The Reader Appreciation Project

Since oldest known times, people tried to figure out the nature’s laws. One by one, the gravity law, the energy conservation law, the action-reaction law, like many others, were discovered and studied, so they are now perceived as a given. In search of our spiritual nature, we claimed to discover another kind of natural laws, harder to prove, but very attractive to our minds. Let’s take for example the Law of Attraction. How many of you believe in it? How many of you wrote about it at least once? There are more than 2 million results in Google for law of attraction.

Steve Pavlina has a very simple definition for it:

The Law of Attraction simply says that you attract into your life whatever you think about.

In other words, your intentions and your good (or bad) will can influence your environment. And your blog. And your audience. This seems to be a perfect recipe for success: just think and the Universe shall follow.

Why do I feel like you don’t fully believe me? Did you also notice that there’s one small piece still missing from the puzzle? Can you find the explanation why some blog contests which give away a few pens can have hundreds of participants, while others,
with prizes of $400 or even $800 are hardly ever noticed?

The intention is the same, the recipe is the same (give and you shall be given), why not then also the outcome?
Can you spot that tipping point beyond which the Law of Attraction starts to work?

I usually view a lot of sites when trying to come up with inspiration for a new design. After recently re-designing a site and creating a WordPress theme from scratch (you have seen the new design, right?), I thought I’d share a couple design decisions I found annoying.

Pop-Ups

I’m not talking about pop-up ads, I’m talking about pop-ups when you hover over a link. An example I came across (unfortunately no screenshot) is when you hover over a link and it displays, “You have the nth most popular outgoing link.” I could really care less how many people have clicked on my link. It’s also demoralizing when you come in last.

Another example of pop-ups is in-text advertising. Daniel mentions to stay away from in-text advertising. Part of this is because of the annoying pop-ups that come up when “accidentally” hovering over an ad-link. Read more…

I’d like to take a moment out of our regularly scheduled programming and thank some of the sponsors of the Reader Appreciation Project. Oh wait, we don’t have any. So how about we work out a deal? You sponsor us, and I’ll write a post about you at least once a month telling the readers how great you are and what you can do for them. Not only do you get groovy ad space, but you also get a post written about you. Oh, and if you pay a little bit more, I’ll include you at the top of that post.

On a more serious note, I have a hard time finding value in such sponsor posts coming from a reader’s point of view. However, in the blogging world, there are no absolutes. I can see some reasons why to thank sponsors from time to time. I asked the readers in a previous post if they liked ‘Thank You Sponsor‘ posts. The responses were mixed, so I’d like to go into that advantages and disadvantages of thanking sponsors publicly. Read more…

After a few months of promising, the Reader Appreciation Project re-design is finally finished. At the suggestion of Bes, the re-design is not the default theme. We decided to allow you (the reader) to try it out for yourself voluntarily for a week or so before it is forced upon you. I’m using a theme-switcher plugin to switch themes, so you can always try out the new theme and switch back by clicking on the links below.

• Original RA Project Theme
• Re-designed RA Project Theme

Your feedback is also welcome.

Writing something can be one of the many ways to produce content. The same way you can write things to help your readers, you can also write things to manipulate your readers.

Following is a list of 3 ways you can write things in order to manipulate your readers, in case your focus is on things other than helping others while helping yourself too. For those that want to appreciate readers, the following list can serve as a sign that slowly more and more people will hopefully realize and identify such tactics and such writing.

3 ways to manipulative writing

Read more…

More and more, bloggers start to realize that relying only on Google to get readers is not a safe way to go. As some latest examples of earthquakes (or rather GoogleQuakes) show, readership coming from SERPS can be seriously affected by bans, algorithm changes or competitors’ smart moves. A quick scan of the blogging world reveals several reader appreciation initiatives organized during this month:

Story of a Startup decided to go for a “Reader Appreciation Month” at RedFlagDeals.com, in their wish to highlight the members who go the extra mile to help out and inspire other members to get more involved.

At TipTail: From Agility to Zen, we found a reader appreciation contest which is now in the stage of voting for the winners.

A Stenopad for My Thoughts had a Reader Appreciation Day on July 6th: they gave out some handstamped index cards to their readers.

Internet Duct Tape comes with a special tip on creating a private area for your RSS subscribers, saying:

It’s important to build a rapport with them, and one of the ways to do that is by giving them special offers that aren’t available to regular readers of the website.

Live The Power mark their blog birthday with two contests: a readers appreciation contest and a blogger appreciation one. There is still time to join in, if you wish.

At A Different Kind of Romance, Arin Rhys shares some thoughts on author, blogger and reader appreciation.

Monique’s Scrappin’ Blog runs a periodical Blog Reader Appreciation Gift Day. The second edition was on June 27th, so stay tuned, maybe the third edition will occur any of these last days of July.Later update:Monique was kind enough to tell us that she’ll be giving the 6th one tomorrow. They have been given out every Wednesday. Starting in August her Blog Reader Appreciation Gift Day will be the first Wednesday of every month.

Some people even moved the Reader Appreciation events offline, one example being Lora Leigh’s Reader Appreciation Weekend, which is announced for September 14th.

