Category: MetaBlogging

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MetaBlogging

Finding your blog niche

Last week in advice to lurkers or interested nonbloggers, I said that a blog has to have a niche, theme or thesis. A blog is always stronger when you start from there. For MamaBlogga, as you may have noticed, the theme is fulfillment in motherhood (although blogging advice from a professional is also a strong draw, I guess).

So how do you find what your underlying message is? How can you be sure you have something to share with the world? How can you find where you fit into the blogosphere?

findniche

Well, after that paragraph of questions, unfortunately, the answer is usually more questions. But first, I’ll tell you how I found my theme. If you read my interview with Mommy Brain Online for the Boost newsletter, you might remember that about the time I started blogging (three years ago!), I was struggling as a new mom. I’d just read I Am a Mother by Jane Clayson Johnson.

I realized that while I knew being a mother was the most important thing I could be doing with my life, it didn’t feel that way. I knew that it should, and I thought other mothers must feel the same way. I wanted to reach out to other moms who were struggling with staying at home or being a mother and offer encouragement and help them find fulfillment—and hopefully find that fulfillment myself.

And a blog was born. So, how can you find the same kind of mission for your blog?

Finding your niche

First, you have to find your general niche—the area you’ll be writing about. For MamaBlogga, obviously that’s motherhood. There are lots of areas of blogging, and many of them are highly saturated—politics, for example.

Although it’s not very useful as a blog tracker these days, Technorati is still a good place to find out what blogs are about. The one hundred most popular blog tags give a good sampling of the most popular blog niches. For example:

  • art
  • business
  • photography
  • design
  • books
  • religion
  • romance and relationships
  • writing

So what are you knowledgeable about? What are you passionate about? What could you write about 3-5 times a week (or, at the very least, weekly)?

Finding your place—your theme

Narrowing that niche, however, is vitally important to finding your place. A blog just about “photography” is going to be a little vague. For example, one day you’re posting tips on adjusting the f stop to compensate for the white of a wedding dress in full sunlight and the next day you’re posting about how to use the zoom on a point and shoot, and then the next day you cover full HDR and then you fill out the week with others’ photos of a dog, a building, a beach and a person.

How will someone visiting your blog for the first time know what to expect next? How will they be able to tell is most of the posts are above their level—or below it? (And don’t even get me started on your blog readers!)

Sometimes we try too hard to be everything to everyone in our niche. But if you pick something narrower—portrait photography or HDR or how to get the most out of your camera—you can actually appeal to more people because you’re appealing to a specific segment instead of small portions of several segments.

Again, we look to ourselves to find this theme, this passion. We’ve already identified an area that we’re knowledgeable (or want to learn more) about. So let’s specialize a little further—what are you passionate about? How can you help other people interested in the same thing? What can you teach or share with people to help them learn, grow and improve?

The more you help other people through your blog, the more you can grow your blog. And for me, the more I enjoy blogging!

Next week, we’ll look at how to express that niche in the first impression of your blog!

What do you think? What themes have you seen in your favorite blog niche? How do you see that blog’s post clustered around that theme? (One other note: today is my five year anniversary! Woot!)

Photo by Andronicus Riyono

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MetaBlogging

Advice to lurkers

As I’ve mentioned a couple times, I recently had a guest post on literary agent Nathan Bransford’s blog. (Very exciting!) I’m still keeping up with the discussion in the comments, and yesterday Donna asked an interesting blogging question:

I’m what could be called a “Lurker”. I lurk in blog-land, reading the advise and posts, sometimes having a thing or two to say. After reading everyone else’s posts, whatever questions or comments I might pose have been answered. I’m satisfied. So, I wouldn’t know what to do with a blog of my own, or if someone actually made a comment about what was posted on the web site.

lurkeradvice

I gave a short answer in the comments, but here is a long one:

1. Stop lurking. Every question you’ve ever thought of has really been answered? Even then, I know I appreciate the fourth “thank you, I really needed this today!” as much as the first. In fact, that’s one of my favorite comments to get.

I know I used to feel reluctant to comment, and often still do, especially on big blogs where I don’t know the blogger. But comments are the currency of blogging. Bloggers love (non-hateful) comments. Most of us won’t bite your head off for commenting; we’ll be too busy loving you forever.

2. Find something to say. Blogs are always stronger when they have a focus/niche/topic. The topic of this blog is fulfillment in motherhood. The topic of my writing blog is the art and craft (and business!) of writing. The topic of my work blog is Internet marketing news.

Or, you can phrase it more like an argument: you can find fulfillment in motherhood, this is how you should write (the argument is a bit more complex than that, of course), you should use Internet marketing (and do it thusly).

