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Do you feel like you’re fighting for every page view your blog receives?
Do you wonder why you’re struggling to find readers when other bloggers seem to just hit “publish” and the world comes running?
It may be tempting to throw up your hands and say, “those other guys have all the luck,” but it won’t get you anywhere.
The truth is, those “lucky” people are doing something you’re not doing.
(Or they’re doing what you are doing, but better.)
If you want to get lucky, you’re going to have to give up the “poor me” attitude and make some changes. Here are some ideas.
Listen before you talk
Two guys walk into a bar (humor me here). The first guy walks up to a woman and says, “Hi. I make a lot of money and drive a really fast car, so you will definitely want to go out with me. Here’s my number. When you’re ready to go out, call me.”
The second guy sits down at the bar and listens. He hears the woman next to him complain to the bartender that the last Italian restaurant she tried was terrible, and that she couldn’t seem to find good Italian food nearby. When there’s a break in the conversation, he says, “Excuse me, but I couldn’t help overhearing about your bad experience with some of the local Italian restaurants. Have you tried Davio’s Cucina? It’s really excellent.”
Which guy is more likely to end up with a date?
I’m betting on guy #2. Instead of just blathering on about himself, he waited and listened for an opening. He started a conversation based on a shared interest. And because he?d been paying attention, he found a great angle to quickly capture the woman?s interest.
When you’re trying to get people to read your blog post, newsletter, or free report, the biggest mistake you can make is to assume that other people are just dying to learn about you and your product (or service). They don’t care about you.
Figure out what they do care about and start there.
Don’t try to be someone else
You know those cheesy pick-up lines you occasionally hear in bars? Lines like:
- “Are you an angel? Cause I think I just died and went to heaven.”
- “If I could rearrange the alphabet, I would put U and I together.”
- “Do you have a map? I keep getting lost in your eyes.”
Each of these lines must have worked for someone, somewhere, at some point in time. But that doesn’t mean you should use them.
There’s a lot you can learn by studying successful copywriters and marketers, and you should learn as much as you can. But you can’t blindly copy what they’re doing.
Swipe files and traditional copywriting techniques are only useful if you can intelligently translate them to your market.
That means you have to figure out how to apply those techniques while still being yourself. And you have to make sure that your content is still something your audience wants to read about.
Stop talking to yourself
Let’s say you’ve just moved to a new city and want to throw a party at your place. Should you (a) sit in your condo and yell, “Hey! I’m having a party!” and then wait for people to start showing up, or (b) go to the next condo association meeting, mingle with the neighbors, and invite them to come by this Friday evening for drinks?
If you think the answer is (a), you seriously need to get out more.
If your blog is getting 20 visits a day, you can’t just keep posting stuff there and praying for more readers. You’ve got to get out and meet some new people.
How? Join a LinkedIn group in your niche and start answering questions. Write a guest post for a popular (and relevant) blog. Comment thoughtfully on other bloggers’ posts and start to make friends. Ask your Facebook friends to forward your stuff to people they think might enjoy it.
The point is, you have to go where your people already are before you can get them to come to you. Find them, talk to them and then invite them back to your place.
You might just get lucky.
About the Author: Traci Feit Love is a writer and communications consultant specializing in content marketing and smart copy. Visit her website for more information or to sign up for her free e-course, “How to Get More High-Paying Clients.”
There?s a new version of Thesis out that has our customers excited, thanks to some really cool new features. And it occurred to me that there are a lot of new Copyblogger subscribers who might use WordPress, and yet not really ?get? what this Thesis thing is all about.
So in this post I?ll tell you what?s brand new in Thesis 1.6, and also bring everyone up to speed on why Thesis makes WordPress way better.
What is the Thesis Theme for WordPress?
Thesis is the flagship product of DIY Themes, a partnership between Chris Pearson and I. It?s the theme framework that powers Copyblogger and many other high-traffic sites.
In a nutshell, Thesis is software that delivers rock-solid SEO website code, plus unprecedented design flexibility for WordPress — without requiring the novice user to code anything.
For sophisticated users, Thesis is a search-optimized development framework that allows designers and web developers to build sites better and faster than ever before.
* SEO
Search legend Danny Sullivan, Google?s Matt Cutts, and Microsoft search engineer Jeremiah Andrick all use Thesis for their sites. So does search and affiliate marketing entrepreneur Rae Hoffman, SEO guru Michael Gray, top bloggers Darren Rowse and Robert Scoble, web-hosting entrepreneur Scott Beale, social media darling Chris Brogan, and thousands of others.
To find out why the Thesis approach to site code results in maximum search engine crawlibility, watch this quick video I put together.
* Design Flexibility
With most WordPress themes, you?re stuck with the basic look and feel that the theme designer decided on. With Thesis, you can choose between one, two, or three column layouts (and the size of each column), change font types and sizes, create a magazine-style layout, and lots more. Again, watch this video for an overview, and then dive into the three demo videos listed below the general video to see what Thesis can do.
