The Reader Appreciation Project

You all know by now how important is to give your readers good tips, so they stay motivated to subscribe and read your blog regularly.

But do you know what’s even more important than giving your readers useful tips?

Giving them in form of lists.

If you believe what I’ve written so far, that’s OK, your readers probably love you already. But doesn’t this blogging world start to look like a cookbook? Take two eggs, scramble them on a plate, add some salt and pepper, some small cut bell peppers, throw everything in a hot pan, wait one minute, turn on the other side, wait another minute, put everything on a plate, decorate with parsley, eat, enjoy.

Although there are great recipe books available for almost everybody, some of us are lousy cooks. Or maybe we are good, but the ingredients we use aren’t always that fresh. Or our timing is not exactly the right one: 30 seconds more on the fire can change the taste of the food we make.

Do you see my point? Why writing in lists, when the outcome would be unique anyway? Why respecting the cooking recipe, if I think my food could have a better taste if I cook by inspiration? Do you think the guests you invite for dinner care more about your cookbook rather than about the result, the food itself? If I were a cooking expert, supposed to produce the same outcome each time I combine the same ingredients, that would make a sense. If you go to a restaurant and order a Caesar salad, each time you expect to get the same combination of foods which we use to call Caesar salad.

But cooking by the book when nobody expects that can be a little frustrating, don’t you think so? Having an infinity of blank pages waiting for me to fill them in could be a challenge for creativity and not for making more and more lists. Why limit myself to a given frame, when I feel like crossing the boundaries? Only because I assume that readers cannot focus enough to read a whole page which is not broken into bullet points?

I’m smarter than that and I’m sure my readers are smarter, too.

What do you think about lists?

Running low on ideas seems to be an issue most of the bloggers face every now and then. At least, this is how I explain myself the numerous posts on this topic I come across every day. Is this a concern that readers would be disappointed if they don’t find you posting with your usual frequency? Or is it maybe a concern that they’d go away and never ever come back to read your blog again? Or maybe that’s just their ego, not allowing them to just break the routine and skip posting until they have something to say to their readers…

Whatever the reasons, we want to be creative and to live up to the expectations of others. That’s why we need backup plans and strategies. Let’s see some of them:

Pat B. Doyle provids her readers with an impressive list of 23 great ideas for blog posts.

Lisa, from Hit Those Keys tells about counterweighs to beat Inertia and produce “New Work”.

Spinebreakers publish an audio interview with an author who has never experienced writer’s block. It seems that having multiple jobs ongoing at the same time is key for him to never have this problem.

Finally, this is how Rudyard Kipling explains the six words which prevent writer’s block.

What’s your way? Do you want to get rid of your writer’s block when it comes, or you are just living it to the full and stop posting for a while?

In a crowded, smoke-filled room, a person asks me, “What are you singing?”

I stare at the blank sheet of paper in front of me, where I am to fill out my name and song request.

“I’m not sure yet. What about you?”

“Oh.” the person replies, “I’m not going up there.”

“Why not?” I ask.

“I get horrible stage fright.”

“It’s just karaoke. Nobody expects you to be an expert singer.” I say trying to reassure my friend.

“I’ve tried it before. I just froze up.”

I smiled, “Sometimes you just have to forget there are other people in the room and sing for yourself.”

Karaoke and Blogging

Singing karaoke in front of a bunch of strangers is an intimidating experience.

If you’ve ever written a blog post for a rather large audience, it is an equally intimidating experience. You’re placing yourself out there for all to criticize.

It is my belief, however, that the more comfortable you become with yourself, the more your audience will be comfortable with you.

Several weeks ago I wrote about my thoughts on a team environment for multi-author blogs.

I argued that individuality (in the context of service) harms the customer, and the better approach is a team-based environment where customers (or readers in the case of blogging) are everyone’s responsibility.

I discussed this concept with a friend who is not familiar with blogging. He is, however, very familiar with customer service as he is a waiter at a local Mexican restaurant.

My friend is very popular among his customers, and his customers often ask for him by name. The other waiters do not like this, since waiters at his restaurant are assigned to tables on a turn-based basis. And since my friend’s customers tip rather well, the other waiters are green with envy.

This past week was a very popular holiday in America called Cinco de Mayo. It’s a nice excuse to grab some Mexican food and drink a few margaritas. My friend asked me to stop in, but warned me, “It’s going to be very busy.”

