Another Blog on Blogging

Well, my friends here at Apsense......

Blogging has become the major focus of my succesfiul Marketing
in the past few MONTHS.

I post to 5 of my blogs weekly and comment in 15-20 a day..
time spent 1/2 hour.

The return on Investment has been phenomenal>

It is because of information such as that presented below and
Some small investments in Reading material
Here is ONE 

READ the Folowing post by Yaro Starak carefully.
I did , applied the principle and saw dramataic results.

Remember the first tip I sent you about using 
comments on your blog as social proof?  

I said that when people visit your blog and they 
see other people interacting they are more likely 
to join in, subscribe or bookmark your blog. You 
receive social proof when you demonstrate that  
people are reading what you are writing and thus 
more people read what you are writing.  

That makes sense of course. What also makes sense 
is the opposite, when you demonstrate to your 
readers that no one is reading your blog. This is 
a form of negative social proof and unfortunately 
a lot of bloggers are taking steps to encourage 
it. 

SOCIAL PROOF MISTAKES

There are many ways you can demonstrate negative 
social proof. You can't do much about not having 
comments when you first start blogging (unless of 
course you start putting in fake comments by using 
different alter-egos and have a conversation with 
yourself - this is not as silly a technique as you 
might think, as long as you only do it to get the 
ball rolling in the beginning). What I'm seeing 
more of lately are bloggers deliberately 
demonstrating they have no readers. This is a 
social proof mistake. 

When you first start blogging you won't have 
readers. That's okay, we all start there. The 
trick is not to advertise your lack of audience.  

One of the traffic tips I use to enhance social 
proof is to display my feed count on my blog. The 
service is provided by FeedBurner.com, which 
provides statistics on how many people subscribe 
to your blog's RSS feed. You can display a little 
feedcount widget on your blog which shows how many 
people read your RSS feed in the last 24 hours. 

This by itself is a handy tool and I'm certain 
it's helped me in many ways to prove my 
credibility. By displaying this counter I am 
social proofing my blog and also myself as a 
blogger and blog traffic teacher. This works 
BECAUSE I have over 1000 readers.  

Imagine what would happen if you used this widget 
the day after you start blogging. Your count is 
going to be 0 or maybe 1 (if you subscribe to your 
own feed!).  

As I travel around the web I see many blogs with 
the FeedBurner widget sitting at single or low 
double digits. That is not a good strategy for 
keeping readers, it is negative social proof.  

Do you think you would be encouraged to read a 
blog that no one else is reading?  

Okay, sure, some people are going to give you a 
chance because they know you are just starting, 
but that's only a few people. Most will visit your 
blog for the first time and have no preconceptions 
so why put something on your blog that will lower 
your social proof? 

SYMPTOMS OF A LARGER PROBLEM

The problem here is implementing traffic 
strategies in the wrong order. Growing your blog 
is not about applying every little tip and trick 
you read just because someone else tells you it's 
good for your traffic or because they had good 
results doing it.  

Every blog is different. All blogs are at a 
different point on the growth curve. One of the 
greatest lessons I learnt while growing my blog 
was to grasp *conceptually* how blogs grow and why 
they grow. That's why I believe it's vital to 
follow a traffic methodology if you are serious 
about growing your blog traffic otherwise you risk 
wasting time on techniques that don't work or are 
not appropriate for your blog in it's current 
state.  

Worse still, you can follow others blindly and as 
the situation with feedcounters demonstrates, do 
things that negatively impact your blog traffic 
growth.  

HERE IS A RULE: Don't place a visible feedcounter 
on your blog until you have at least triple figure 
subscriber counts, or at least 50+. The same goes 
for traffic statistics or any other raw number 
count. Only advertise details that will positively 
affect your traffic.  

Have patience, you will get there, and when you do 
you can show off your statistics to bring in even 
more readers.  

Here's to your blogging success,

Yaro Starak
Blog Traffic King