The Secret Power of Blog Post Title

I always knew that writing a strong headline is important, but I never thought that it deserves much more time and efforts that I spent on that. Problogger offers some interesting statistics, based on the research:

On average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest. This is the secret to the power of the headline, and why it so highly determines the effectiveness of the entire piece.

That means that the better the headline is, the better your odds to get wide public attention. Definitely, writing a great headline doesn’t guarantee the success of your writing. The benefit conveyed in the headline still needs to be properly satisfied in the body copy, either with your content or your offer. But great body content with a bad or even marginal headline is doomed to go largely unread.

The proper parallel is a job interview. If your resume is not good or appropriate, you will never get to the interview with prospective employer, and it really does not matter how good you are, and how well you fit to the advertised position. It is too, that if you do not match, if will not pass the interview test, but at least you will have such a chance.

The copywriting trainers at American Writers & Artists teach The Four U’s approach to writing headlines. Headlines, subheads and bullets should:

* Be USEFUL to the reader,

* Provide him with a sense of URGENCY,

* Convey the idea that the main benefit is somehow UNIQUE; and

* Do all of the above in an ULTRA-SPECIFIC way.

Coming from other direction, you title should follow another set of rules, applicable for blog posts as well. Your Blog Title Should:

* Stimulate curiosity and create excitement

* Spell out the purpose of your article

* Give a reason to take immediate action

* Allow readers to find your post via keyword search

There are a few free tools online that can help point you in the right direction if you’re genuinely stumped on what to call your content. The following are some I’ve used before, and love:

·         HubSpot Blog Topic Generator

·         Tweak Your Biz Title Generator

·         Portent’s Content Idea Generator

In most cases, the topic you receive won’t necessarily be perfectly ready to slap on your article. Some tweaking will probably be required, but they’re pretty neat tools for breaking through a mental block.

Sources and Additional Information:

http://www.copyblogger.com/writing-headlines-that-get-results/

http://www.business2community.com/blogging/15-unbelievably-powerful-pro-tips-rockstar-blog-titles-0759572

http://socialmediatoday.com/rebekah-radice/1555291/5-ways-create-deliciously-irresistible-blog-post-title

Missing Link between Facebook and Twitter

Most of the modern time bloggers recognize the value of the social networks to promote their blog post, sharing the related information on the multiple sites and creating additional web links to your blog, which plays positive role for your site ranking.

Among the two leading applications in the social networking are Twitter and Facebook. Free web service Natter will save you time by linking your two accounts in these communities. As you register to the Natter account, all your tweets will be monitored by the Natter service and instantly posted to Facebook. The same way, your every comment posted on Facebook, will be automatically reposted to Twitter in real time. So you can follow your Facebook right from your favorite Twitter client.

Main Features:

• Post tweets to your Facebook profile.
• Post Facebook comments back to Twitter.
• Only post tweets containing a hashtag (e.g. #fb) to Facebook.
• Finds and displays links in your tweets as a Facebook post.
• Translates twitter names to their real world counterparts.

Website: http://natter.r10.railsrumble.com/

Editorial Calendar Plugin for WordPress from StressLimit

If you are serious professional blogger, using WordPress as a blogging platform, you may want to look on the free feature offered by StressLimit. Planning ahead will bring your blogging to the next level of professionalism and improve your rating among the readers. Eventually, that will help to improve your blog visibility in search engines, bring more visitors, and improve your profitability.

Why Use an Editorial Calendar?

An editorial calendar is the foundation of strategic blogging; it lets you do the planning that it takes to get the most audience reach from your blog content.

• An editorial calendar lets you plan ahead;
• An editorial calendar adds structure to your creativity;
• You can take a great concept further by serializing content;
• You can be proactive and capitalize on search trends.

Main Features

• See all of your posts and when they’ll be posted.
• Drag and drop to change your post dates.
• Quickedit post titles, contents, and times.
• Publish posts or manage drafts.
• Easily see the status of your posts.
• Manage posts from multiple authors.

Developers’ Website: http://stresslimitdesign.com/editorial-calendar-plugin

100+ Ways to Battle Blogger’s Block

Why do you blog? Do you blog for money? Do you blog for fun? Actually, the purpose of your blogging will largely define the strategy you apply. I blog for both: fun and money, but fun goes first. Therefore, each of my 20 blogs I started because I liked the topic, because I wanted to learn more about, and because I was more or less confident that the same topic will be interesting for my readers.

But, overtime, your interests change, you feel that there is nothing more you can say on the topic, and you just do not want to discuss the topic any more. Here it comes blogger’s block. If I feel like that, I usually put the blog on the passive preservation mode, remove it from the active blogs list and focus on other topics. Overtime, my perception might change, I might find a new perspectives or the new line of discoveries on the topic, thus become interesting in the blog again. These blogs are returned to the active list. Other blogs will remain on the passive lists forever, supported by by-monthly posts just to keep them alive. In any way, if I do not feel like writing on the particular blog or topic, I just skip it and go to the next. Well, it is my way of coping with blogger’s block.