* Support
Even with everything that Thesis makes easier, we know that people don?t want to be hung out to dry. Our support forums have evolved into a truly supportive community of over 10,000 of your fellow webmasters and bloggers. You?ll have help from DIY Themes support professionals, Thesis Certified Designers, and tons of your peers who simply enjoy lending a helping hand.
What?s New in Thesis 1.6?
Now, here?s the new goodness. Thesis 1.6 offers a lot of improvements throughout, plus two major innovative capabilities ? you can now change colors throughout the theme without getting into the CSS markup, and you can create drop-down interactive navigation menus right from the control panel in the WordPress dashboard.
* Change Colors Throughout the Theme Without Code
This is huge for someone like me, who would never mess with CSS in order to change background colors, column colors, etc. I only know enough code to be dangerous, but now if I want to throw up a new site with a varied color scheme, I can do it without bugging Chris or Tony.
Watch this video to see how to build a site with Thesis 1.6.
* Create Killer Navigation Menus
This is another awesome feature for people who don?t code. Now you can create interactive navigation menus with drop-down subpages for each choice, all point-and-click from the Thesis design panel. It was cool the other day when Mark McGuiness proudly emailed me to check out his new interactive navigation menu (Mark?s a poet and a creativity consultant, not a coder).
Watch this quick video that shows how to work the navigation options.
What About Thesis 2.0?
The buzz is already building about the highly-anticipated Thesis 2.0 ? a complete next generation approach to an already innovative theme. From what I?ve seen so far, it?s hard to believe this is the natural evolution from what we started with a year-and-a-half ago.
But don?t think you have to wait. Our current model and pricing provides all Thesis customers with every future update and unlimited access to support? so you can get started with Thesis today and never miss out on what?s coming next.
(And if you caught the hint by my use of the word ?current,? you understand that this will change in the near future. Come join the Thesis community today).
About the Author: Brian Clark is founder of Copyblogger and co-founder of DIY Themes, creator of the innovative Thesis Theme for WordPress. Get more from Brian on Twitter.
What is good writing?Ask an English teacher, and they’ll tell you good writing is grammatically correct. They’ll tell you it makes a point and supports it with evidence. Maybe, if they’re really honest, they’ll admit it has a scholarly tone — prose that sounds like Jane Austen earns an A, while a paper that could’ve been written by Willie Nelson scores a B (or worse).Not all English teachers abide by this system, but the vast majority do. Just look at the writing of most graduates, and you’ll see what I mean. It’s proper, polite, and just polished enough not to embarrass anyone. Mission accomplished, as far as our schools are concerned.But let me ask you something:
Is that really good writing?
I think most good writers listen to the way English teachers want them to write and think, “This isn’t real. It has no feeling, no distinctiveness, no oomph. You’re the only person in the world who would willingly read it. Everyone else would rather chew off their own eyelids than read more than three pages of this boring crap.” And they’re right.Compare an award-winning essay to a best-selling novel, and you’ll notice that they are written in almost completely different languages. Some of it has to do with the audience, sure. It’s natural to write differently for academics than you would for everyday people. But my question is: who are you going to spend more time writing for?My guess: everyday people — your family and friends, your blog audience, your boss at work, maybe even a Letter to the Editor every now and again. None of them are academics. None of them want to read an essay.Personally, I think good writing doesn’t have to be educated or well supported or even grammatically correct. It does have to be interesting enough that other people want to read it. Much of what comes out of high schools and universities fails this test, not because our students are incapable of saying anything interesting, but because a well-meaning but flawed academic system has taught them a lot of bad habits.Let’s go through some of them.
1. Trying to sound like dead people
It’s a sad state of affairs when the youngest writer on your reading list has been dead 100 years, but that’s the way it is in school. I don’t know who exactly decides what’s worth reading and what’s not, but they (whoever “they” are) believe in reading the “classics,” and most of those classics are centuries old. What’s worse is that many teachers hold up the classics as examples of what good writing is, and they expect you to mimic those writers with your essays.Sure, Chaucer and Thomas More and Shakespeare were the stud muffins of their day, but you don’t see them on the New York Times Bestseller List now. Not because they aren’t good (they were freaking great), but because people can’t connect with them. By mimicking their style, you might make a few teachers happy, but you’re essentially handicapping your writing in the eyes of the public.If you want to make a connection, you’re much better off studying the hot writers of today — like Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, and Seth Godin. Watch what they do, and play with using some of their techniques in your own writing. Yes, you’ll still be mimicking the work of another writer, but at least you’ll be mimicking something people want to read.
2. Expecting someone to hand you a writing prompt
Looking through the eyes of an educator, I can see why telling students what to write about would be useful. You have a bunch of students who couldn’t care less about your curriculum, and making them write a paper about the assigned readings is a great way to force them to read the material. Makes sense . . . but it doesn’t make it any less damaging.One of the biggest challenges of writing is figuring out what to write. Whether you’re writing a memo, an article, or a letter to your mother, the process is always the same: you start out with a blank page, and you decide what to put on it. Sure, that involves considering what your audience will want to read, but no one but you makes the final decision of what to put on the page. That act of deciding is what writing is all about.