Indeed it was very busy. I was lucky to have found a parking spot, and I had to sit at the bar instead of my favorite table.

The waiters, whom often fought for customers, were scurrying around from table to table making sure everything was alright. That night, there was no set waiter per table.

I asked my friend about it a few nights later. He said, “That morning I came up with the idea. I told my manager that if we don’t work like a team, our customers are going to get slaughtered.”

When asked about the tip situation, he responded, “Even though I get the most tips, I felt it was better to share the tip revenue evenly that day. Everyone was pulling their own weight, and it worked out pretty good.”

In the end, Cinco de Mayo for my friend and his restaurant was a huge success. Many first-time customers came in to celebrate, and many returning customers came in to say hello. And, according to my friend, the day would’ve been a disaster had it not been for a team working environment.

Conclusion – How does this compare to blogging?

My friend’s Cinco de Mayo story is just a neat example of a person placing his customers’ interests first.

How do you think this example of a busy day at a restaurant compares to that of blogging?

I quit!

Ok, not really. But how many times have you told yourself that when it comes to blogging?

If you’ve been in the blogging game long enough, you probably know quite a few bloggers who have quit.

Some quit because:

• Subscribers weren’t growing
• Traffic wasn’t increasing
• No money was coming in
• Their page rank took a hit or was too low
• Their site was blacklisted by Google
• They received too many negative comments
• They didn’t receive enough comments
• They were burnt out
• They were too busy (school, work)
• They had personal obligations (child, spouse, parents)
• And more…

Within the past two weeks I’ve read a few posts that I consider rather thought-provoking. One was about a blogger’s responsibility to the readers, and the other was about blogging pains. Both expressed confusion for what the future held for their blog and their readership. And believe me, I share the same thoughts constantly.

And confusion over the future, or lack of purpose, is intimidating. Even Lorelle VanFossen says it’s a good reason to stop blogging:

Stop blogging if you don’t have a purpose: Honestly, you don’t have to blog if you don’t want to, and if you don’t know what to blog about, don’t. If your blog has no purpose, stop blogging.

You can probably relate to Lorelle’s quote. It’s hard to find purpose on a blog. And it’s demoralizing when a purpose can’t be found.

While at WordCamp, one phrase from Liz Strauss was a huge motivator. The phrase? “They come for you.”

You are the one unique value on your blog.

The information is everywhere. But you are the one who molds it, shapes it, and brings your experience to it.

As Liz puts it, readers come to a blog to read your stuff. And if it’s a multi-author blog such as this one, readers come for your writing, and perhaps others’.

Because, as Liz puts it, “Information — straight, clear information — is all over the Internet. But you aren’t.”

Conclusion

People will quit blogging. It’s a fact of life. Some blogs have just run their course.

But for those questioning why they should keep going, perhaps it’s for those readers that are coming just for you.

I’ve thought about quitting many times. But it’s often the readers that keep me going.

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?

I’d like to share with you something that happened to me this week that demonstrates to me what reader appreciation is all about: appreciating you readers.

Have you ever written something you thought would offend?

Writing can be difficult when you are talking about subjective topics, matters of style or taste, or even just good practice, so it is no surprise that from time to time someone takes what you have to say the wrong way.

What do you do then when you write something and realise when you read it back later on that you have just criticised something that a reader does, even though it wasn’t meant to apply to them?

There are a few options:

1. Nothing, if they are that easily offended perhaps they shouldn’t be reading it anyway;
2. You can wait, and hope they understand you enough not to take offence;
3. You can be extra nice to that person, possibly adding a link;
4. You can can go back and add an update to your post;
5. You can e-mail them directly and explain;

So which would you choose?

Be Honest

What happened to me this week is that someone e-mailed me to tell me that their comment didn’t mean to apply to me, and clarified their meaning. I hadn’t read it as being critical of me, and even if it had been I probably would have agreed, but regardless of the original intent that e-mail spoke volumes. I, the reader, was appreciated.

I probably wouldn’t have been so forward thinking. I might even have opted for the head-in-the-sand approach. The web is full of people who like nothing better than to shoot you down so a few days under the duvet, sneaking furtive glances at the comments page when you think no one is looking, is a fairly easy choice to make.

So what would you do? Any of the above, or something different again?

