Best Time to Blog
Why is knowing the best time to post a blog so important? If you know when the majority of people visit your site and read your stuff then you can time your new material to be released prior to their arrival. This keeps people coming back to your site and will increase your readership. So what are the best practices regarding times of the day you should post your new articles? Let's take a look.
Breaking News
If you are publishing a breaking news story then it goes without saying it's a time-sensitive piece. You need to get these posts published as soon as possible to get the most out of them. When writing breaking news, don't re-read and edit the thing over and over again to try and make it perfect. Instead get it posted then go back and edit the article if necessary. Speed is more important here than grammar because the quicker you are getting your article up the higher the chance the search engines will index you first, bringing you more visitors and more links from other bloggers.
Informational/How-to Articles
When publishing your general information or how-to articles speed isn't nearly as important. Instead you want to post right before the majority of your readers arrive on your site. This is where having some analytics information on traffic by hour of the day can be helpful. If you do not have that information or are just starting out then you have to know your audience.
If you are focused on people in the United States the best time for you to post is going to be different than if you are targeting Italy. You generally don't want to post late at night when nobody is online. According to Dan Zarrella, most people read blogs int he morning and there is a steady dropoff throughout the day. So much so that half as many people read blogs at night than they do in the morning.
So the most important thing to remember is to get your new content out before your audience arrives. A lot of people use RSS readers these days. If readers subscribe to your blog and you can time your post to go live shortly before they pull up their feeders, you will be at the top and get a lot more views.
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How Often Should You Post
A frequently asked question for people just starting out with blogging is how often should you post new articles? The easy answer is you should publish whenever you have something valuable to say. Of course, ideas won't always just come to you so you are going to have to search out topics to right about. There are a number of factors that should go into your decision on how often you should write new posts for you blog. Let's take a look at some of the things you should consider.
Posting Frequency Varies From Blog to Blog
If you are invovled in a news niche or cover a wide range of topics on your blog then you are going to need to post more often. If you write long, quality, in-depth posts then you can post less frequently. Other people like to write short, sharp posts that cover their information quickly and these bloggers can get away with posting more often. Also, if you have a lot of different writers then you can increase your output a lot easier than if you are doing everything by yourself.
You should also consider who your readers are. You don't want people to unsubscribe from your blog because you are posting too often. You have to figure out what your audience prefers and cater to them.
Why You Should Post More Often
Think about going to CNN.com or DrudgeReport.com. Would you keep returning to their sites every day if they rarely changed the stories listed? The answer is no. The same applies to your blog, if you want people to keep coming back you have to give them something new to look forward to.
If you look at the most popular blogs on the web and their posting frequency, the sites that post more than once per day do significantly better than sites that post fewer than once per day. That means that while knowing the best time to post might be important for your very best stuff, but posting more often will help you gain more readers and links than posting fewer items at the right time will.
The more pages you have the more pages the search engines have to index. This means that you will get more traffic. Also, your existing RSS readers will have more opportunities to see your stuff.
Why You Should Post Less
If you post too often then your readers might feel bombarded and unsubscribe. You might also start running out of ideas if you are posting five times per day. You want to make sure you balance you content out on a consistent basis. If you write fewer posts you will also increase reader engagement so you'll see more comments on each post, generating an in-depth discussion.
Conclusion
The most important thing is to find a posting frequency that works for you and your readers and then stick with it. The number one problem that I find with blogs in trouble is inconsistency in posting.
People get excited when they are starting out and post often, but after failing to generate a solid reader base they start tailing off and their blog ultimately fails. Your readers will grow accustomed to your schedule, but it has to be maintained. If you start publishing every day and then take a week off, your readers will get worried. They might start emailing you to see if you are still alive, or worse, forget about your site and be gone forever.
If you can post once every 2-3 days to start, try that. If you feel like you are getting a backlog of ideas, increase that number to 4-5 times per week and keep building up until you find the right amount that works for you. It's much easier to increase the amount of posts than it is to scale back, readers don't find that as easy to adjust to.
How often do you post? Let me know in the comments.
