The Reader Appreciation Project

Two cannibal bloggers are chatting about their readers:

- How do you appreciate your readers?

- With pommes frites and a glass of good wine!

Two firemen bloggers are chatting about their readers:

- What kind of readers do you like most?

- The ones who set my soul on fire!

Two policemen bloggers are chatting about their readers:

- How was your traffic today?

- I’ve got a couple of readers who exceeded the reading speed limit.

Two fishermen bloggers chat about their readers:

- How do you catch so many readers with your articles?

- I always use fresh (link)bait!

Two kamikaze bloggers are talking about their blogs:

- What’s your biggest fear in blogging?

- Each day I fear I ain’t gonna live enough to answer all comments!

Two toddler bloggers are talking about their readers:

- Do you think they smelled my lie about my previous month earnings?
- No, but if you want to be honest to your readers you should disclose also how much money you’ve spent on diapers!

I hope you just had some fun. No real blogger was harmed while writing this post. Any resemblance to real bloggers is purely not coincidental.

If you started blogging more than 5 minutes ago, chances are that you already have a few readers, and you probably know some of them (if not all) by their names.

Now you know who your customer is, you start writing with him in mind, you start polishing your articles more, because you know that Bill, or Jane or Cheap Blue Contact Lenses will have their say on that next article of yours.

But what else do you do with your readers, when you don’t write for them and you don’t answer their comments?

1. Do you share links on social networking sites?

2. Do you read their blogs?

3. Do you chat with them on Skype, or other instant messenger services?

4. Do you meet them at blogging conferences?

5. Do you exchange emails with them?

6. What else?

If you shut down your computer and close your eyes, how many of your readers you can list by their names? If you have less than 10 readers-commenters, you’d probably remember all of them. If you have 100 readers who comment, you’d be lucky if you remembered 50% of them. What if you had 11874 readers? How can you have so many readers and still write with them in mind? Or are you still writing only for the core readers who were the first to discover your blog and enjoyed it ever since? Or for those people you are doing also other things with?

Or are you just writing for the Google bots, hoping that people would follow?

What better sign that bloggers do care about their readers can be more eloquent than the increasing number of plugins which reward readers for being part of blog communities?

Some reader appreciation plugins offering direct benefits: Top Commentors or Last comments, or Ajax Edit Comments fall into this directly rewarding category.

Some other plugins offer indirect benefits, which are rather meant to help readers as bloggers, by offering them a small SEO help. This category includes the Do Follow and Comment Luv plugins, which are some of the “most hunted” and “most searched for” and which (especially the Do Follow) sometimes make people sign their comments with “purple lamp post” or “white beans soup with noodles”, or other thoroughly researched keywords.

Thanks to Stephen Cronin, the conversation between lamp posts, noodle soups and camping flashlights is coming to an end: The Keyword Luv plugin allows commenters to input both their name and their desired keywords, the backlink to their blog being anchored on the keywords, and not on the name, as it was before.

If you want to read a more detailed review of the Keyword Luv WordPress plugin, you can visit InspiritBlog, or you can download KeywordLuv Plugin and offer your readers a nice treat.

Due to the fact that this plugin is valuable only if it is used on Do Follow blogs, you will need to install a Do Follow plugin in order to be sure it works smoothly.

If you have a Do Follow blog, I’m sure you won’t miss all the “items” which used to leave comments on your blog. You can now offer them a name.

We’ve just seen three ways to ruin an online reputation. It is just that easy: take a wrong step and you’re lost. Sometimes, one doesn’t even need to lie, cheat or hack your readers. Sometimes, a small “detail” like telling something really important for the readers in a small phrase hidden inside a very long sales letter can bring one down in a matter of days, if not hours. This was the case of Joel Comm, who was selling an ebook for $9 and had all buyers automatically subscribed to a $29.9 monthly membership.

Seeing his reputation endangered by greed, Mr. Joel Comm saw himself in the position of running from blog to blog and saying how sorry he is, and how he is going to fix that issue by changing the sales page, so people can clearly see and opt for one of the variants: buy only the book, or buy the book plus the subscription.