Do you know Rubik’s Cube? If you do, then you probably remember the frustration of endless hours, rotations and calculations, only to get into a bigger mess of colors.

And if you happened to have a brother like mine, who was hiding from me, and then came out with the magic cube solved, you can imagine how upset I was the day I discovered he was actually peeling off the stickers and stick them back again.

But once you got the technique, and you managed to solve the cube, suddenly the fact that your younger brother was doing that shameful thing became much less important. It was like a confirmation of a hierarchy you had in your mind regarding your abilities compared with your brother’s.

The Rubik’s Blogging Cube

This is pretty much like the relationship a blogger establishes with the audience: you have to know the secret to make them come, and once they are there, you need to learn how to make them stay, and even more, how to bring them back.
The more you know, the most successful you are in doing this. But in the beginning, without having almost any experience with readers, a blogger could get frustrated and demotivated when seeing others attracting readers like the fly paper attracts the flies, while she puts a lot of effort in writing, linking, commenting, socializing, writing again, linking some more, and yet seeing day after day how others come from behind and move forward in high speed.

You’d ask now, and you’d be right, which is that secret, that technique which sticks readers to your blog. Do you believe that Rubik’s cube has only one solution? I know two of them, and probably there are more.

Like this blogging and readers appreciation: there’s no unique way to get to it. Indeed, you can read guides on how to become an authority in your niche, you can assimilate the knowledge and the insights they give you, you can find original ways to know your readers better, and yet, when it comes to real life, you are faced with the reality of not getting the attention you’re worth.

If you don’t know Rubik’s cube, please watch this demonstration on how to solve it, and then you’ll get an idea of how complicated it seems to get to your readers. Then learn and rehearse the solution, and you’ll realize in fact, how simple it is. Just a bit of learning and a lot of rehearsal.

When we were children, we used to play a game. I thought it long forgotten, but it keeps popping up in my mind more and more often, and I’ll tell you why.

The game goes like this: a word is chosen, and we are all going to say it, 10 time, 100 times, 1000 times, for as long as we can resist. The idea is that regardless the word, after a number of repetitions, it loses its meaning. You keep on saying it, but it doesn’t resonate anymore in your brain, it is just a bunch of sounds with no sense attached.

You can try this at home. I guarantee that all you need is a half an hour to make any word lose its meaning, provided that you constantly keep on repeating it with a loud voice.

Take the words “nice post”. Isn’t it that you loved to see a comment like that in your first days of blogging? I surely loved it. Then it started repeating, post after post, until it lost its meaning, and finally I realized that it was an artificial finding (called comment spam) meant to increase the number of links pointing to a certain site.

Now take the words “great content”, or “make money online”, or “to your success”. Words with meanings that once upon a time made sense, lead us now to pushing the back button in our browsers, only to get rid of the vacuum sensation that fills (or rather empties) our brains at their sight.

Original thinking people try to pull an alarm string, but the crowd they are speaking about is elsewhere, reading some more marvelous-empty words, and dreaming about celebrity, which is always by the next corner.

Good people spread the word about great initiatives, and reward those they had so much to learn from. Such articles are relaxation for my tired mind.

Cool people step out of the crowd and speak their mind. This doesn’t mean they don’t have respect for anybody. Actually they do.

New projects are rising, now when so many readers were hungry for them.

What shall I say more? Be careful with your words. Improper use may lead to a serious loss of meaning. And of good audience.

If you run a blog and you are concerned with its quality, chances are that you become wiser every day. Each and every day you learn new things, you discover better ways of organizing your content, in your wish to offer readers a pleasant and useful experience, hoping to hook them to bookmark your blog. Yet, how often do we forget that our readers don’t have the same experience as we do? We read a lot of blogs, we see them changing, evolving, most of them in the same direction, we got used to see lists of categories, tag clouds or RSS subscription icons, and we understand their meaning instantly.

Do you think you know how your readers behave?

Did you know that more than 300 million babies are born every year only in the US? Do you know what this means for your blog? At least 3 million fresh readers every year. Because most of those children will some day learn how to use the internet. Maybe babies born 10 or 15, or 20 years ago are using the internet today for the first time in their life. If your blog was the first website they found, how well do you think they would be able to navigate through its content?