3. Writing long paragraphs
Once upon a time, it was acceptable to write paragraphs long enough to fill multiple pages with big blocks of text. Not surprisingly, that’s the way most of us were taught to write: long paragraphs, topic sentences neatly organized, lots of supporting evidence in between assertions. It was the “correct” way to write.Not.Any.More.Nowadays, most paragraphs should be a maximum of three sentences. It’s also a good idea to include some shorter paragraphs with only one or two sentences, using them to punctuate powerful ideas. It’s not so much about having a “correct” length as using paragraphs to give your writing rhythm.
4. Avoiding profanity at all costs
I admit it; this is a controversial one. Many excellent writers still hold that profanity has no place in a professional publication, while others curse like a lovable two-dollar, er, paid companion. The rest of us sit around feeling uncomfortable and wondering whether it’s okay to express ourselves “that way” or not.So who’s right? Well, I think Stephen King says it best:
Make yourself a promise right now that you’ll never use “emolument” when you mean “tip” and you’ll never say John stopped long enough to perform an act of excretion when you mean John stopped long enough to take a shit. If you believe “take a shit” would be considered offensive or inappropriate by your audience, feel free to say John stopped long enough to move his bowels (or perhaps John stopped long enough to “push”). I’m not trying to get you to talk dirty, only plain and direct.
?Nough said.
5. Leaning on sources
Most kids I knew hated digging up sources and quoting them in their papers, but not me. No, the sneaky little bugger that I was (and still am), I realized that sources were an escape route from creativity. With enough quotations from other writers, I could fill up an entire paper without coming up with a single original thought of my own. And I was rewarded for it. From kindergarten to getting my degree in English Literature, I got an A on all but like five papers.Here’s why: a lot of teachers care more about solid research than original ideas. They don’t want to see daring and inventive arguments, challenging the foundation of everything we hold to be true and arguing boldly for a new worldview. To them, it’s much more important that you understand the ideas of others and be able to cite them in MLA format.But real life is the opposite. Go around citing the sources of all of your ideas and people will start avoiding you, because it’s boring as hell. They don’t care who said what, and they aren?t interested in hearing the chronology of an idea. What they want to hear is a new perspective on a favorite topic. If it comes from you, that’s fine. If it doesn’t, that’s fine too.
6. Staying detached
We are taught that good writing puts the focus on the subject, not the writer. It’s unemotional. It gives equal attention to opposing points of view, presenting them all without singling out one as best.And sometimes, it’s true. If you’re a scientist, engineer, or a doctor, then maintaining your role as a detached observer is a great idea.For everyone else though, it’s a disaster. Have you ever read the stuff scientists, engineers, and other so-called “detached observers” write? It’s boring! Outside of their exclusive circles, you couldn’t pay people to read it.If you want people to want to read what you write, then you should do the opposite. Be more like Oprah Winfrey, Howard Stern, Gary Vaynerchuk. They are opinionated, have a unique style, and are prone to emotional outbursts.It’s no coincidence. That’s what makes them interesting.
7. Listening to “authorities” more than yourself
Who am I to criticize the writing habits you learned in school?Well . . . nobody.Yes, I’m a professional writer. Yes, I have a literature degree. Yes, other writers have paid me up to $200 an hour to edit their work, and they’ve been amazed when all I did was correct the above mistakes.But that doesn’t mean I’m right. In fact, that’s probably the most important lesson you can learn about writing:No one but you is an authority on your writing.Not me. Not your English teachers. Not Strunk and White and their highfalutin Elements of Style.The longer you write, the more you’ll realize that other writers can’t tell you what to do. You should listen to more experienced writers, sure, but never more than you listen to yourself.Great writers don’t learn how to write by sitting in writing courses, reading writing blogs, or browsing Barnes & Noble for yet more books on writing. They learn how to write by coming to a blank page, writing something down, and then asking themselves if it works. If it does, they keep it. If it doesn’t, they don’t. Then they repeat the process until they finish something they feel is worth publishing.
Sadly, most writers don’t know this
They labor under the mistaken assumption that there is an invisible standard of good and bad. And they worry that the Writing Police are going to show up at their door any minute, handcuff them, and haul them off to jail for failing to measure up.If that was true, you wouldn’t see a single writer walking the street without one of those blinking bracelets around their ankle.The truth is that you’re in charge. You. The blank page is sitting there, and you can fill it up with whatever the hell you want.So stop sitting there, silly.Go for it. About the Author: Jon Morrow is Associate Editor of Copyblogger and Cofounder of Partnering Profits. Get more from Jon on twitter.
Since the very first blog, written around an ancient campfire somewhere in the moist foothills of Seattle, content has been crowned the undisputed king. The king ruled over all that was written, be they blogs, articles, ads, fiction, or a killer love letter. All that was copy sat at the feet of the [.]
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