Surely, Joel’s reputation had to suffer. But what about the reputation of all bloggers, like Darren Rowse of Problogger who promoted his ebook via affiliate links? Maybe they didn’t notice the scam, like many buyers of the book. Or maybe they’ve seen that, but they kept their mouth shout, in order to get the commissions. There was a lot of money at stake, as the previous version of AdSense Secrets (the ebook in question) sold for $97, and now there was an updated version available at only $9. Quite a bargain for the naive buyers!

Quite a surprise for all bloggers who promoted the book, to find their online reputation endangered by the simple fact that they promoted a product they thought to be good.

What do you think? Did the affiliate bloggers’ reputation also suffer from Joel’s scam or not?

There’s no secret that many bloggers measure online success beyond dollars and cents. I suppose that even those ones who are measuring success in money are happy to see that their blog attracts loyal readers.

What does a blogger do after he gets his loyal readers?

Well, a piece of advice which is frequently encountered is to “make a list”. So people follow the trend and make a list out of their readers, either by bribing them into subscribing, or simply by the interesting things they write.

What does a blogger do with his list?

Once the readers are not readers anymore, but “the list”, the blogger starts sending them emails. He has their permission, so he feels free to communicate with his list as frequently as he feels like.

What does a blogger communicate to his list?

This is the sad part of the story: once you turned from reader into “part of a list”, you start getting advice about what is the next thing you need to buy in order to … (to whatever the blog you subscribed to was about), or about how lots of people are so cool and you are not, because you don’t have Y product, or because you haven’t read Z book.

The funniest thing is that most of the times, those bloggers get their offers from affiliate networks, and you find yourself every morning flooded with offers to buy the same product, but from a dozen of guys who all want your attention.

Do you want to be “a list”?

I don’t want to be “a list”, and despise the fact that I receive maybe hundreds of offers every day. I have never bought anything as a consequence of getting those messages. Am I a bad reader because I don’t make those bloggers happy and buy their stuff? Actually it happened only once that I bought something only because I wanted to reward a blogger for his efforts. I already had a cracked version of that stuff, but I felt good when thinking that the guy would smile when he sees that he’s got a commission, consequent to my purchase.

But you know what? That blogger never put me on “a list” and never sent me one email to sell me something.

Do you share my feelings against such lists? Let’s all have our say as readers, maybe internet marketers would end up listening.

Today is Earth Day 2008. I’ve seen it celebrated at first in Google (and I didn’t get the reason for shaping letters like trees) and later on, in many blogs who wrote about it, or celebrated it by changing their usual header to a “greener” one.

Have you thought that the more readers we can get, the better the Earth can become? Do you remember, in the age before internet, how many books were you buying and reading every year? Hard copy books are eating the forest. Printing houses are polluting (I never understood how printing house workers don’t faint because of the smell inside). Or how many newspapers you used to read and send to the garbage the next day. Other trees, other forests gone for good.

The better a blog is, the most readers it attracts, the more trees are saved, simply because those readers take from their books reading time, in order to read your blogs. The days have still 24 hours each, while the things we want to do in those 24 hours are maybe ten times more. The result? We cut on books reading time, then we buy less and less books, as the ones we’ve already bought over the past five years are still waiting to be read.

How is it? Can you believe that your blogging can save a few trees every year?

As I read ProBlogger once in a few weeks or so, I found out about the Blogger Appreciation Day directly from bloggers who linked to my blog on April 13th or 14th as a sign of appreciation. The funniest thing is that they diverted a bit from the purpose of this celebration, and appreciated those bloggers for being readers rather than for being bloggers.

Nevertheless, appreciation is supposed to make people feel good, isn’t it?

Most of the times, it works that way. But, as in my case here, it can make you feel a bit embarrassed. The reason I felt that way was that I haven’t visited those two blogs since a couple of months ago and now they were appreciating me as a reader.

So, the reader appreciation resulted in getting one reader back, acting like a boomerang. For myself, and probably for many other readers. And because I didn’t stop reading those blogs on purpose, but I just got caught in some projects, you can be sure that at least for a while I’ll remember to check on those two blogs every other day and become again the reader they used to like. And this was due to one single reminder link.

