Archive for the 'BB31Days' Category

31 Days to a Better Blog: The final days

Firstly before I begin my summary of the final tasks, I’d like to say a big thank you to Paul Webster from the ICT Hub, who boldly took on the final days of the challenge whilst I hopped on a train with the family, leaving all technology behind and unplugged for a much needed vacation in France. Paul on his Watford Gap blog (about ICT support in the regions here in the UK, with a bit of railway coffee for good measure!), did a fine job of tackling the final days really well and I no doubt will be a slave to any of his requests in the future as compensation.
A big thank you too to the 31 Days to a Better Blog community who not only welcomed Paul into it all at a late stage, but a personal big cheers to you all. With thanks to this challenge first instigated by Michele Martin of the Bamboo Project Blog, I have a new circle of global friends who through the project have introduced me to a wide range of ideas, concepts and inspiration too. Congratulations to the MiniLegends, the fabulous class of 9 year olds in Australia with the support of their fabulous teacher Al Upton who won the Chocolate Challenge.
Do take a look at the MiniLegends site, they’ve used VoiceThread recently which I mentioned to them a while back. These young people are just fabulous!!!

Anyway, August is now over, and officially so is the challenge. I had a good excuse to fall behind with my holidays, and a few of us are still plodding through the final tasks.
It hasn’t ended there though, nearly all of us and quite a few extra have joined in as a new community to learn and discover more in our journeys with blogging. You can read more about the ideas behind this in a recent post by Michele Martin, or head straight over and join in on the new Building a Better Better Blog community. Also, I’d highly recommend that you keep looking at the taskmaster of this challenge, Darren Rowse’s site at Problogger. The interest and learning that have been shared on his site are really useful too, with many of the readers and participants giving their tips and experiences.

I’ve not had too much time to do all of the final tasks in great detail but listed them here, and I hope that you, my readers have enjoyed my journey into building a better blog. I still have much work to do. This challenge has inspired me to really understand the role of my blog, and also of my main website, and redesigns and tweaking will be much of a feature in the coming months ahead to refine my sites usability and look more.

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31 Days to a Better Blog - Day 22: Getting new readers up to speed, and a special welcome

Day 22 of the 31 Days to a Better Blog challenge is all about helping new readers to catch up with your blog.

Darren from Problogger, describes todays task:

“Sometimes after you’ve been blogging on your blog for a while it’s easy to forget that not all of your readers have been reading your blog since you started. While you’re familiar with every aspect of your blog and how to use it - your more recent loyal readers may not.

One way to catch new readers up on what your blog is all about and how to use it most effectively is simply to write a post telling them.”

This is another useful task/tip from Problogger. Once my blogs builds up in readers further I may add simple posts to help new readers every so often as Darren suggests.

Earlier in the challenge, I made a the first steps in an effort to help readers understand more about my blog and how to use it. I added easier navigation, improved the About page, and also made it more visible and easy for new readers to keep up to date with RSS feeds, as well as a page dedicated to helping a new reader understand about RSS. It is and will be a work in progress. Even after the challenge has finished, I will try to be mindful to regularly check up on key areas to ensure my readers feel supported in taking part in my site.

When would I need to create a ‘new reader’ post, rather than a stand alone page?

I can use my statistics gained from Google Analytics to track new versus returning visitors to my site, and also use my Feedburner statistics if the numbers of subscribers suddenly rise. Using these tools will help me to identify when my blog is receiving a rise in new visitors. That is where I feel, a post to help new visitors would be at its best use then.

Last notes…

I am very fortunate to have received an offer from a friend to take over my challenge role, whilst I am away on my holiday.
I welcome you to Paul Webster who has a blog and will continue to keep the challenge going for me whilst I’m away on his site at watfordgap.wordpress.com. Paul blogs about regional ICT support and his role at the ICT Hub. He’s based in Sheffield, a different part of the UK to me. As a latecomer to the challenge he’ll be looking to implement some of the past tasks on his blog site in the coming months ahead.
Welcome Paul!

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31 Days to a Better Blog - Day 21: Make a reader famous!

Day 21 of the 31 Days to a Better Blog challenge is to make a reader famous.

