I’ve said it many times on ProBlogger but if your blog is not solving a problem or fulfilling a need or desire among your readers then you’re unlikely to see them return.

The needs, desires and problems you can be meeting need not be large ones - but if you’re connecting with people on these levels you’re being useful and this goes a long way towards making the type of impression on someone that draws them into a loyal relationship.

Better still - if you’re useful to someone they’re often going to tell others about it which is a big part of the growth of many successful blogs.

Examples of Useful Blogs

Being useful can take on many different forms. Lets looks at some examples of fairly well known blogs:

• Mashable - gives people the latest news on Social Media but also teaches them how to use it.
• Boing Boing - a blog that gives a laugh and looks at curious trends in technology
• Lifehacker - helps people become more productive and be better at different technological pursuits
• TMZ - feeds people’s desire to know the latest gossip and celeb news
• Seth Godin - teaches on the topic of Marketing
• I Can Has Cheezburger - gives people something to giggle about
• Treehugger - resources people to live green
• Seeking Alpha - gives financial news and advice
• Zen Habits - helps people be more productive
• CopyBlogger - helps bloggers write better

Now you might not read all of these blogs (and there are many thousands more that we could use as examples) - but they all have many thousands of devoted fans and daily readers, because they’re producing content that meets some kind of need, fulfils some kind of desire or solves some kind of problem.

The ways a blog can be useful are many - but here are some of the basics (taken partly from ProBlogger the Book):

• Entertaining - increasingly blogs are being used as entertainment. People are going to them for laughs, for gossip and for fun conversation.
• Educational - many successful blogs teach people to do or be something
• Informational/News - these blogs might teach you any practical skills but they keep you up with the latest on a particular topic, location or trend
• Thoughtful - some readers want a place where they can have their minds open to viewpoints.
• Debate - some blogs serve as places for people to come together to have dialogue and debate around a topic.
• Community - many blogs are build more on people having a sense of belonging and feeling that they’re a part of a community than the actual content.

Of course this list could go on and on and will vary from blog to blog with some meeting multiple needs and others just targeting one.

How is Your Blog Useful?

This is a question that I think bloggers would do well ponder before they start blogging as well as during the blogging process (in fact it’s probably a question to ask every day before you publish anything). Strive to meet a need and enhance people’s lives in some way and you’ll be taking a step closer to connecting with people in a way that will hopefully be part of a lasting relationship.

Further Reading

• How to Get in Tune with Your Readers Needs [and Produce Compelling Content]
• Solve a Problem - 7 Ways to Identify Reader Problems

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Usefulness - Principles of Successful Blogging #3

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You might not have known it at the time - but the moment was defining, it changed the course of some area of your life in a way that turned things upside down.

I had one of those course changing moments early in my blogging. It was a moment that resulted in my blogging moving from being a hobby that generated a nice bit of secondary income into a full time business.

It was a moment that at the time didn’t feel life changing - but it was.

The funny thing about this moment is that it wasn’t a discovery of some secret way to make money blogging, it wasn’t the day I stated one of my blogs… in fact it was a moment that didn’t immediately lead to any particular change on my blogs - because it was largely something that happened in my mind - a paradigm shifting moment.

It all started with 9 words from my wife (V)

‘You’ve got 6 months to make blogging full time.’

She then told me that if I didn’t get it to this kind of level I’d have to get a ‘real job’.

Up until this point I’d been talking about how blogging could one day provide us with a full time income. I’d been showing her the growth of the earnings from the blogs so far and projecting forward to what they might be in the future if things kept going.

I’d been on about it for months and things were going OK - the earnings graphs I kept showing her were trending up - I could see the possibility of one day being a full time blogger.

But I’d been talking a lot…. dreaming a lot…. creating a lot of pretty graphs…. and not really DOING a lot.

I didn’t really see it (I was too close and too caught up in my dreams) but V knew it and so she set me an ultimatum - a deadline that changed my thinking and more importantly led to me changing the way I went about my blogging.

In the moments after V’s ultimatum I had a realization that while I dreamed that one day my blogging would become a business that I’d been treating my blogging like a hobby.

I knew that if I were to succeed in going full time in the next six months that that had to change. I needed to start looking at my blogging as a business now - even though it was only earning a day or two a week’s income.

That moment changed everything.

That was the day I….

• started putting serious time aside for blogging
• became more focused upon my core tasks of creating content
• wasted less time on distractions
• became more strategic in my thinking and set myself goals to work towards
• began to look for new income streams - beyond AdSense
• started hustling for advertisers - ringing up businesses in my niche and pitching my blog to them
• began to seek out guest writing opportunities on other blogs and even in main stream media
• started setting myself deadlines for posting a certain number of posts a day and developed an editorial calendar
• I started networking more with other bloggers
• began to invest more time and even money into my learning of different aspects of blogging
• started to look for a business coach who could teach me how to look at what I do as a business instead of a hobby

That day began the process for me of looking at what I do as a business.

While not a lot changed on my blogs that day - the impact over the last 4-5 years has been significant. I’ve not looked back and many of the things I changed back then have become patterns and a natural part of my blogging work flow.

The #1 reason my blogging grew into a business was that I began to treat it as one.

Tomorrow I want to share a free opportunity with you that I think will help many of us as bloggers to make this mind shift. You see many of us are stuck in the mindset of looking at what we do as a ‘hobby’ and need to make a shift into looking at things more as a business person.