Can you see how powerful linking to your readers’ blogs from time to time can be? How often do you remember to link to them?

Blogs. Sidebars. Fashions. Uniforms. The 125×125 ads displayed in the sidebar of probably 80% of all blogs.

Despite their extremely poor conversion rate (very few people are clicking, and even fewer buy), the little cute squares are bloggers’ favorites when it comes to selling advertising (or at least to filling them with affiliate banners, forever waiting for the day when the advertisers’ requests will start flooding their inbox). That section is most of the times clearly labeled as Advertising, or Sponsors, so it is clear the sole purpose of those ads is money.

Keeping this in mind, do you believe that displaying those ads in the sidebar implies that the respective blogger also endorses those products or services? I never thought that readers may think I’m endorsing those things I get paid for displaying in my sidebar, as long as I label them as advertising.

Although assuming is not the wisest thing of all, I assume that some of you will say that it is a sort of endorsement. Some others would probably say that a blog’s sidebar is just like the advertising pages in printed magazines: pure advertising. No magazine endorses the products which are advertised inside. It’s just advertising, everybody knows and accepts the convention.

Why then would you buy something from a banner in my sidebar? Or, would you?

You probably know by now that you’re going to assist very soon at the launch of the Reader In-appreciation Project. I thought Ronald’s idea was good, and it could be extended. We are currently seeking for guest writers, but the acceptance conditions are drastic, and you have to comply with all of them in order to have the honour of in-appreciating our readers.

1. All guest writers need to know nothing about the topics they write about. The less you know, the better you’ll in-appreciate your readers and they will thank you for that.

2. All guest writers should have a cool slogan, something like “The King Of Free Traffic”, or “The GoneSense Queen”, or “The Niche Princess”. Just be hot and trendy, and don’t think that you actually have no clue.

3. All guest writers should write in bullets, think in bullets, and even speak in bullets. Bullets, like in lists, not like in guns.

4. All guest writers should have an exaggerated self-esteem and show it off like every two paragraphs or so. Your readers need to be reminded how good you are, how nice your feet smell and how fast is your latest car paid for with their money.

If you cannot do these, don’t think to apply for a position. We want to hit 1000 feed subscribers over the first three weeks from launch, so we cannot afford even the smallest mistake here.

We shall also have a 5-times-a-day newsletter, which will point to highly useful ebooks and courses about chasing the wind around while making mayonnaise, and we promise you they won’t cost more than $7 per piece, and they will be very easy to read and digest.

So, let the guest authors list begin to build up. You are invited to pitch for one of the 3 positions in the comments box below.

Have you seen the dashboard of the new WordPress 2.5 yet? I’ve seen it today for the first time, and for a few seconds I felt like Alice in Wonderland: despite the cool look, almost nothing was in the known place anymore. I suppose it is OK, but when you’ve seen the same page for thousands times over the past year, you have to fight a little to get rid of the old patterns (and develop new ones).

Lately I’ve become interested in developing themes for WordPress blogs, and many times I ask myself which way is better: to get creative and take people out of their blog navigation patterns, or to go with the flow and create those kinds of layouts which are “in fashion”? Due to the fact that we design the themes for the readers, and we wish them all to download and use at least one of our themes within one year from now, we decided to follow the trend and create themes which respect the readers’ wishes and expectations.

What do you think? Is this usability, to find all things in place, more or less where you’d expect them to be, or is it only the fact that we are overexposed to certain things, thus developing stereotypes in our behaviours and expectations?

If you cannot figure out what I am talking about, please check out the following website: www.leoburnett.ro. It belongs to the Romanian subsidiary of the international advertising agency Leo Burnett. It is one of the most creative websites I’ve seen lately, but I’d like to find out your opinion, as users who don’t understand the language (actually the main menu items are in English, so you won’t have a problem finding your way).

How interesting should a website be, so we take time to learn how to navigate it? Is a website an artwork in itself, or should it mainly serve the purpose of offering information to the readers?

Personally, I like it when I find everything easily on a page, but I cannot refrain from thinking that we have imitation deep in our blood, with the consequence of a perpetual search for models to follow.

Would you still read a blog with a crazy creative theme? Would you give your blog a crazy creative look?