Darren from Problogger gives us some ideas about how to build relationships and support your readers:

• “Promote a comment to a Post - sometimes readers make incredibly insightful and wise observations and tips in the comments of your blog. While they will be read by a handful of people in the comment thread - why not pull it out and use it as the basis for one of your post - highlighting the wisdom in it and the person who made the comment.
• Write a Post about their Blog - visit the blogs of those leaving comments on your blog and pick one that you resonate with to post about. Write an ‘unpaid review’ of the blog - highlighting the best posts and what you like about it.
• Give Readers an Opportunity to Promote Themselves - run a project or write a post that gives readers an opportunity to promote themselves in some way.”

These are all really useful tips which I’ll look to implement after my holiday break. Whenever a reader comments on my blog, I head over to their site too if they have one. What a great way to build community especially if you find a reader that writes similar articles to you or on a complimentary theme or topic.

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31 Days to a Better Blog - Day 20: Run a reader survey

The challenge continues…
On day 20 of the 31 Days to a Better Blog experiment, we’ve been given the task to run a reader survey.

Darren from Problogger explains why this is useful:

“There are two main reasons why this exercise is worth doing:

1. Blog Improvement - the most obvious benefit of asking readers to review your blog is that you find out what they like and don’t like about it so that you can make improvements
2. Reader Participation - asking this question draws readers out of their lurking state to make a comment or send an email. In doing this you actually create users who take a little more ownership of the site and who feel like they are being valued and listened to.”

If you are a nonprofit organisation with a website or blog, surveying your readers is a really important event. It can help you to see if your website or blog is reaching the intended audience, and if it is, what do your readers think.

In the voluntary and community sector, we are all used to monitoring and assessing the outcomes of much of our work. We’re using surveys to obtain feedback from not only service users, but increasingly funders and other partners and stakeholders too.
So remember when doing your monitoring, you should include questions about your website or blog too. I’ve seen some of organisations and charities forget to do this in their annual surveys. Having a website provides a means to communicating with your readers and users, and it is important to realise that they are just as important as your newsletter or other promotional materials you may produce.

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31 Days to a Better Blog - Day 19: Respond to comments on your blog

The task continues, and the task for day 19 of the 31 Days to a Better Blog challenge is to respond to comments on your blog.

Seems an easy task, but one that is essential to help build relationships with your readers and show that their involvement in your site is what makes it successful.

Darren from Problogger says about responding to comments on your blog:

“While this is one of the simplest acts that a blogger can do (I almost didn’t publish this because it’s so basic) it is something that can have a real impact upon your readers.”
“So block out a little time today to scan through the latest comments on your blog. Answer questions, respond to others ideas, leave a welcome message and continue conversations by asking questions of your own.”

“This acknowledgment goes a long way and is one of the best ways of developing a commenting culture on your blog.”

A simple but essential task.
My blog notifies me when some one has left a new comment by sending me an email. I’ve got into the habit now of sending a thank you email back to the reader especially when they are a new reader, and often respond to the comments on my blog.
I hadn’t really anticipated the community and relationship building aspects of blogging until taking part in this challenge. It’s made the process really worthwhile, and hopefully my readers will shape the future of my blog and what I write about.

Finally, should you comment on this article or any others… I may not be able to respond to many comments in the coming days, so please accept my apologies in advance. Holiday with the family in France is beckoning me away from technology for a week!

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31 Days to a Better Blog - Day 18: Create a sneeze page

Day 18 of the 31 Days to a Better Blog challenge involves creating a ’sneeze’ page for your site. A sneeze page you may ask? What is that?
Darren from Problogger explains the task.

“A Sneeze Page is one that simply directs readers in multiple directions at once - back into your archives.”

A useful tip for not only blogs but can be transferred to websites too. Darren suggests creating themed pages where people can see the best of information.
I thought a lot about how I can implement this on my blog site. Being a fairly new blog, I don’t see it as essential yet, but as the blog grows with many more articles and posts, it makes good sense to help readers to be able to find the older posts and also easier to find what they want to read an easily.

Over the coming months I’ll be implementing some themed pages to help direct new readers deeper into my site. But for now, I needed to examine how people found what they needed to find.