BloggingBookshelf is offering more than 100 professional advices on how to battle the Blogger Blog in their free eBook. You can download the brochure from the following link:

http://www.ziddu.com/download/14357071/bloggers-block-ebook-from-blogging-bookshelfv3.1.pdf.html

101 tips for improving your blog by Ben Barden

In this post, I would like to present an ebook - 101 tips for improving your blog by Ben Barden from http://www.toptenblogtips.com/. As the title claims, the ebook contains 101 essential tips for all bloggers, no matter how technical you are, or which platform you use.

The ebook is divided into 10 sections, each containing 10 tips:

1. Advertising and Promotion
2. Blogging Personalities
3. Comments
4. Content
5. Design
6. Guest Posts
7. Networking
8. Overcoming blogger's block
9. Planning
10. Post frequency

Tip #101 is provided at the end of the ebook.

You can download the ebook here:

http://www.ziddu.com/download/11644427/Ben_Barden_-_101_tips_for_improving_your_blog.pdf.html

It's a free download, so you can share it with no restriction.

Do you check your blog statistics too often?

While monitoring your trends and stats is one of the most important thing you can do to improve your blog, that might become kind of obsession. Not only it takes your valuable time, if you do that too often, at some point it may become one of the conditions of your personal well-being. Your trends go up – you are happy, down – you are upset and depressed. Is that really productive? Are you happier now, when you have one more condition for your mood changes?

I would like to present blogger Vikas Gupta opinion on the topic.

Things Take Time (TTT) and it is one the hardest things to understand while blogging for obvious reasons. Almost all of us at some point of time have watched our blog statistics to get a minute-by-minute idea of how many visits our blog is garnering as analyzed by the various statistics plugins and Google Analytics or StatCounter. It is certainly an enjoyable exercise and one which is hard to resist given the immediate gratification it brings. Here are my views on why worrying inordinately about your blog statistics, hits and blog traffic is not a very good thing to do.

Don’t waste your precious time

Time is money. Many bloggers spend a lot of time watching those stats (often real-time) and getting a lot of satisfaction or tension. More often than not it is tension because everyone wants as many hits as possible and one is rarely satisfied which is normal human behavior. Statistical analyses of your blog(s) once in a while are necessary and desirable but spending a lot of time with it not advisable.

It also gives you tension

You are not getting what you want unlike your rival whose traffic and PR is just shooting upwards! You will only accentuate that painful feeling (aka tension) if you do not control your obsession with your blog’s traffic. Remember, Things Take Time (TTT). Ask any established and successful blogger and they suggest you to concentrate on content and quality more than traffic analyses. Traffic will follow sooner or later. Why torture yourself by thinking about it incessantly?!

You will compromise on quality

Blogging is not just about numbers and hits. If you worry about traffic and blog stats all the time you may end up writing for search engines than human beings. Blog for human beings not for bots. Build your credibility first traffic later. As a matter of fact, traffic is a concomitant of good content and will chase you and your blog though it may take some time.

Slow and steady wins the race

Many successful bloggers today are not fly-by-night online entrepreneurs. They worked hard with their blogs and exhibited a high degree of perseverance. “Between saying and doing many a pair of shoes is worn out,”  is a popular Italian proverb. So work more on your blog and less on your stats.

Worrying in moderation is fine

Moderation in all things! As they say you can eat whatever you like as long as it is in moderation. The same sentiments apply here. Do not ignore your blog stats and do not let it get the better of you. Wise bloggers know how to maintain the balance. Be wise and not otherwise!

Choosing Topic for your Blog which is right for you

One of the readers of the blog asked my advice on how to choose the right niche to work in. While it looks like and easy question to answer, in reality it is not. I have personally started several blogs, which I got eventually bored with, thus placing them in the passive mode. I have other blog, quite interesting and attractive, but appeared to be unmarketable and unprofitable (at least, for me). I have found a nice post by Daniel Scocco at DailyBlogTips, where he reviews the possible reasons of the blogging failure, based on the improperly chosen blogging niche. Presenting the post for your attention. 

A lot of people want to make money blogging, and a most of these people will fail miserably. There are 1000 reasons why this happens (and happens so often), but I find that one of the most common reasons a blog fails is because of the subject it is about.

No, not because you picked a subject that is way over saturated. And no, not because you picked a subject that is hard to monetize. What I am talking about here is when you pick a subject that you, the writer, have no business writing about in the first place.

You see, the number of people with blogs about a subject they either have no real interest in, no real passion for, no real experience with, no real knowledge about, or any combination of the four, is, quite frankly, pretty freaking insane. And hilarious.