I have this friend who yesterday saw a website for the third time in her life. The site was one of the blogs I run (which I thought to be perfectly clean, not cluttered, well-organized), and I was asking my friend for feedback. She is supplying all the content for that blog, I’m only functioning as a posting robot for her, because she doesn’t have an internet connection. Yesterday she has seen her blog for the first time.

This is how the front page of the blog looks like (first view and after scrolling down):

Well, the feedback was really striking:

The site appeared to have only one page, I couldn’t find the others. I’m sure they were there somewhere, because you said so, but I wasn’t able to find them. There was no button on the page I’ve seen.

• She didn’t imagine post titles are clickable
• She had no idea what “previous entries” mean, so she didn’t think to click there
• She didn’t click on anything because all she saw was text, and none of the texts were saying “Click here”
• This explains the very low click rate for the AdSense ads that run on single pages (probably not many readers thought to click on some headlines there, so they never saw the single pages)

I’ve never seen something more cluttered in my whole life. Everywhere I looked on the page there were words, so I could hardly focus to read the content because of that. Are you in such a hurry that you have to put everything on the same page?

• She was bothered by the left and right sidebars, because they contained “text” (actually that text were the Recent Posts and Archives on the left, and the Categories and a tag cloud on the right).

I explained what Recent Posts are, and I got the following reply:

Who can be so dumb to put the table of content on the same page with an article? Probably an engineer like you. All books have separate page for the table of content. If people want to see that table, they click on its correspondent button and go there. I want my site to be read like a book, I want to browse through the pages like if it was a real book. On the pages, I want only the content, with no disturbing texts on the edges, no matter how useful you say it is. If you are keen on keeping those sidebars, OK, but please fill them with pictures.

Because her initial brief was that the site should have a header with a photo, I just did it that way. Look what she commented on that:

There is something wrong with the header photo: it looks like a broken TV image. All I saw was a very narrow photo fragment. Did you do that on purpose? I remember I’ve seen the same kind of broken photo on another site. Please replace it with a normal, square picture.

Wow! Again I got the comment that only an engineer like me could chop a photo that way and believe the readers would like to see that on a site. It’s useless to say that I’ve spent about two hours to find those “horrible” pictures for her header (as she wanted photos from Paris, and I’ve never been there, so I had to find some royalty free ones), and to “chop” them in that style.

My point in telling you this story: niche blogs are different

If you are thinking to start a blog in a niche other than blogging, internet marketing or computers, beware at your audience: they see things in a totally different way than you do, so you’d better take a few testing steps before investing lots of work:

1. If you want to know how readable your blog is, ask your grandmother to take a look at it.
2. If you want to know how appealing your blog layout is, ask a 7 years old child to take a look, while you watch the process.
3. If you want to know how to improve your blog, ask your audience for feedback.
4. Photos are important. A magazine without photos would be boring. The same way, a site can be boring if the eyes have no support for relaxation. Use pictures. Your readers want them.
5. Test, test, test. You have lots of free analytics tools, so you can test every move you make. I’m going now to change my friend’s cooking blog the way she wanted, and then I’ll compare the bounce rates and the number of page views per visitor. If they will improve, then she’s right. If not, we will ask for more feedback and test again.
6. Think out of the box. How do your readers use your blog? When do they read it? My friend said that she would take the laptop with her in the kitchen while she would cook following a recipe she found on a website, so the text should be big, to be seen from a distance.
7. Don’t be afraid of your readers. They can help you, but you have to ask them for help. Don’t get upset when you get negative feedback. Try to understand the reasons behind that feedback. Many times you’ll discover golden nuggets.
8. Don’t bend your ears to everything. Lots of readers mean lots of opinions, and keeping everybody happy is impossible. I’m not going to listen to my friend and remove the Recent Posts and Categories from the front page, because I still think they are in the benefit of her readers. I’ll just move them in the header section, after I replace the header photo with a square one.
9. Educate your readers. Newbies are excellent, as they are a source of fresh feedback, but we cannot stay in the Stone Age for ever. Even if your blog is not about blogging, you can still write some articles to let your readers know that what they read is a blog, that they can subscribe to it for free, that they can interact with you and with the other readers, also for free. Teach them how to use your blog. If your content is interesting enough, they will learn.

If you have the curiosity to test your blog with an internet newbie, I’d be very curious if you shared some insights with the rest of us. Thank you in advance, I’m waiting for your comments.