Gaining users. Lessons learned from blogging.
This one is going to be a bit long, as I refer to my own experiences in blogging, how I approached increasing the number of readers, my failures and lessons learned. In the end, I come up with a conclusion that points back into the direction of usability and communities.
In 1999, I didn’t care much for what I blogged or who might been the audience — if I had any at all. In 2005/2006, that changed when I noticed a growing number of net-prominents who were barely more talented than me. Though they had a lot readers. Apparently because they aimed at gathering a large audience, be present. Which made me ask how to gain a greater audience too. (Probably, that was an a bit short-sighted Me Too which lacked insight to the core of the idea, but anyways, that was on what I started.) So, the core of the question was how to gather readers, and trying to figure it out revealed some lessons to be learned. Some of them might pay out when you go after gaining users for a new service, especially if the users are free, including free to leave at any sudden point in time.
My subsequent questions were Who does see my blog at all?, Where?, Who’s seeing pieces of it?, Which pieces? And if people saw pieces of my blog, as that’s usual on the web, most likely those pieces would feature a link back to the original postings on my blog — how could I make these people to follow these breadcrumbs? — At least, that would cause a few new visitors. With a little luck, some of them might even become regular visitors.
So, the first question to tackle was: Which pieces do people see of my blog when they don’t see it in a whole? And where do they see them? — One answer is obvious: Pieces of my blog people might find on search engines. There I won’t be able to influence what they might see as the presentation algorithm might strip out everything not relevant to the person’s search.
RSS feed probably would be the next thing you would come up with. Right. And, depending on your blog’s or blog provider’s settings, what people would see of your blog were predictable to some extend: At least, feed subscribers would learn about the headline of your feed distributed postings. With a little more look the feed would contain the first 255 characters of your postings’ texts .. the whole first paragraph or the whole postings altogether. With some special contribution of your blog provider there might even be the chance to summarize your posting and feed that instead.
The third thing their postings become visible by to the outer world — i.e. far away from their blogs — inexperienced bloggers easily fail to spot. That’s trackbacks. Cuttings of their own postings featuring a link to an other page on the web. Trackbacks usually feature a backlink, a link from the cutting back to your posting. That’s what you’re actually after, since the backlink is what multiple readers of that foreign page might take to come over to your blog.
On the cuttings, you depend on two conditions: #1, your software pings back the linked page and #2, the pinged side creates a trackback. Often the trackback is minimalist, so everything that gets displayed on the linked page is the headline of your post. If you are lucky. Sometimes even that gets abridged. With a little more luck, you don’t get only your complete headline placed there but also the link text or, depending on how the trackback generation is set up, gradually more, such as link text plus the whole sentence the link is in as context or even surrounding 255 characters of context. However, for trackbacks you seldomly will know how much — i.e. what part — of your posting gets rendered on the linked page.
To sum it up, what I figured out where blog postings of mine become visible was: in search engine results, RSS feed and trackbacks. Also, I can tell how they become visible: Either the headline only (hopefully but probably not abridged), headline plus (abridged?) link text, headline plus link text plus 255 characters of context, headline and link text plus the whole paragraph the link is in.
How to gain audience?
Now, how could I gain audience? How can I make them follow the breadcrumbs? How can I keep any visitors? How can I make them want to come back?
There were a few very basic principles I learned from my experiments: Respect your audience, every single individual, contribute something, be honest don’t attempt to trick your readers — they’d notice. If not individually, then as a collective, communicated by the comments in your blog.
There are simple ways to contribute some things: People like positive fellows, therefore being positive might make your visitors like your place, therefore might want to come back. Even if you need to contribute critics, people usually prefer constructive critic over a nagging, destructive or poor one, poorly researched. People flee naggers, but by providing substance — gathered by careful online search — you might gain a plus.
Also, you might relay news by your postings. It’s a fine lineament to credit sources you used. Completely independend of your legal duty to identify your sources. Set a link to your source, and you get one more chance to gain a backlink. In many cases your credit and link to your source at least might cause the source page owner come over and read what you’ve written about them. Be pleasant, and you might even cause them to write positively about you in another post. However, being too pleasant might make you suspectible to your audience.
Provide substance
Next challenge I took was to provide substance. Before that, I created sensational headlines but quickly learned that people don’t come back, especially since the posting bodies provided the least substance. I noticed I had to put up and put up posting after posting to keep up the number of visitors, not to mention how to increase that number. Straw fires as I took to call them. — On the other hand, by some later project I learned by providing non-strawfire articles people actually come back, and I not even need to invest post after post, day after day. Which is true for this blog even more: The first day I had a dozen of page impressions, and since day #7 the blog never again had less than fifteen page impressions a day. Since somedays the number of referring pages is below the number of actual visitors, I assume there are indeed some people checking back with this blog independently.
