Ian M Rountree

Copywriter, Project Manager, Digital Marketing

Giving People More – SEO for Bloggers Part 4

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cold storage on FlickrSo we’ve let ourselves write something on purpose, and made it fit into the schedule. We know we’re going to write more, because we’ve got purpose and a schedule – but how can we make sure that people get it when it comes out? Letting people know you want them to Get More of This is one of the three primary calls to action a blogger can take advantage of.

As much as we can ask people to subscribe or bookmark our things – sometimes just making it easy for people to do so is enough.

Even given the paradox of choice problem, providing options for people to take advantage of is one of the best ways to facilitate the Get More of This call to action. Does your blog have an RSS icon or a “Subscribe Now” link of some kind? Is there a form, on every page, stating you offer email updates? Do people know you’re using a Facebook app like RSS Graffiti to drop your posts into your Facebook page automatically?

Just set out the choices – don’t worry about a best option, people will engage on the level at which they are most comfortable.

What about non-blog connections? If you’re one of those intensely busy news feed kinds of bloggers, posting upwards of ten to fifteen articles per day – have you considered having a Twitter account just for your article headlines?

What’s your Mix of More?

While we do need to allow people to pick their level of involvement, it has to stop somewhere. Two dozen Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and SoAndSoOn buttons on your blog posts are fairly likely to annoy people. Similarly – if you’re on Twitter, but not Reddit, does your Reddit button need to be as big as your Twitter button? Making these choices isn’t about eliminating an avenue of connection for your audience – instead, it can serve as an indicator of the best ways to interact with you.

Narrowing in on the four to seven (or so, at most) options that fit your habits and your own involvement on the web – and never, ever forget that RSS button among them – will help your audience to understand where you are, add to your sense of personality, and develop an immediate connection with anyone of similar involvement.

The sufficiently savvy will know, and have means by which to share your things wherever they want to. However, giving permission in simple, understandable cues can make a huge difference to people’s comfort level regarding involving themselves with your ongoing progress as a writer.

Creating your appropriate Mix of More is just as important as building the unique value proposal for your writing.

Image by the measure of mike.

“Read It All Week” – An Open Challenge

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How much time do you spend actually reading blogs?

Yeah, self-serving question – hear me out here.

Justin Kownacki and I are offering a challenge, between July 19th and July 25th, for anyone interested to measure the size of their personal libraries. this came out of a discussion we had about why people share, what they share, and where the perceived benefit is in being in either position; the sharer and the receiver.

We subscribe to blogs almost on an autonomic basis now – last time I counted, before this challenge, I had about 60 blogs on my reader, only three of which I could identify immediately. Why did I add them? What process have I used to flush low-value streams in the past? How can we streamline our intake, and not miss out on high quality content that comes up every so often in the more esoteric feeds we’re aware of?

More appropriately, how much benefit to our weekly routine is the act of consuming all of this content?

In order to measure this – or at least to bring attention to it, even if measurement is difficult, we’d like to offer you a challenge. Here are the guidelines:

Preparation:

  • Mark All As Read right now – This isn’t a week for catching up, it’s a week for staying on task, or getting ahead, with your reading.
  • Set aside some time every day to read. Maybe it’s an hour before work; maybe during lunch; maybe just before bed. Maybe all of these.
  • Assess which physical media you’ll be including in this experiment. Magazines, newspapers, news television – whatever you include normally, be sure to add that to your planned list.
  • Catalogue your current content commitments. Even if its just a number, write out the amount of media you’re planning to attempt to keep up with. For example, my week will consist of [x] blogs in Google Reader, [x] hours of news television/radio, [x] podcasts and [x] print media.
  • Mark the time, if you like, by reposting these guidelines to your blog if you have one. Letting people in on the process is a big part of any experiment.

During The Week:

  • Actually read everything. Getting to “Reader Zero” is a noble task, but it requires that you actually read everything to assess its value.
  • Resist the urge to subscribe to new blogs, just for this week. Bookmark new sources for review later, by all means, but consider that adding the commitment to new sources in mid-experiment changes the nature of the work.
  • Take notes, if it helps. By all means, keep a running log of the experiment – I’ll be using #ReadItAll on Twitter to mark my observations.

Wrap-Up (Post experiment):

Now is the time to anti-curate your findings. Which sources turned out to be most useful? Consider promoting them or sharing their content. Which ones turned out to be more detriment than benefit? Unsubscribe immediately. Which ones showed mixed results? Unsubscribe, but bookmark for later review.

Mark the fall-out from your experiment. How many blogs did you start with, how many have you kept? How many bookmarks did you make, finding interesting streams for review? What has this experiment revealed about your reading – and sharing – habits?

Mark your experiences with a follow-up post on Monday, July 26th.

The real goal of the week here is two-fold: to increase understanding of how much we can reasonably consume in a week, and to ensure that we’re consuming media that we both want and need during that time, rather than what we feel we ought to.

Bonus round: Self-examination.

Part of the methodology behind this experiment comes from the patterns Justin and I agreed on noticing in how, and what, people share with others. We’re not trying to discourage sharing, or speculative subscription. That said, what’s beneficial should stay around to provide lasting improvement and information, while uninteresting, or less useful items piling up and frightening you away from your reading should be discarded.

What do you think? Are you in? Join us in examination for #ReadItAll week!

Update: Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins posted a very insightful explaination on SiliconAngle about why #ReadItAll isn’t for him – go check it out!

Tis the Season for Best of Year Lists

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Making the morning rounds in my RSS feeds, I happened upon a post from Penelope Trunk about Brazen Careerist’s  Top 50 Companies to Work For list. Penelope’s post about how it was made is fairly interesting itself, but the list struck me as an oddity.

There are a lot of banks on the list. As well as other financial institutions. Somehow, I expected to see more tech companies. Google is at #4. Yahoo! is at #23. Apple and Microsoft? Not even on the list. Obviously there are things going n behind the scenes here that make these companies less than attractive to Gen Y. Wonder what that is?

But where is Gen Y actually working? Maybe retail, I thought. It’s where I got stuck, having made the boneheaded decision not to go to college.

Surprisingly, the only retail companies there were Abercrombie & Fitch, and Target at #11 and #48 respectively. Maybe this is less of a surprise to people in the US. A&F is not exactly my style, so I can’t speak for their culture at all outside of hearing that the dude who’s in all of their posters at their storefronts actually works at their %th Avenue store in NYC… Posing in front of his own fifty-foot tall poster all day. Thatt’s high-scale intensity right there. On the other hand, Target never impressed me when I was spending time in Minnesota. Outside of large-format Goldfish crackers, it was fairly standard, and no one ever looked happy. But that was eight years ago, maybe corporate culture has changed.

Or maybe it hasn’t. Many of the greenhorns I see coming into my store as recruits seem to have a totally different handle on the work environment than I do, and I’m only seven or eight years older than they are. I’m aware of a maturity gap – that much is visible – but in a lot of cases, there’s an attitude gap that can’t be explained by maturity.

Trying to teach “proper priorities” to someone not in your generation is like trying to explain Outliers to a kiwi fruit. Until you understand the nature of the gap, it’s impossible to address.

I don’t know if there’s an answer for this. Or even a direct action to be taken. But awareness is worth it, even if all it does is reduce your stress without making your task easier.