Update: due to unforeseen circumstances I’ve pulled tomorrow’s post. I was going to promote something that I thought fit the bill but on further investigation - it doesn’t. My sincere apologies but I don’t want to promote something that doesn’t fit with my ethos.

However I do recommend people take this idea of learning how to build a successful business seriously. I did this through finding a business coach, reading books and networking with business owners (offline and online).

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

The #1 Reason My Blogging Grew Into a Business

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1. Choose a niche that you would like to promote.  Make sure it is something that you can find several products for on Clickbank.  Setup a twitter account that is specific to your niche, for example: stop_smoking_now or lose_weight_fast.  Make sure you use an image on your account and choose a background - so that it doesn't look like a generic twitter page.  Make it look like a real person's twitter account.  You can even fill it with some real tweets for the first few days as you build your followers, so that it has a more natural feel.
2. Use twitter's search form to find people tweeting about subject matters that are related to your topic.  For example, if you are going after the stop smoking niche, then search for phrases such as "quit smoking" or "i just quit smoking today", etc.  You can also use software such as Hummingbird or Bird Feeder to gain followers.
3. Setup an account on Twitterfeed.  You can use Twitterfeed to automatically populate your tweets with topics relevant to your niche.  Find blogs with posts in your niche and feed them into your twitter account.
4. Check out this post about automatically retweeting.  Setup a twitter bot to retweet posts from people that are tweeting about your niche.  Yahoo pipes are very powerful for mashing together content from other twitter users.  Retweeting can help you gain more followers.  I just started tinkering with this last night but it seems like it can be very useful for a variety of marketing methods.
5. Once you have gained a good number of followers, go over to Hop RSS or CBFeed and create an RSS feed for products in your niche.  Add this feed to your twitterfeed account and you will now be pumping links into your twitter account that link to your clickbank hop links.

You now have targeted ads on your twitter page, and hopefully some targeted followers.  Watch the money start rolling in

OK, this is just the tip of the iceberg, but hopefully this will give you an idea and get the ball rolling.  Twitter can be a very powerful tool for internet marketers.

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This is a guest post by Srikanth AD. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Bloggers love to have comments on their blogs. It builds social proof, enriches the content, fosters community and so on. Here are six plugins that you can use to boost the number of comments on your blog and make the commenting process more efficient.

1. Better Comments Manager

Replying to comments from your readers will make them come back in the future, because they will know that your care for them.

The “Better Comments Manager” plugin allows you to reply to the comments right from the Admin panel. In the absence of this plug-in, you have to visit the post individually and reply to the comment which is time consuming and tedious if you have tons of comments to reply.

2. Subscribe to Comments

By installing this plug-in in your WordPress blog your readers can get email notifications about the further comments on the post. When a reader comments in a post and checks the box to get E-mail notifications, it helps him to stay in touch with the comments and encourages him to come back to your blog and stay engaged in the discussion.

This helps to add more value to your post as more and more commenter’s exchange their ideas and views on the post.

3. WordPress Thread Comment

This plugin for WordPress allows the readers to reply to a specific comment, making it easier to follow the discussion. The plugin should also be compatible with most WordPress themes around, and installation is not that difficult.

4. IntenseDebate

This is one another cool WordPress plugin to consider if you are looking to get more comments and visits to your WordPress blog. This plug-in encourages your readers to actively participate in the discussion and it allows them to rate a comment posted with simple thumbs up or down buttons.

They can also leave active replies to the comments or start a new comment. Commenters can also subscribe to the replies and new comments such that they get email notification when a reply to their comment is received or any new comment is added to the post.

5. Absolute Comments

This plugin for WordPress also allows you to instantly reply to comments right from the admin panel.

The interesting feature of this plug-in is that it supports threaded comments, and if you have set to receive email notification, when a new comment is posted you can see a direct reply link to the comment in the email.

6. Contact Commenters

This is a great tool to interact with the commenters of your blog posts. By using this plugin you can send email to selected commenters, perhaps thanking their for their comments or asking their opinions on a related issue.

Srikanth AD is the author of Tech Inspiration.

Original Post: 6 WordPress Plugins for Better Comments

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This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. Just use the contact form if you want to submit a question.

Dan asks:

How would you rate a site with traffic sources being 79% organic, 8% referral traffic and 13% direct traffic? Does that mean it would be a great time to start focusing on those keywords that bring visitors from search engines? Is it enough?

The question is not completely clear to be honest. What do you mean by “rate a site”?

What I can tell from a site with such a traffic source breakdown is that it could be monetized with CPC ads like Google AdSense and perhaps with affiliate marketing deals, depending on the keywords that are bringing the organic traffic.

I also can tell that the owner of such a site is probably focusing on the content, and not using social media marketing extensively (else the referral traffic source would be larger).

It that good? Bad? It depends on the objectives that the site owner has for the site. Someone looking to build a passive stream of income would love such a site. Someone looking to build a brand would need to work more on the referral traffic part.

As for focusing on keywords, well, that decision is not completely related to the traffic source breakdown. For one thing 80% of organic traffic does indicate that search engines tend to like the site, so building keyword focused pages and bringing even more organic traffic would make sense. T

That being said, even a site owner that is getting only 10% of traffic from search engines could decide to start building keyword focused pages, exactly to improve that percentage.

In reality the traffic source breakdown alone is not enough to understand what is going on with the site, in what direction it should press and so on. You would also need to know the niche of the site, its monetization strategy, its promotional strategy and so on.

Original Post: What Do My Traffic Sources Indicate?

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