It’s maddening.

After all, we meticulously craft our posts, carefully choose each word, spend time adding SEO (search engine optimization), tags and the perfect picture(s), ensure we’re providing value, double check to see if the words are spelled correctly and are grammatically correct, only to find out our visitors are skimming.

Some visitors will even rat themselves out by leaving a comment which doesn’t make sense.

We know they didn’t read our words, but yet we enjoy those comments.

What’s a blogger to do?

Today’s Lesson

With many bloggers blogging part-time, writing posts for their blogs AND making time to visit other blogs can be challenging.

Time must be cut somewhere, so it’s often done while they’re reading/skimming the blog posts of others.

So, what can we do?

Accept it.

If we know our posts are being skimmed, why not make it easier for a visitor to do so?

Here are a few suggestions:

1. Write shorter posts
2. Use bullet points
3. Use photos or white space to break up the verbiage
4. Ask questions at the end which don’t “test” to see if the visitor read our post, but instead are relevant to the content.

Take your reader’s time constraints into consideration and they may reward you with a comment.

Today’s Assignment

If you had a choice to have a visitor read your post or leave a comment, which would you choose?

Do you have any other tips on how a blogger can improve their chances of having their posts read in their entirety?

Care to share?

Although I don’t think about it often, I still do.

I was scared to hit “publish” the first few times, and I worried because I kept switching my theme.

I didn’t know any of the blogging terms either.

Being self taught, I spent most of my non-writing time searching for help, but even when I found help, I usually didn’t understand what to do with it.

I was pretty naive.

Today’s Lesson

When I think back to when I first started blogging, I didn’t have too many expectations except for thinking I could make lots of some money by having a blog.

• I wasted a lot of time signing up for affiliate networks and tweaking my Google AdSense ads.




• I didn’t know that without thousands of visitors a day, making a decent income from a blog was out of the question. When I figured it out (that I needed traffic to make money), I wasted time trying to get more traffic, too. Instead, I should have been learning more about SEO (search engine optimization) and spending less time looking for an “easy way”.




• I wanted comments. Little did I know I should have kicked the “If I build it, they will come” attitude and should have spent time visiting and commenting on other blogs.




• Although I worried about changing my theme so often, I should have realized without a steady stream of visitors, it really didn’t matter.




• I love numbers, so for me checking my statistics became a daily obsession. Instead of wasting time watching the numbers rise and fall, I should have spent time either writing and publishing or learning techniques which would take me closer to my goals.




• Social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook can be fun, but they can also be addicting. Before signing up, I should have asked myself if the benefits of participating in social networking will outweigh the investment of my time.

Truth be told, I wasted a lot of time on blogging activities I should have postponed until later or maybe not even got involved in, but that’s in the past.

What about you?

Today’s Assignment

Looking back, if you had to do it all over again, where would you have spent more time?

Where would you have spent less time?

Care to share?

Being in the construction industry, we know those who prefer to rent won’t need our services. And because we don’t have the man-power and equipment, we know those who need huge jobs done, won’t be our customers either.

Hence, when we advertise, we choose resources we believe are being viewed by the clients we are targeting.

It’s not always easy, but through trial and error, we hit the mark .

Today’s Lesson

Building a blog is very similar to building a business. First and foremost, we need to know who our target audience is.

Secondly, in order to reach that audience, we need pick our blog post topics accordingly.

Similar to advertising, by using SEO (search engine optimization) we can tighten the gap, just as we can by sharing information we feel would be beneficial to our target audience.

However, problems can emerge when we throw comments into the mix.

Truth be told, it’s often other bloggers who are commenting on our blog posts, and not the readers we’re writing for.

I believe it’s easy to start blogging with a target audience in mind, only to forget whom we’re blogging for when other bloggers begin to show up.

Bloggers will always support other bloggers. That’s a given.

However, if we inadvertently start writing for bloggers and NOT for our target audience, not only can our readership suffer, but so can the growth of our blog, as well as potential earnings (if applicable).

Today’s Assignment

In an effort to receive more comments, have you changed your writing style or blogging activities in order to attract fellow bloggers to your blog, instead of your target audience?

If you’re not attracting your target audience, what is your biggest challenge?

Care to share?

Ahhhh, another Friday. Time to slip into our favorite jeans and tee, kick up our heels and relax.

Here at Blogging Without A Blog (BWAB) we had lots to think about this week. We talked about our target audience, giving our readers eye candy, and how our online image is projected through our blog.

As a footnote on growing niche blogs and reaching our target audience, we also need to know how to get “those” visitors to our blogs. The most important way is by use of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). To avoid being redundant, I suggest reading John Hoff’s post on “25+ SEO Tips for Getting Ranked Well In Search Engines”. He covers the subject from all angles and provides links to many great sites and plugins.

I’ll be the first to admit, I’m bad about not using SEO. Using keywords and keyword phrases does change the way we write, and often I sit at my keyboard and start typing. Like many of you, I, too, have a lot to learn in that area.

Looking back on the week, or forward on what you need to do with your blogs, are there any areas you would like to discuss further? Do you have any questions? Any suggestions for future posts you would like to see here?

How has this week impacted you?

Are you planning to make any changes to your blog?

Or, to the WAY you write?

The floor is yours.

Have fun!

Keep it clean!

Don’t forget to “subscribe to comments” (bottom of page) so you can follow the discussion and join back in.

Here’s her response.

5) In a post for Blog Herald on preventing blog burn-out, you stated you follow over 350 blogs in your feed reader. What determines which blogs you follow and which posts you read? And do you do what most bloggers confess to, and scan articles without reading word for word?

Of course I scan. I couldn’t function otherwise. Most people scan. That’s a normal reading behavior and doesn’t apply to bloggers specifically. We all scan blogs, newspapers, magazines, even books. For me with that many blogs to track, I have to in order to survive. However, when I boil it down to really important articles, I read them thoroughly, digesting all of it, as do we all when things of interest confront us.

What determines the blogs I follow and the posts I read? Depends.

Every Wednesday I publish the WordPress Wednesday News covering a wide range of WordPress news, tips, events, and topics. Thus, I have a huge list of WordPress-related blogs that I have to track in order to generate that weekly post. Are they blogs I would track normally? No. Most of them are BORING and dull, but I love geek talk, so I find something interesting in all the code babble, too. It’s my job, and it helps to enjoy even the dull stuff.

I have a wide range of subject categories I track, though not as often as I do the weekly WordPress news items. I track blogs about writing, science, science fiction, gardening, eco-building, environmental issues, nature, knitting, cooking, genealogy, web analytics and SEO, web design, blogging, and the news. I also have a few favorite friends that I track through their blogs. My list is no different from other people as I track the things I’m interested in, monitoring industry news, tips, and information.

As to which blogs make it into my feeds, I think that I’m also like other people. Subject matter dictates inclusion. I have very few blogs I will track that aren’t focused on a specific subject as an expert. I track some genealogy blogs because they write about their research and I can learn about the tips and techniques they use to uncover their family’s history, but if they spend too much time rattling on about their broken down car, family, marriage, work, or ranting about politics and things of little or no interest to me, I’m gone.

To end up in my feed reader you have to feed me. You have to give the information that brought me to your site in the first place. You have to keep providing me with the information I can use or you lose.

Today’s Assignment

What determines which blogs make it into your feed reader?

How do you manage your feed reading time?

To avoid redundancy, the subject of scanning posts was addressed in a recent article titled: Bloggers Flunk The Reading Assignments. If you would like to share how you feel knowing others are scanning the posts you work so hard on, please feel free to leave a comment below.