My rule of thumb on writing posting is to first figure out what point(s) I want to make and what’s the subject I am going to discuss. This helps me to stick to the topic. Then, write the article. Write its body first since that is what you are after and where you’ve got the space to present it. Only in the second step I go for the headline. As this one becomes visible everywhere — in search results, feeds and trackbacks –, I prefer to set up the headline as a summary of the article and, at the same time, in a manner that’s attractive enough to make people want to learn about the details, i.e. go into the article, read it. That, in my opinion, works as well for your yet gained permanent audience who are reading that headlined within your blog, right anext of the original article as for anyone who’s reading the headline from afar only, i.e. from another person’s page or as a search result.
During you write your posting you might notice keywords that are important for your article or help to identify what the article is about in only these few keywords. If you notice these down, you can re-use them as tags for your article. — Tags actually are some good, something valuable you provide to your readers: Tags are a tool. Your people might notice an article of you, ponder about it a few days but forget to store a bookmark for its original page. Then, coming back to your blog, having tagged the article helps them to re-find it. That’s the reason for why I prefer to tag my articles. (For that reason, I even tagged a few whole blogs of mine I wrote before the blog provider enabled tagging.)
By using 43 things, I learned to avoid my goals I listed there to look too dry. To have goals to achieve and duties to fulfill and steps to take to make it to ther, what I achieved already and what I needed to tackle next at least should not look unworthwhile. Therefore, I begun to wrap up the dry definitive parts into stories. Which made them look more human and livable. Although I never ever had a real human feedback on whether that way of wrapping up things by personal stories, by making the things more real by connecting them with issues of my real life, I continued that habit and applied it to blogging too. I think, that makes me look more real. At least it makes more real for me what I write about or what I aim at. — However, making things more real, more tangible in my humble opinion is also a means to provide my readers with a little more surplus.
Lessons learned
Along the way of figuring out everything, I also learned some lessons. To increase the number of visitors by sensational headlines inveigles to actually do so. But you rather quickly learn about the strawfire effect and will go for an alternative strategy costing less.
In detail: A strawfire headline might catch as long as people don’t see the whole posting. The moment they do they might notice your headline was crap. And leave. Therefore, I turned to make my headlines match what I wrote about. If the article is poor, well, then don’t promise too much by the headline. Stick to the facts. Be honest. To your visitors you show your respect for them by doing so. Which might make you more liked. Reward your visitors for coming over, make your article match what its headline promised. If you (try to) trick them they might mention your blog as inadvisable. If at all.
In any case, provide something substancial, as that is a benefit your visitor wants to get out of using your blog, i.e. reading it as a whole, subscribe to it or to read a single article of it. Figure out the topic you are after beforehand and stay on-topic. Stick to the facts, since that’s what probably most of your readers are after. Be honest and humble. People dislike the opposite, and most probably will find out.
When your post gets delivered as RSS and you’re not sure how much of it will be visible where your reader gets it displayed, make sure the headline and first paragraph are okay — i.e. honest, real and attracting at once.
If you want to link another page, provide a benefit to your readers as well as to the readers of the page you are linking to: In your posting make a describing part of your text become the link — such as Robert Scoble was blocked from Facebook or Chris Anderson published The Long Tail. Avoid ‘Here’-Links, such as ‘If you want to learn more, click here.’ Such link don’t reveal anything about the page you are linking to, while my approach of linking by significant parts of the text do. — That’s helpful for your users. The other way ’round, to get people follow the breadcrumbs to your page you must make it attractive to follow the backlink. Therefore, having the max-255-characters-of-context rule in mind, I tend to choose carefully where to put my link to the source I am referring to: My goal is to provide as much — and as attracting — context as necessary and possible to the people reading the backtracking page.
If you need to grow audience, you might want to link only to pages which render the trackbacks at all, since otherwise there’s no entry point from the linked page to yours, thus no benefit for you linking that page at all. — Here, an alternative chance of cheating reveals itself: To gain a backtrack, you could link to page B while you’re actually answering to page A. As A and B can have a slightly different and subtle undertone, answering A by linking B might fail. People would notice and probably smell the rat. Would make a minus for you. Hence, you should avoid this.
Conclusion
Although I took this as a motive from the beginning onwards, I now became able to put it into the right words: To gain audience, convince the people. Convince them that reading your blog provides them with (lots of) benefits. Being honest and humble helps.
To put it one step farther and to approach usability and communities again, my final conclusion is: Every step you want a person to take you must them win over for. At least as long as your environment is the web where there’s that much competition, and competitors compete by offering free services and goods.