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What Should Go on a Disclaimer Page
If you want to be taken seriously as a blogger then you might want to think about adding a disclaimer page to your site. The key to the page is to disclose any potential conflict of interest you may have between yourself and what you are writing about. It is our belief that too much disclosure is better than not enough, but there is a large gray area covering what is considered necessary and what may be going too far. Think of sites like CNN.com. If they talk about Money Magazine or take a quote from them, the author will normally include that they are owned under the same corporate umbrella so the reader knows about the tie between the two companies. How about if CNN.com talks about Netflix, do you see them adding to the story that NetFlix buys banner ads on the site? Not at all. So when should you disclose?
Financial Association
If you have a financial association with the subject of your post or story then you should disclose it. I don't mean advertising, which should seem obvious to the visitor. If they see banner ads posted everywhere then they should know that you are geting paid for that space and aren't displaying banners out of the kindness of your heart. However, you should disclose when you are an owner or part-owner of a company displayed or talked about on your site. If you are getting paid by the company you are writing about, either as an employee or as a contractor, then you should disclose that. You should also put up a discloser if you are in financial competition with a company you are writing about. If an owner of MySpace is going to write about how terrible Facebook is, then don't you think you should know there might be a financial gain for them if MySpace is chosen over Facebook by the reader?
Personal Involvement
The slippery slope comes in to play when you talk about personal involvement. If a friend owns a company you are writing about, you may want to mention it. How close of a friend does it have to be before it's worth mentioning? Well, I supposed that is up to the writer to decide, but I prefer being overly informative. If you are talking about a family member though, you should let the reader know about your relationship.
What do you think should go on the disclaimer page or be disclosed by writers? Have you seen a site disclose too much or not enough? Let's hear about it in the comments.
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Benefits of a Contact Us Page
It's very important for every site owner to have a way for readers to contact them. If there are visitors who have to spend more than a few seconds looking for a way to get a hold of someone from your site, then you could possibly miss out on a sale, a profitable business relationship, a question worth answering via a post, and I think you get my point. The question really should be why wouldn't you want your readers to contact you. Let's look at some of the benefits of a contact us page in order to further motivate you to get your up and running.
Private Communication
Sure, having comments on your blog generates a sense of community, and we've even spent time trying to teach you how to get more comments on your blog because we think they are so valuable, but not everyone is going to want to ask their question publicly. If you give your readers a way to contact someone via email then they will feel they can talk in private.
Accessibility
If your visitors have a way to get in touch with you then they will feel like they can pitch you their ideas or just let you know that they appreciate what you are doing for them. It also shows that you are willing to take responsibility for the content of your site and welcome criticism. If there is a problem with your site or blog, then your visitors can let you know about it. No site owner has time to monitor their site 24/7 and the thousands of pages they may have.
Opportunities
Like I said in the introduction, visitors could be contacting you in order to ask a couple of questions before purchasing something from your site, or maybe they want to partner up with you on a business venture. The questions that they ask could work great for future articles or posts.
I know that some site owners worry about privacy issues or that if their email is posted they will get spammed to death. Take it from me, someone who manages rather large sites that get tons of traffic, I have never had a problem letting my readers know who I am and what my email address is. As for spam, that's why I go with GMail!
Have you gotten anything else out of having a contact us page? Let me hear your story in the comments!
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What to Put On Your About Us Page
When a new visitor comes to your site and wants to know what it is about where do you think they turn to? Hopefully your answer was the "About Us" page, but how up-to-date is yours? Take a look at some suggestions I have for what to include on this section of your site in order to give your visitor an idea of what you are all about.
Personalize the Page
Your visitors should be able to put a face to the name of the person they are reading about. It will give your site a human touch. If you are selling a product people want to buy from people, not un-named companies. If you are selling information then they want to know you are an expert and not a pimply-faced, unkept 15-year old kid. Provide a professional looking photo and your About Us page will be off to a positive start.
Short Summary
In the introduction section of your about page you should have a short and sweet summary of the information that you cover on the site. Keep it short in case the reader doesn't have a lot of time or just wants a quick overview, if they want more details details then you will give them more specific information further down the page.
Your Details
After the summary you can go into further details as to what type of site you are running and some personal information about yourself such as your name, occupation, location, education, previous sites your have written for and worked for, and whatever else you would put on a job resume. That's how you should see the about us page, as a resume. You are selling yourself to your visitors so put your best foot forward.
Contact Information
Make sure that you include a link to the contact us page or provide the contact means on the about us page. This emans an email address, or if applicable, phone number and physical address.