The Reader Appreciation Project

One of the best things about building good relations with your clients and blog readers is to find out what upsets them. Whether it is something related to what you offer or something that people encounter elsewhere, there is probably something online or offline that upsets your clients and blog readers. These external elements can result in any potential clients not actually paying attention to what you have to say, and any existing clients or blog readers to not be convinced by your call to action messages. Some people may even associate your messages with the elements that upset them. You want to make sure that never or rarely happens by ensuring that that your clients and readers are happy with you.

If you want to build good and long term relations with both your clients and blog readers, you have to find out how to convey your message without triggering any of the upsetting elements that you are aware of. A good writing adapts to both the writer and the readers. Good content adapts to both the content producer and the receivers.

Are you adapting enough to figure out why your clients get upset?

10 Elements that can upset your clients

Read more…

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?

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?

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?

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?

If you are still with us after reading this Absolute Guide To Losing Readers, it means that you are either interested in what we write, or you are too lazy to delete the feed from your RSS reader. Or maybe we don’t follow all the guides we write

Anyway, if you offer tutorials to your readers, and you really want to help them, these are a few points you need to check before publishing:

A Good Tutorial Should Be Detailed

Do you remember how was it the first time you started using a software? Nothing was familiar to you on that screen, and there is nothing more frustrating than a tutorial which assumes that you know some things from before. When you write a tutorial, make sure you don’t skip steps. It is better to assume that your readers are complete newbies to that info you are giving them, than to imagine that some things are so simple that you could skip them. Don’t skip anything.

A Good Tutorial Should Be Specific

There’s no point in you telling me that good content can be obtained by “writing good content”. This is a fake tutorial, as it doesn’t teach me anything. Unfortunately, I’ve encountered so many examples in which we are told to do something by actually doing that thing, and to be honest, after reading such tutorials I have a strong feeling of losing my time.

A Good Tutorial Should Speak The Reader’s Language

If you use specific terms (and many times you’ll have to), make sure you have a glossary included with your tutorial. It’s pointless to tell me that I should be ranking better in SERPs, if I’m a complete newbie to internet marketing. If your tutorial is addressed to me, make sure it is fully readable by me.

A Good Tutorial Should Leave Room For Feedback

Sometimes readers would need further clarifications on an issue which you thought you covered well, but they still don’t get to the point. A good tutorials website should have comments enabled, allowing readers to express their wish to go deeper into some of the presented topics. If you write tutorials, get ready to answer all kind of questions pretty quickly (if you want to be a really good tutor).

Now I’m leaving you room for improvement: what else do you think could be characteristic to a good tutorial?