Don’t have a message to the world? You can sometimes garner a following just posting interesting stuff—research for a novel, travel information, etc.

3. Get out there! I’ve attended a few industry conferences in Internet marketing and publishing. While the subject matter is vastly different, I can attest that you get a lot more out of conferences if you take the opportunity to talk to people. Yes, it’s hard—I’m very shy (I don’t like calling the pizza parlor, or even my friend sometimes!). But so are lots of other people out there. You never know what might happen if you’re willing to take that first step.

And here’s your chance! Whether you’ve commented here once or one thousand times, introduce yourself in the comments and let’s chat!

More WFMW

Photo by Sofie

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MetaBlogging

Get even more out of FeedBurner

Table of contents for Blogging Add-ons

Guess who’s featured in today’s edition of MommyBrainOnline’s The Boost newsletter? It’s me! Welcome to new visitors! Please subscribe to MamaBlogga to get more posts on finding fulfillment and blogging tips!

It’s been a while since we went through the five easy steps to getting started and seven ways to get more from FeedBurner, the RSS service. Well, FeedBurner recently added a feature to help you get even more out of the service!

FeedBurner has offered email subscriptions for a while, for your blog readers who want to get updates in their inbox instead of in a reader. But while you could customize lots of options for your email newsletters, the subject line was always the same. For years, the only way you could make your email subject line change to match your content was to login every day and do it manually.

But that’s changed! Now you can add a custom feature to your subject line to make it match your post titles. Under Publicize > Email Subscriptions > Email Branding, here’s the new “hot tip”:

gooburner-custom-subject-line
Just add ${latestItemTitle} to your subject line, and the title of your latest post will appear in your subject line.

If you have more than one post per day, you can customize your subject line even more if you check the checkbox. A popup menu appears giving you even more options:
gooburner-custom-subject-line-mult

Why is this helpful? It will help your email subscribers see what’s coming in your email. It should also increase the number of email subscribers who actually open your email, since it won’t get lost in a sea of same-subject emails (like Darren Rowse of ProBlogger points out).

Here’s the official Google announcement of the FeedBurner change.

More Works-for-me Wednesday

So get out there and make your email newsletters even better!

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MetaBlogging

Is the FTC coming after mom bloggers?

restrained-150x150Have you heard about the FTC’s new policies for bloggers? Yep, that’s right, the US federal government is making rules that will affect bloggers everywhere—including mom bloggers.

What’s this monumental change? Well, the Federal Trade Commission is taking a closer look at online reviews. Yeah, it’s still going to be okay to review products online—but if you were paid to write the review, got the product for free, or use an affiliate link in your post, you’ll need to tell your readers.

The FTC hasn’t published specific guidelines yet (I’ll let you know when they do), but they’ve addressed the subject in new policies over the last few months.

sheriffWhat does this mean for you? I take it to mean that now is a good time to get a disclosure policy. Here is my disclosure policy. In the absence of specifics from the FTC, I believe a site-wide policy, when linked prominently and worded appropriately, is sufficient notice for affiliate links. Specific product reviews or paid posts, however, would probably not be covered by blanket statements like this (unless all of your product reviews use the exact same terms).

“But—but—but—” you say? Brian Clark at Copyblogger has a great post today pointing out that disclosure can actually be a selling point. In his examples, he discloses affiliate links at the link level.

Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim also has some suggestions to avoid the wrath of the Feds, especially if you don’t feel a site-wide disclosure is enough:

So, how can you make sure you don’t ever hear from the FTC?

If in doubt, spell it out! Cheesy, I know, but it will help you. If you ever stop to ask yourself, "should I disclose this?" then the answer is probably "yes." The chances are that whatever is causing the guilt-trip isn’t worthy of the FTC’s attention, but you’ll feel better for disclosing it AND you’ll earn the trust of your readers!

Other tips that might help you sleep at night:

  • Create a page that lists all of your potential "conflict of interests" and simply link to it whenever your post includes mention of one of those relationships.
  • Tag any links with something visible and obvious. Such as (affiliate) or (sponsor).
  • You don’t have to publish the full terms of your compensation. Simply stating "Company X sponsored this post…") or ("We received free XXX as part of this review…") will likely be enough to satisfy the FTC.

And finally, I have to link to AllThingsD‘s coverage, because they used the cover of “The Who Sell Out” and I like the Who. 😉

Warning: I’m not a lawyer and this isn’t legal advice. This is my opinion and interpretation of vague FTC guideline statements that have yet to be made into concrete, specific policies.

More Works-for-me Wednesday

Photo credits: handcuffs—Penny Mathews; badge—Steve Woods

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MetaBlogging

What are Followers and how do I get them?