Seriously, do you have any idea how many blogs there are about “making money online” that are written by people who have never made a cent online? Or how many blogs there are about “blogging” that are written by people who don’t actually have anything close to a successful blog? It’s kinda like a fat guy writing about weight loss. They lack significant knowledge about it, and they certainly lack first hand experience with it, but they see other people blogging about it successfully and making decent money, so they decide to try it too.

I mean, if it works for these people, it will surely work for you, right?

The obvious problem (well, obvious to me at least) is that you don’t actually have any knowledge about or experience with the subject. And, no matter how talented of a writer you may think you are, this tends to come through to your readers. You’d be surprised at just how easy it is to tell when you are reading something written by someone who is truly knowledgeable about a subject, and when you are reading something written by someone who is mostly just rewriting stuff they’ve learned from someone who actually IS knowledgeable about the subject.

It’s a big difference, and it’s usually quite noticeable. The result? Your blog will probably fail. People seeking information want to get that information from someone who is truly qualified to give it. You aren’t, and they will most likely notice.

It’s also entirely possible to be knowledgeable about a subject, but still not really be interested in it or passionate about it. This will again come through to your readers, but the even bigger problem here is that one of the keys to having a successful blog is time. It is extremely rare (you might as well read that as “impossible”) to see a blog become a success overnight. As I’m sure has been mentioned on Daily Blog Tips before, it takes time. In some cases, lots of time. And, if what you are blogging about isn’t something you are truly passionate about and interested in, guess what? This will be the slowest passing time you’ve ever experienced in your life.

In most cases, you will completely lose interest long before that time is ever reached. The result? Your blog will probably fail. You can’t fake passion, at least not long term. You may be able to fool your visitors for a while, but you won’t be able to fool yourself.

In the end, it’s pretty simple. Blog about a subject that you are at least somewhat knowledgeable about, and a large amount passionate about. If you don’t, you are putting your blog in a position to fail from day 1.

So the question now is, how do you find this magical blog subject that fits the above description? Well, there’s a few ways, but here’s my personal favorite tip:

Go to your family and close friends and present them with this question: If they had a problem of some kind, something that they needed help with, something they couldn’t figure out, something they didn’t understand, something they had questions about… what would make them say “Hey, I need to call [insert your name here]!”

The responses they give should give you a really good idea of the kind of stuff you should be blogging about. And once you have that, you’re set. Only 999 other possible reasons for why your blog will fail. Look on the bright side though. At least you’re starting off in a position to succeed. Many people don’t even have that.

A new way to express yourself with Sketchcast

If you are an active blogger, you know that you operate in highly competitive environment. In order to attract, surprise, and keep your readers through your content, interface, and useful features. One of them is ability to add a quick drawing or sketch, related to a topic of discussion. Visualization might save you a lot of explanation and give your readers better and faster understanding of all details. Yes, you can prepare and add your images offline, but that will take a lot of time and efforts. If the illustration is simple, or if you have strong artistic abilities, cool Web2 application Sketchcast will be your valuable assistant.

Here is a brief tutorial of how to use this free service in three simple steps

STEP 1:
Register for a new account at Sketchcast.

STEP 2:
Filling out all the required info, you can start to draw (optionally, with your voice speaking).

STEP 3:
After drawing you can embed the sketch player in your blog.

 

Simple, isn’t it?

Any sketch can then be embedded on your blog/ homepage for people to play-back, and you can also point people to your sketchcast channel on the developers website (or let them subscribe to your sketchcast RSS feed).

How to disable text selection on Blogger blog

In one of the previous publications, we presented a way to disable right click on the page of your Blogger blog to decrease the copyright violations from your readers “borrowing” your content for their own purposes. To go further in your content safeguarding efforts, you can make the next step, disabling text selection on your page entirely.

This hack was created by Dynamicdrive as well in the form of Javascript, and is also applicable to those bloggers who don’t like their content copied by others. If this concern is on top of your priorities list, then Copy the following code and Paste it to your blog template:


<script type="text/javascript">

/***********************************************
* Disable Text Selection script- © Dynamic Drive DHTML code library (www.dynamicdrive.com)
* This notice MUST stay intact for legal use
* Visit Dynamic Drive at http://www.dynamicdrive.com/ for full source code
***********************************************/

function disableSelection(target){
if (typeof target.onselectstart!="undefined") //IE route
target.onselectstart=function(){return false}
else if (typeof target.style.MozUserSelect!="undefined") //Firefox route
target.style.MozUserSelect="none"
else //All other route (ie: Opera)
target.onmousedown=function(){return false} How to disable
target.style.cursor = "default"
}

//Sample usages
//disableSelection(document.body) //Disable text selection on entire body
//disableSelection(document.getElementById("mydiv")) //Disable text selection on element with id="mydiv"

</script>