Category: Blogging

4 Common Blogging Mistakes That Kill Traffic

by Maria

I spend a lot of time looking at blogs and websites and seeing common blogging mistakes. Maybe too much time. Sometimes I feel like if I have to see one more watercolor Facebook icon or read one more About Me page, I will just flop over, dead from too much Interneting.

But 95% of the time, I just love it. It’s fascinating to see the front end of a blog or website and then talk to its owner and find out how they rank on the 5 most important analytics for bloggers. I guess it’s sort of like seeing how the blog sausage is made. (“Blog sausage” sounds wrong. In a hilarious way. I will now have to dedicate my remaining years to proliferating this phrase.)

common blogging mistakes

ANYWAY. It’s become so incredibly important to have a strong online author platform before you launch a book that it’s impossible to overlook the power of a well-done website or blog. Yet the most common blogging mistakes are so incredibly rampant that it’s hard to miss them, if you’re looking.

But if there’s one thing I’ve seen from speaking to hundreds of bloggers, it’s that very few of them know what the heck anyone else is doing on the back-end. Sure, there are plenty of online courses you can take that could help you build traffic and avoid common blogging mistakes, but there’s nothing like seeing how that traffic converts into book sales to show you how important certain overlooked areas are.

There are 4 common blogging mistakes that I think are especially overlooked, and where I think many people are stifling their engagement, throttling their traffic, and overall slowing down the growth of their businesses. Here are the common blogging mistakes I see most often:

Read More

How to Measure Engagement and Why It Matters for Your Platform

by Maria

How to measure engagement

A few weeks ago I was asked about how to measure engagement, and I gave a quick answer in a comment thread. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I spend a lot of time talking about how crucial engagement is, and not enough time talking about how to measure it.

When I was an editor at a New York publisher, I would have anywhere from 7-15 meetings a week. Mostly that was because I had to be at meetings for two different teams, but it still meant anywhere from 1-2 full work days a week spent sitting around a conference room with a group of people.

Some of the meetings were awesome and energizing and full of smart people brainstorming about our books. But some of them were painful. If anyone has ever been in a production meeting where you’re reviewing deadlines title-by-title, you’re probably as accomplished of a doodler as I am. I can now draw quite a menagerie of miniature animals. This is in no way a life skill.

But the point is that it was the content of the meeting that determined whether I was an active or inactive participant. If we were talking about one of my books, or about marketing strategies, or about titles, I was usually giving my full attention and input to the meeting. If we were talking about production dates that had nothing to do with me, it was giraffe-drawing time.

If you had put a two-way mirror in that conference room and placed a randomly selected group of people on the other side, they could have easily told you which people in the meeting were engaged, simply by looking at who was interacting with the meeting content—by offering opinions, asking questions, or expressing emotion.

The meeting of the minds that is your blog/vlog/website is no different. Some people are just popping their head into the room and leaving, some people are present but not engaged, and some people are all in. The people who are all in will be interacting with your content in one way or another. So measuring engagement is really about measuring action.

How, exactly, to measure engagement on different platforms:

Read More

Read, Eat, Drink: The Best Publishing, Writing, and Platform Links plus a Memorial Day Menu

by Maria

Read:

neil degrasse tyson quote

5 Smart Content Strategies from a Stellar Marketer of Ideas (Sonia Simone on Copyblogger): If you haven’t heard of Neil deGrasse Tyson, he will be your new favorite nerd. “He talks about the value in having a passion for all kinds of things, not just your specific area of study. (Tyson has pursued serious interests in wrestling, rowing, wine collecting, and ballroom dancing, so he practices what he preaches.)” In a world where we’re all honed in on acquiring ultimate knowledge in our fields, it’s such a relief to be encouraged to intellectually roam .

Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital Age (Maria Popova/On Being with Krista Tippett): I listened to this podcast on Tuesday, and it absolutely changed the trajectory of my whole week. I’ve always been an obsessive fan of Popova, but it’s particularly inspiring to hear her talk about the things few people talk about–meaning, fulfillment, intellectual curiosity–in a fresh, accessible way. Dream dinner party: Me, Maria Popova, Krista Tippett, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and an XL pot of soup.

Osama Bin Laden’s Bookshelf Reflects His Fixation with the West (Michiko Kakutani for The New York Times): “His bookshelf is a weird hodgepodge. It’s hard to know how complete a list it is, and whether he requested certain books from aides, or if aides sent him works they thought he might like or that might influence his thinking.” A fascinating look at how the books we read shape our world view.

The 5 Simple Strategies That Grew Our Social Traffic by 350% (Madhav Bhandari on BufferSocial): Spoiler alert! The 5 strategies are: schedule the reposting of evergreen content, figure out your optimal timing, have great content to begin with, write headlines that draw people in, and include others in the conversation. But this is still worth a read, because each of those strategies needs to be unpacked before it can be implemented.

The Best Typography, Colors, and Templates Used in the Highest-Converting Social Media Images (James Johnson on BufferSocial): “Turns out, there’s tons of actionable, research-backed advice on how to create social media images that get shared—the ideal colors, fonts, text, and more, all leveraging what we know about design, psychology and the Internet to get more shares and engagement.”

10 Steps to Overcome Writer’s Block (Carly Watters): Step #2 is to “Forgive yourself a perfect draft: No one writes a clean first draft. It’s called a ‘Shitty First Draft‘ for a reason. Read some Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird is a must!) and learn that perfect doesn’t exist. Especially in art.” Writers, agents, and editors are always saying this because it’s one of the truest truths out there. But it’s so, so easy to forget. My favorite visual reminder: this free Anne Lamott art print to hang in your office and look at every time you’re battling perfectionism.

Read More

Read, Eat, Drink: Link Roundup and a Twenty-Minute Asian Noodle Soup

by Maria

Read:

Literary Agent Advice

There is so much to read! Here’s the scoop this week on platform-building, publishing, reading, working, and Facebook eating the Internet:

Why The Best Reading App Available Today is Not What You Think (Michael Hyatt): This ties in perfectly to last week’s Read on Why We Can’t Read Anymore. Now that the ebook market has plateaued at about a quarter of the overall book market, we’re starting to see how the gain in efficiency of ebooks can also mean a loss of deep comprehension. The real question is: do we want to read a greater volume of words, or do we want to dive more deeply into those words?

The Future of Remote Work Feels Like Teleportation (Christopher Mims, WSJ): “Given how geographically diffuse our Internet-centric tools have already made many companies, it is hard to see how these technologies won’t someday transform how we work just as thoroughly as email and the telephone did.”

Facebook is Eating the Internet (Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic): “Facebook, it seems, is unstoppable. The social publishing site, just 11 years old, is now the dominant force in American media. It drives a quarter of all web traffic.” More on why a Facebook page is an integral part of a platform.

Read More