Not on Blogger? See more resources

Have you see one of the most popular new widgets/gadgets on Blogger blogs lately? They’re popping up all over: Followers. A grid of user pictures in the sidebar of popular blogs, showing off the wonderful mix of people that this blogger attracts.

followers1

So what’s this all about?

What’s Following?

Following is a lot like subscribing using RSS. When your visitors “follow” your blog, they get updates from your blog (and all the other ones they follow) in a centralized location—this time, though, instead of Google Reader or Bloglines, it’s their Blogger Dashboard:

followers4

How Do I Follow?

To follow your favorite blogs, click on the Follow button on their sidebar widget. You then get to choose what account to use to follow the blog—Google, Yahoo, AIM, Open ID or Netlog. (Google includes your Blogger account.)

followers2

Once you’ve signed in, Blogger gives you the option of following the blog publicly or privately.

followers3

Either way, you get to read updates on your dashboard, but if you don’t want this site added to your Blogger/Google profile, select Private. Note that Following a blog might also result in it being added to your Google Reader. Hasn’t happened to me, but I’ve heard reports.

Why Do I Want Followers?

You want followers for the same reason you want subscribers—it grows your audience. (If you don’t want that, that’s okay, too, of course.) Blogger Help explains this well:

The Followers widget is a great tool to help you grow your blog’s audience. Readers often visit a blog and enjoy it but fail to return. With the followers widget you can get all readers to return and become a fan.

You can also use a Followers widget to better connect with your readers—to see who they are and to find and comment on their blogs, even if they’ve never commented on yours.

How Do I Get Followers?

First things first, you have to add the Followers gadget. This is available primarily to Blogger blogs, but if you run a blog on your own hosting, you can also add the widget if you sign up for Google Friend Connect.

To add the gadget in Blogger, go to Layout > Page Elements (the default tab under Layout). Choose where you want the Followers box—your sidebar, your footer, whatever:

followers5

Click on “Add a Gadget” in your desired place. A window with a list of choices pops up. Right now, Followers is #1:

followers6

After you click the plus button to the right of Followers, you’re given options to give the Followers box a title (in my above example, from Literary Agent Nathan Bransford‘s blog, the title is “Friends of the Blog”) and to customize the colors to match your layout:

followers7

Once you’ve added the Followers gadget, you’ll want to encourage your readers to follow your blog. Again, Blogger Help has some good advice here:

  • Write a post about your followers widget.<l/i>
  • Encourage all readers to become a follower [Well, unless you’re a grammarian. Then you’ll encourage all your readers to become followers, because I don’t think it’s very healthy for all your readers to become just one follower 😉 ].
  • Put your followers widget at the top of your sidebar so more readers will notice it.
  • Many readers ignore sidebar items so by writing a post about your followers widget and moving the widget to the top of your sidebar, you will inevitably grow your audience.

The best way to encourage people to follow your blog is to have awesome content—something they’ll want to come back and read again.

Learn more about attracting readers with RSS and getting your visitors to stay and subscribe. I’ve written a free guide to increasing your blog’s stickiness, “Get Your Visitors to Stick!”

Good luck garnering Followers!

add to kirtsy | More WFMW

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MetaBlogging

Google’s Blogger: Search Box for All

blogger_logoLast April, I wrote an open letter to Google Blogger users, asking you to please use the header navbar because that was the only way most people could search your site. (Personally, if I really, really wanted to link to or comment on an older post on your site, I do know a few tricks, but it’s still extra work for me—and do you want to make me work more when I’m trying to link to you?)

Well, even if you didn’t listen (for shame!), Google did. I mentioned almost a year ago that Blogger in Draft had added two cool, user-friendly features for Blogger users to try out: a comment form right on the post page and a search box gadget (AKA widget). However, to put those features on your blog, you had to move your blog from regular Blogger to Blogger in Draft.

Then last October, Blogger moved the comment form to regular Blogger, meaning you can put form on your post pages for people to leave comments, just like WordPress and Typepad blogs. And yesterday, regular Blogger finally got the Search Box Gadget!

To add a search box to your Blogger sidebar, go to Layout>Add a Gadget. Select Search Box from the list. Then you get a list of options:

file

Here you can set the title for your search box (I don’t think you really need one, but “Search this blog” is fine, too). The check boxes allow you to choose what tabs you want to see in your final version.

Here’s a look at the search results:

google-blogger-search-big

See how it says “This Blog,” “Linked from here,” and “The web” across the top? Clicking on each of those reveals a different pane of results for the same search term. Also note that these search results are inserted right above your blog content.

So help out the people who want to read and link to your archives today and add the Search Box Gadget!