/site so that people are encouraged to tell their friends to check out what you have to offer.

NEXT:  You add affiliate programs/PPC programs/Clickbank Programs/etc. that mesh seamlessly with your theme

NEXT:  You offer complimentary downloads that get passed around online and bring people back to your site

NEXT:  You build your reputation online by doing what only YOU can do – Providing value via your own unique style.

There’s always a method to me madness.  🙂

And that brings me to:

NOTE!In closing

In today’s lesson, you learned about simple plugins you can add to your blog that will compel others to tell their friends about your site, thus effectively doing your marketing for you.

But!  An opportunity now arises! 

(remember, there’s no such things as problems in real life – just misunderstood opportunities)…..

HOMEWORK – One of the goals of bloggers and site builders is to grow their subscriber numbers as high as possible (speaking of which, have you subscribed yet so as to not miss a lesson?  Find out all the reasons why you’d love subscribing over here!). 

Your homework tonight is to figure out just why people would like to subscribe to your site.  Trust me, you want to do this…it will be a key component to tomorrow’s lesson.

Can you think of anything else to include?  Feel free to comment about it below!

Until tomorrow,

Barbara


#BEGIN highlights of this blog writing post:

Beginners make money blogging tips:  You’re not the only one who will promote your blog – happy readers do that as well!

Intermediate and/or Advanced make money blogging tips:  Always make it worthwhile for people to comment on your blogs.  I highly recommend installing Commentluv and Linky Love and goodies of that nature.

#END highlights of this blog writing post


Like this post? Please feel free to Digg It and let your friends know about it too – I very much appreciate your time!

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