Queer Joe’s knitting blog had a Reader Appreciation Day on July 11th, by simply thanking their readers in a few words:

I wanted to send out a special thanks to all the folks that either enthusiastically embrace my ideas, or minimally put up with them and read my blog anyway.

I’m sure that these are not the only examples of bloggers trying to emphasize their appreciation for the readers, so if you know such examples, please fell free to share them with us. Also, if you intend to organize some special reader appreciation events on your blog, please let us know, so we can announce them to our loyal readers, too.

Clarification note: reader appreciation can’t be measured in the number of contests, giveaways or parties you organize for your readers. It is a matter of respect, in the first place. A very good example of a great host is Chris Garrett, who recently started The Authority Blogger Forum. His host abilities and his respect for the readers turned the forum into a cozy place where bloggers can find support, understanding, appreciation and a lot of useful resources for blogging and communication. If you want to see it for yourself, you are invited to join the forum, via our above link.

This is part of a forum contest: the more of you subscribe referred by us, the more chances we have to benefit from Chris Garrett’s experience and have him as a guest author here, at Reader Appreciation Project. I’m waiting for you at The Authority Blogger Forum, so please subscribe and let’s make our blogs better.

I’m going to write a post soon that will lay out my very blunt opinion on the usefulness of sponsor type posts. I admit I am a little naive when it comes to criticizing things like this because I haven’t ever tried to monetize a blog before. However, to me as a reader, I don’t see any benefit of these posts whatsoever.

One type of sponsor posts that comes to mind are the ones from Daily Blog Tips. In this June sponsor post, Daniel thanks the readers:

As usual, I would like to thank the readers on the first place.

The next sentence gets to business:

Secondly, Daily Blog Tips has 2 Sponsorship spots open for July, if you are interested just head to the Contact page and send me an email, I will get back to you as soon as possible.

As a reader, what do you think of such posts?

Please respond as I’d like to use your feedback for a follow-up post.

A Google security flaw (which has been fixed) allowed malicious websites to automatically subscribe readers to RSS feeds using Google Reader. The way it worked was an iframe was loaded on a page that would automatically load a page adding users to a blogger’s feed count.

The trick (hack?) mentioned above is a blatant attempt to game the feed counters that are so prevalent on many sites. It can also be interpreted as an attempt to lure advertisers in since a high feed count might be a good indication that a site is doing well.

A large side-effect of adding all of these readers as feed subscribers is that the readers had no choice in the matter. All a reader had to do was go to a website. If many websites had participated in this technique, a reader would suddenly be overwhelmed with new feeds and no idea how they had gotten there.

Michael from Copyblogger wrote how it is never a good idea to force readers into anything. I am against forcing readers to have advertisements blasted in their face, and also forcing readers to unknowingly subscribe to content.

I’d like some feedback on this if any of you have time to comment. What are some of the ways you’ve been “tricked” to click on an ad, subscribe to a feed, or stay longer on a website? Are there any benefits at all for tricking readers to do a task?

More bloggers are starting to talk about reader appreciation. Maybe the RA Project is starting to be very effective on many levels. We are seeing more people look into it, and we are also seeing more people treat their readers with respective comments.

Should fake appreciation be as respected as real appreciation?

A question arises in my mind every day though: if I see obviously fake appreciation online, should I still respect it, the same way I would respect real appreciation from someone? Is replying to comments simply to fulfill an obligation and give an illusion of caring about the community the same as responding to comments because of wanting to and caring about the community because of a real feeling of care? Read more…

Readers appreciation is getting more and more attention from bloggers of all shapes and sizes. Contests and debates are popping up every day, readers are invited to more and more interactions, on some blog posts, there are more words in comments than in the post itself.
After the hot debate whether or not paid comments are a disservice to readers, a new controversial move triggers lots of reactions: Kumiko Suzuki decided to switch off comments on Cash Quests, explaining in details how her blog benefits from this move.

I’m not going to argue with Kumiko’s decision, as time and Kumiko will probably tell us if it was a wise step. Nevertheless, I’d like to bring into your attention two of her points regarding switching off comments implications:

1. The sense of community will decrease:

This one made the decision quite hard! Without comments, there is definitely a decrease in the community feeling of the site. However, I believe that a blog isn’t a community in the first place. If Cash Quests were a community everybody would have an equal chance of having their voices heard and there wouldn’t be just one person writing 90% of the content for the site – and taking 100% of the revenue! A blog is part of a community of bloggers but it isn’t a community itself.

2. Better relationships will be built:

Without having to spend time reading, moderating and replying to comments I predicted that I would have more time to spend e-mailing and building relationships with other bloggers. This has definitely occurred with some fantastic relationships being built that have resulted in some very high PR links being both given and received.

Reactions from the blogging world were not so positive: people like Kevin from Blogging Tips, Julie Ann Bonner, I Thought Therefore I Blog, 45n5 or John Chow expressed their opinion and their reasons for welcoming comments to their blogs.

Back in October 2005, Steve Pavlina explained the benefits of switching off comments on his blog, being confident that it was a good decision. However, one year later, Steve associates a forum to his blog, allowing the community to interact even more. It seems that he missed the comments, after all.

What do you think?

Is your blog a community in the first place? Do you believe that not spending time moderating comments will allow you to build better relationships?