I thought about my archives. I’d already added some text on the home page to say that ‘here are the latest articles’, and at the bottom about ’seeing more articles.’ It led you to a drab basic archive page which I created when adding a more transparent navigation system for the blog. I’d explained a little about what the archives were, but nothing too helpful unless you were a blogger yourself. Not very exciting to new readers especially if they weren’t sure what they were looking for.
So time for another small overhaul, by going into the backbone of my site to make this work.

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31 Days to a Better Blog - Day 16: Create a heatmap of where readers click on your blog

The 31 Days to a Better Blog challenge continues…(for background information to the project follow this link here.)

The task for day 16 is to create a heatmap of where readers click on your blog. This looked a fun task to do and I could see the usefulness of having a go, and seeing if it would be a useful tool to use when supporting nonprofit organisations.

Darren at Problogger says:

“The basics of this tool are that it tracks where readers of your blog click when surfing on your blog. It creates a heatmap of the results.”

Why would we want to create a heatmap?

I already use Google Analytics and can track how visitors use my site, which links they click, find out where they enter their site and leave and more. But it did look kind of fun, so I signed up with the free service at Crazy Egg.
You can add up to four pages on the free service, but just for the purpose of the experiment I chose just one, the home page.
It is a useful aid, and can help you to identify if your visitors are finding what they need to on your site. Does your design and layout work? Where do they click?

I think using this as well as Google Analytics can be really useful. It’s very visual and easy to comprehend, although I think that it needs to be understood that it isn’t the same as Google Analytics which provides so much more in depth data for your site.

I waited for a few hours and then came back to it, logged in and true enough - there was an overlay of my webpage with the heatspots on. I’d only left it a few hours before checking on it so not too much there yet, but already interesting viewing. I’ll check again tomorrow to see how the spots have grown! It shows where people click on your page. You can also get more in depth data easily too, of the referrals to the page and more.

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31 Days to a Better Blog - Day 15: Stickify your blog!

Following on the 31 Days to a Better Blog challenge, the task today was to ’stickify’ your blog.

Darren at Problogger says:

“It revolves around identifying key points where traffic is entering your blog and then optimizing those points for stickiness either by providing means for subscribing via RSS or email or by driving people deeper into your blog.”

A few days a go, the task was to analyse your statistics (see my post here on day 11 of the challenge on how I use Google Analytics), so by using your new knowledge of how people are accessing and using your site you can target key areas of your site or blog which you can add some extra features to enable new readers to want to stay or sign up for feeds to keep connected with your news.

Darren is using video in his post to convey his ideas and messages, which is well worth a look, as an idea.
I’m going to try a few future posts as videoposts, although don’t want to compromise accessibility too much for those that cannot use the technology, so am currently looking in to and testing some ideas tools to provide captions to video’s (such as MAGpie) and also looking into podcasting my RSS feeds too (such as the Readspeaker podcast feed).

There’s a useful article on the ICT Hub website about Web 2.0 and accessibility if you are interested in some of the barriers that blogging and interactive websites can cause.

(If you use or know of any of the tools mentioned to enable captions to video, or podcasting rss, please do contact, as I’m compiling a list of applications to test and report on! Thanks)

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31 Days to a Better Blog - Day 14: Analyse your blogs competition

Todays task in the 31 Days to a Better Blog challenge is to analyse your blogs competition. Darren of Prologger did use the term ‘competition’ hesitantly, as your competitors or those blogging in a similar theme are also your biggest allies, connect and share with them.

Since this challenge began, I’ve connected lots with other participants, some who have similar goals to some of mine, and we’ve began to build relationships, connect and discuss

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31 Days to a Better Blog - Day 12 & 13, and an update on progress…

The 31 days to a Better Blog Challenge continues…

The task for Day 12 is to Introduce Yourself to another Blogger.

“Email another blogger in your niche to introduce yourself and your blog. You don’t need to ask them to link to you or anything - the point isn’t to get any specific outcome other than to touch base and hopefully build a relationship.”

Since this challenge began, I’ve been alot more confident in a making contact with other bloggers, not only in my ‘niche’ but in other areas too. I really recommend this tip, relationship building is definately a key part of communicating via the internet. It’s a little harder than the traditional face to face route, and does require abit more time and commitment, but the results are very worthwhile. I now communicate with a wide range of people regularly across the world that I wouldn’t have formed any connections with, if it had not been for blogging and reading others blogs.

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